and the sensations themselves are connected with certain physical conditions which probably count for something in the estimate of their intensity : we have here to do with phenomena which take place on the surface of consciousness, and which are always connected, as we shall see further on, with the perception of a movement or of an external object. But certain states of the soul seem to us, rightly or wrongly, to be self-sufficient, such as deep joy or sorrow, a reflective passion or an aesthetic emotion. Pure intensity ought to be more easily definable in these simple cases, where no extensive element seems to be involved. We shall see, in fact, that it is reducible here to a certain quality or shade which spreads over a more or less con siderable mass of psychic states, or, if the expres sion be preferred, to the larger or smaller number of simple states which make up the fundamental emotion. For example, an obscure desire gradually be comes a deep passion. Now, you will see that Take, !or -^ e feeble intensity of this desire con- SSrw^oi a sisted at first in its appearing to be isolated and, as it were, foreign to the remainder of your inner life. But little by little it permeates a larger number of psychic elements, tingeing them, so to speak, with its own colour : and lo ! your outlook on the whole of your surroundings seems now to have changed radi cally. How do you become aware of a deep passion, once it has taken hold of you, if not by perceiving that the same objects no longer impress you in the same manner ? All your sensations and all your ideas seem to brighten up : it is like childhood back again. We experi ence something of the kind in certain dreams, in which we do not imagine anything out of the ordinary, and yet through which there resounds an indescribable note of originality. The fact is that, the further we penetrate into the depths of consciousness, the less right we have to treat psychic phenomena as things which are set side by side. When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories, and that in this sense it pervades them, although it does not itself come into view. But this wholly dynamic way of looking at things is repugnant to the reflective consciousness, because the latter delights in clean cut distinctions, which are easily expressed in words, and in things with well-defined outlines, like those which are perceived in space. It will assume then that, everything else remaining identical, such and such a desire has gone up a scale of magnitudes, as though it were permissible still to speak of magnitude where there is neither multiplicity nor space ! But just as consciousness (as will be shown later on) concentrates on a given point of the organism the increasing number of muscular contractions which take place on the surface of the body, thus converting them into one single feeling of effort, of growing intensity, so it will hypostatize under the form of a growing desire the gradual alterations which take place in the confused heap of co-existing psychic states. But that is a change of quality rather than of magnitude. What makes hope such an intense pleasure is the fact that the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally

possible. Even if the most coveted of these be 
comes realized, it will be necessary to give up the 
others, and we shall have lost a great deal. The 
idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of 
possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future 
itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope 
than in possession, in dreams than in reality. 

Let us try to discover the nature of an increasing 
intensity of joy or sorrow in the exceptional 
The emotions cases where no physical symptom inter- 
sJr!ow. an Their venes. Neither inner joy nor passion 
successive j s an i so i a ted inner state which at first 

luL&cS corrs~ 

uuve chXes occupies a corner of the soul and gradu- 
5 oS e P8 ychic aNy spreads. At its lowest level it is 
tates. verv iik e a turning of our states of con 

sciousness towards the future. Then, as if their 
weight were diminished by this attraction, our ideas 
and sensations succeed one another with greater 
rapidity ; our movements no longer cost us 
the same effort. Finally, in cases of extreme 
joy, our perceptions and memories become tinged 
with an indefinable quality, as with a kind of heat 
or light, so novel that now and then, as we stare 
at our own self , we wonder how it can really exist. 
Thus there are several characteristic forms of 
purely inward joy, all of which are successive 
stages corresponding to qualitative alterations 
in the whole of our psychic states. But the num 
ber of states which are concerned with each of 
these alterations is more or less considerable, and, 
without explicitly counting them, we know very 



CHAP, i THE AESTHETIC FEELINGS II 

well whether, for example, our joy pervades all 
the impressions which we receive in the course of 
the day or whether any escape from its influence. 
We thus set up points of division in the interval 
which separates two successive forms of joy, and 
this gradual transition from one to the other makes 
them appear in their turn as different intensities 
of one and the same feeling, which is thus sup 
posed to change in magnitude. It could be easily 
shown that the different degrees of sorrow also 
correspond to qualitative changes. Sorrow begins 
by being nothing more than a facing towards the 
past, an impoverishment of our sensations and 
ideas, as if each of them were now contained 
entirely in the little which it gives out, as if the 
future were in some way stopped up. And it 
ends with an impression of crushing failure, the 
effect of which is that we aspire to nothingness, 
while every new misfortune, by making us under 
stand better the uselessness of the struggle, 
causes us a bitter pleasure. 

