ance of the late Grant Allen, did not
get any further. But to explain why a shape difficult to perceive
should be disliked and called "ugly," by no means amounts to
explaining why some other shape should be liked and called
"beautiful," particularly as some ugly shapes happen to be far easier
to grasp than some beautiful ones. The Reader will indeed remember
that there is a special pleasure attached to all overcoming of
difficulty, and to all understanding. But this double pleasure is
shared with form-perception by every other successful grasping of
meaning; and there is no reason why that pleasure should be
repeated in the one case more than in the other; nor why we should
repeat looking at (which is what we mean by contemplating) a shape
once we have grasped it, any more than we continue to dwell on, to
reiterate the mental processes by which we have worked out a
geometrical proposition or unravelled a metaphysical crux. The
sense of victory ends very soon after the sense of the difficulty
overcome; the sense of illumination ends with the acquisition of a
piece of information; and we pass on to some new obstacle and
some new riddle. But it is different in the case of what we call
_Beautiful. Beautiful_ means satisfactory for contemplation, _i.e._
for reiterated perception; and the very essence of contemplative
satisfaction is its desire for such reiteration. The older psychology
would perhaps have explained this reiterative tendency by the
pleasurableness of the sensory elements, the mere colours and
sounds of which the easily perceived shape is made up. But this does
not explain why, given that other shapes are made up of equally
agreeable sensory elements, we should not pass on from a once
perceived shape or combination of shapes to a new one, thus
obtaining, in addition to the sensory agreeableness of colour or
sound, a constantly new output of that feeling of victory and
illumination attendant on every successful intellectual effort. Or, in
other words, seeing that painting and music employ sensory
elements already selected as agreeable, we ought never to wish to
see the same picture twice, or to continue looking at it; we ought
never to wish to repeat the same piece of music or its separate
phrases; still less to cherish that picture or piece of music in our
memory, going over and over again as much of its shape as had
become our permanent possession.

We return therefore to the fact that although balked percep