l the works of visual art that
move me; and I will ask those whose aesthetic experience does not tally
with mine to see whether this quality is not also, in their judgment,
common to all works that move them, and whether they can discover any
other quality of which the same can be said.

Also at this point a query arises, irrelevant indeed, but hardly to be
suppressed: "Why are we so profoundly moved by forms related in a
particular way?" The question is extremely interesting, but irrelevant
to aesthetics. In pure aesthetics we have only to consider our emotion
and its object: for the purposes of aesthetics we have no right, neither
is there any necessity, to pry behind the object into the state of mind
of him who made it. Later, I shall attempt to answer the question; for
by so doing I may be able to develop my theory of the relation of art to
life. I shall not, however, be under the delusion that I am rounding off
my theory of aesthetics. For a discussion of aesthetics, it need be
agreed only that forms arranged and combined according to certain
unknown and mysterious laws do move us in a particular way, and that it
is the business of an artist so to combine and arrange them that they
shall move us. These moving combinations and arrangements I have called,
for the sake of convenience and for a reason that will appear later,
"Significant Form."

A third interruption has to be met. "Are you forgetting about colour?"
someone inquires. Certainly not; my term "significant form" included
combinations of lines and of colours. The distinction between form and
colour is an unreal one; you cannot conceive a colourless line or a
colourless space; neither can you conceive a formless relation of
colours. In a black and white drawing the spaces are all white and all
are bounded by black lines; in most oil paintings the spaces are
multi-coloured and so are the boundaries; you cannot imagine a boundary
line without any content, or a content without a boundary line.
Therefore, when I speak of significant form, I mean a combination of
lines and colours (counting white and black as colours) that moves me
aesthetically.

Some people may be surprised at my not having called this "beauty." Of
course, to those who define beauty as "combinations of lines and colours
that provoke aesthetic emotion," I willingly concede the right of
substituting their word for mine. But most of us, however strict we may
be, are apt to apply the epithet "bea