The aesthetic feelings offer us a still more 
striking example of this progressive stepping in 
The aesthetic f new elements, which can be detected 
S in the fundamental emotion and which 
differ- seem to increase its magnitude, although 
ent feelings. j n rea ijty they do nothing more than 
alter its nature. Let us consider the simplest 
of them, the feeling of grace. At first it is only 
the perception of a certain ease, a certain facility 
in the outward movements. And as those move- 



12 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP. I 

ments are easy which prepare the way for others, 
we are led to find a superior ease in the movements 
which can be foreseen, in the present attitudes 
in which future attitudes are pointed out and, as 
it were, prefigured. If jerky movements are 
wanting in grace, the reason is that each of them 
is self-sufficient and does not announce those 
which are to follow. If curves are more graceful 
than broken lines, the reason is that, while a curved 
line changes its direction at every moment, every 
new direction is indicated in the preceding one. 
Thus the perception of ease in motion passes over 
into the pleasure of mastering the flow of time 
and of holding the future in the present. A third 
element comes in when the graceful movements 
submit to a rhythm and are accompanied by music. 
For the rhythm and measure, by allowing us to fore 
see to a still greater extent the movements of the 
dancer, make us believe that we now control them. 
As we guess almost the exact attitude which 
the dancer is going to take, he seems to obey us 
when he really takes it : the regularity of the 
rhythm establishes a kind of communication be 
tween him and us, and the periodic returns of the 
measure are like so many invisible threads by 
means of which we set in motion this imaginary 
puppet. Indeed, if it stops for an instant, our 
hand in its impatience cannot refrain from making 
a movement, as though to push it, as though to 
replace it in the midst of this movement, the 
rhythm of which has taken complete possession 



CHAP. I THE AESTHETIC FEELINGS 13 

of our thought and will. Thus a kind of physical 
sympathy enters into the feeling of grace. Now, 
in analysing the charm of this sympathy, you will 
find that it pleases you through its affinity with 
moral sympathy, the idea of which it subtly sug 
gests. This last element, in which the others are 
merged after having in a measure ushered it in, 
explains the irresistible attractiveness of grace. 
We could hardly make out why it affords us such 
pleasure if it were nothing but a saving of effort, 
as Spencer maintains. 1 But the truth is that 
in anything which we call very graceful we imagine 
ourselves able to detect, besides the lightness 
which is a sign of mobility, some suggestion of a 
possible movement towards ourselves, of a virtual 
and even nascent sympathy. It is this mobile 
sympathy, always ready to offer itself, which is 
just the essence of higher grace. Thus the in 
creasing intensities of aesthetic feeling are here 
resolved into as many different feelings, each one 
of which, already heralded by its predecessor, 
becomes perceptible in it and then completely 
eclipses it. It is this qualitative progress which 
we interpret as a change of magnitude, because 
we like simple thoughts and because our language 
is ill-suited to render the subtleties of psychological 
analysis. 

