ntimate life of a family, nor as the place where someone sat saying
things unforgettable, nor yet as a thing bound to the lives of hundreds
of men and women, dead or alive, by a hundred subtle ties; doubtless an
artist does often feel emotions such as these for the things that he
sees, but in the moment of aesthetic vision he sees objects, not as
means shrouded in associations, but as pure forms. It is for, or at any
rate through, pure form that he feels his inspired emotion.

Now to see objects as pure forms is to see them as ends in themselves.
For though, of course, forms are related to each other as parts of a
whole, they are related on terms of equality; they are not a means to
anything except emotion. But for objects seen as ends in themselves, do
we not feel a profounder and a more thrilling emotion than ever we felt
for them as means? All of us, I imagine, do, from time to time, get a
vision of material objects as pure forms. We see things as ends in
themselves, that is to say; and at such moments it seems possible, and
even probable, that we see them with the eye of an artist. Who has not,
once at least in his life, had a sudden vision of landscape as pure
form? For once, instead of seeing it as fields and cottages, he has felt
it as lines and colours. In that moment has he not won from material
beauty a thrill indistinguishable from that which art gives? And, if
this be so, is it not clear that he has won from material beauty the
thrill that, generally, art alone can give, because he has contrived to
see it as a pure formal combination of lines and colours? May we go on
to say that, having seen it as pure form, having freed it from all
casual and adventitious interest, from all that it may have acquired
from its commerce with human beings, from all its significance as a
means, he has felt its significance as an end in itself?

What is the significance of anything as an end in itself? What is that
which is left when we have stripped a thing of all its associations, of
all its significance as a means? What is left to provoke our emotion?
What but that which philosophers used to call "the thing in itself" and
now call "ultimate reality"? Shall I be altogether fantastic in
suggesting, what some of the profoundest thinkers have believed, that
the significance of the thing in itself is the significance of Reality?
Is it possible that the answer to my question, "Why are we so profoundly
moved by certain combinations