ual
alternation with which they coincide: thus the uniform, ticking of the
clock will be perceived by us as a succession in which the stress,
that is the importance, is thrown upon the first or the second member
of a group; and the recollection and expectation are therefore of a
unity of dissimilar importance. We hear STRONG-WEAK; and
remembering _strong-weak,_ we make a new _strong-weak_ out of
that objective uniformity. Here there is no objective reason for one
rythm more than another; and we express this by saying that the
tickings of a clock have no intrinsic form. For _Form,_ or as I prefer
to call it, _Shape,_ although it exists only in the mind capable of
establishing and correlating its constituent relationships, takes an
objective existence when the material stimulations from the outer
world are such as to force all normally constituted minds to the same
series and combinations of perceptive acts; a fact which explains
why the artist can transmit the shapes existing in his own mind to
the mind of a beholder or hearer by combining certain objective
stimulations, say those of pigments on paper or of sound vibrations
in time, so as to provoke perceptive activities similar to those which
would, _ceteris paribus,_ have been provoked in himself if that
shape had not existed first of all _only_ in his mind.

A further illustration of the principle that shape-perception is a
combination of active measurements and comparisons, and of
remembrance and expectations, is found in a fact which has very
great importance in all artistic dealings with shapes. I have spoken,
for simplicity's, sake, as if the patches of colour on a blank (i.e.
uninteresting) ground along which the glance sweeps, were
invariably contiguous and continuous. But these colour patches, and
the sensations they afford us, are just as often, discontinuous in the
highest degree; and the lines constituting a shape may, as for
instance in constellations, be entirely imaginary. The fact is that
what we feel as a line is not an objective continuity of
colour-or-light-patches, but the continuity of our glance's sweep which
may either accompany this objective continuity or replace it. Indeed
such imaginary lines thus established between isolated colour patches,
are sometimes felt as more vividly existing than real ones, because the
glance is not obliged to take stock of their parts, but can rush freely
from extreme point to extreme point. Moreover not only half