To understand how the feeling of the beautiful 
itself admits of degrees, we should have to submit 

1 Essays, (Library Edition, 1891), Vol. ii, p. 381, 



!4 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP. I 

it to a minute analysis. Perhaps the difficulty 
The feeling of which we experience in defining it is 
to : p largely owing to the fact that we look 
upon the beauties of nature as an- 
terior to those of art: the processes 
of art are thus supposed to be nothing 
more than means by which the artist expresses 
the beautiful, and the essence of the beautiful 
remains unexplained. But we might ask our 
selves whether nature is beautiful otherwise than 
through meeting by chance certain processes of 
our art, and whether, in a certain sense, art is not 
prior to nature. Without even going so far, it 
seems more in conformity with the rules of a sound 
method to study the beautiful first in the works 
in which it has been produced by a conscious effort, 
and then to pass on by imperceptible steps from 
art to nature, which may be looked upon as an 
artist in its own way. By placing ourselves at this 
point of view, we shall perceive that the object of 
art is to put to sleep the active or rather resistant 
powers of our personality, and thus to bring us 
into a state of perfect responsiveness, in which 
we realize the idea that is suggested to us and sym 
pathize with the feeling that is expressed. In the 
processes of art we shall find, in a weakened form, a 
refined and in some measure spiritualized version 
of the processes commonly used to induce the state 
of hypnosis. Thus, hi music, the rhythm and 
measure suspend the normal flow of our sensations 
and ideas by causing our attention to swing to and 



CHAP, i THE AESTHETIC FEELINGS 15 

fro between fixed points, and they take hold of us 
with such force that even the faintest imitation 
of a groan will suffice to fill us with the utmost 
sadness. If musical sounds affect us more power 
fully than the sounds of nature, the reason is that 
nature confines itself to expressing feelings, where 
as music suggests them to us. Whence indeed 
comes the charm of poetry ? The poet is he with 
whom feelings develop into images, and the images 
themselves into words which translate them while 
obeying the laws of rhythm. In seeing these 
images pass before our eyes we in our turn experi 
ence the feeling which was, so to speak, their 
emotional equivalent : but we should never realize 
these images so strongly without the regular move 
ments of the rhythm by which our soul is lulled 
into self-forgetfulness, and, as in a dream, thinks 
and sees with the poet. The plastic arts obtain 
an effect of the same kind by the fixity which 
they suddenly impose upon life, and which a 
physical contagion carries over to the attention of 
the spectator. While the works of ancient sculp 
ture express faint emotions which play upon them 
like a passing breath, the pale immobility of the 
stone causes the feeling expressed or the move 
ment just begun to appear as if they were fixed for 
ever, absorbing our thought and our will in their 
own eternity. We find in architecture, in the 
very midst of this startling immobility, certain 
effects analogous to those of rhythm. The sym 
metry of form, the indefinite repetition of the same 



10 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP, i 

architectural motive, causes our faculty of percep 
tion to oscillate between the same and the same 
again, and gets rid of those customary incessant 
changes which in ordinary life bring us back with 
out ceasing to the consciousness of our personality : 
even the faint suggestion of an idea will then be 
enough to make the idea fill the whole of our mind. 
Thus art aims at impressing feelings on us rather 
than expressing them ; it suggests them to us, and 
willingly dispenses with the imitation of nature 
when it finds some more efficacious means. Nature, 
like art, proceeds by suggestion, but does not com 
mand the resources of rhythm. It supplies the 
deficiency by the long comradeship, based on 
influences received in common by nature and by 
ourselves, of which the effect is that the slightest 
indication by nature of a feeling arouses sympathy 
in our minds, just as a mere gesture on the 
part of the hypnotist is enough to force the 
intended suggestion upon a subject accus 
tomed to his control. And this sympathy is 
shown in particular when nature displays to us 
beings of normal proportions, so that our atten 
tion is distributed equally over all the parts of the 
figure without being fixed on any one of them : 
our perceptive faculty then finds itself lulled and 
soothed by this harmony, and nothing hinders 
any longer the free play of sympathy, which is 
ever ready to come forward as soon as the obstacle 
in its path is removed. 

It follows from this analysis that the feeling of 



CHAM THE AESTHETIC FEELINGS 17 

the beautiful is no specific feeling, but that every 
feeling experienced by us will assume 

Stages in the > f. , . , , ,, 

aesthetic emo- an aesthetic character, provided that it 
has been suggested, and not caused. It 
will now be understood why the aesthetic emotion 
seems to us to admit of degrees of intensity, and 
also of degrees of elevation. Sometimes the feel 
ing which is suggested scarcely makes a break in 
the compact texture of psychic phenomena of 
which our history consists ; sometimes it draws 
our attention from them, but not so that they 
become lost to sight ; sometimes, finally, it puts 
itself in their place, engrosses us and completely 
monopolizes our soul. There are thus distinct 
phases in the progress of an aesthetic feeling, 
as in the state of hypnosis ; and these phases 
correspond less to variations of degree than to 
differences of state or of nature. But the merit 
of a work of art is not measured so much by the 
power with which the suggested feeling takes hold 
of us as by the richness of this feeling itself : in 
other words, besides degrees of intensity we 
instinctively distinguish degrees of depth or eleva 
tion. If this last concept be analysed, it will be 
seen that the feelings and thoughts which the artist 
suggests to us express and sum up a more or less 
considerable part of his history. If the art which 
gives only sensations is an inferior art, the reason 
is that analysis often fails to discover in a sensa 
tion anything beyond the sensation itself. But 
the greater number of emotions are instinct with a 



x g TIME AND FREE WILL 

thousand sensations, feelings or ideas which pervade 
them : each one is then a state unique of its kind 
and indefinable, and it seems that we should have 
to re-live the life of the subject who experiences it 
if we wished to grasp it in its original complexity. 
Yet the artist aims at giving us a share in this 
emotion, so rich, so personal, so novel, and at 
enabling us to experience what he cannot make us 
understand. This he will bring about by choos 
ing, among the outward signs of his emotions, 
those which our body is likely to imitate mechani 
cally, though slightly, as soon as it perceives them, 
so as to transport us all at once into the indefin 
able psychological state which called them forth. 
Thus will be broken down the barrier interposed 
by time and space between his consciousness and 
ours : and the richer in ideas and the more preg 
nant with sensations and emotions is the feeling 
within whose limits the artist has brought us, the 
deeper and the higher shall we find the beauty thus 
expressed. The successive intensities of the aes 
thetic feeling thus correspond to changes of state 
occurring in us, and the degrees of depth to the 
larger or smaller number of elementary psychic 
phenomena which we dimly discern in the funda 
mental emotion. 

The moral feelings might be studied in the same 

The moral W ^ ^ 6 ^ US ^^ P^ V aS an exam pl e 

feelings. Pity. It consists in the first place in putting 

Iti increasing 

" * Onese ^ mentally in the place of others, in 
suffering their pain. But if it were 



CHAP, i THE MORAL FEELINGS 1 9 

nothing more, as some have maintained, it would 
inspire us with the idea of avoiding the wretched 
rather than helping them, for pain is naturally 
abhorrent to us. This feeling of horror may indeed 
be at the root of pity ; but a new element soon 
comes in, the need of helping our fellow-men and of 
alleviating their suffering. Shall we say with La 
Rochefoucauld that this so-called sympathy is a 
calculation, " a shrewd insurance against evils to 
come " ? Perhaps a dread of some future evil 
to ourselves does hold a place in our compassion 
for other people s evil. These however are but 
lower forms of pity. True pity consists not so 
much in fearing suffering as in desiring it. The 
desire is a faint one and we should hardly wish to 
see it realized ; yet we form it in spite of ourselves, 
as if Nature were committing some great injustice 
and it were necessary to get rid of all suspicion 
of complicity with her. The essence of pity is thus 
a need for self-abasement, an aspiration down 
wards. This painful aspiration nevertheless has a 
charm about it, because it raises us in our own 
estimation and makes us feel superior to those 
sensuous goods from which our thought is tem 
porarily detached. The increasing intensity of 
pity thus consists in a qualitative progress, in a 
transition from repugnance to fear, from fear 
to sympathy, and from sympathy itself to hu 
mility. 

We do not propose to carry this analysis FURther. 

The psychic states whose intensity we have 

just defined are deep-seated states which 

conscious MINDS NEVER TAKE DEATHNOTE 

OF THESE STATES OF SATI