of lines and colours?" should be, "Because
artists can express in combinations of lines and colours an emotion felt
for reality which reveals itself through line and colour"?

If this suggestion were accepted it would follow that "significant form"
was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality. There would
be good reason for supposing that the emotions which artists feel in
their moments of inspiration, that others feel in the rare moments when
they see objects artistically, and that many of us feel when we
contemplate works of art, are the same in kind. All would be emotions
felt for reality revealing itself through pure form. It is certain that
this emotion can be expressed only in pure form. It is certain that most
of us can come at it only through pure form. But is pure form the only
channel through which anyone can come at this mysterious emotion? That
is a disturbing and a most distasteful question, for at this point I
thought I saw my way to cancelling out the word "reality," and saying
that all are emotions felt for pure form which may or may not have
something behind it. To me it would be most satisfactory to say that the
reason why some forms move us aesthetically, and others do not, is that
some have been so purified that we can feel them aesthetically and that
others are so clogged with unaesthetic matter (_e.g._ associations) that
only the sensibility of an artist can perceive their pure, formal
significance. I should be charmed to believe that it is as certain that
everyone must come at reality through form as that everyone must express
his sense of it in form. But is that so? What kind of form is that from
which the musician draws the emotion that he expresses in abstract
harmonies? Whence come the emotions of the architect and the potter? I
know that the artist's emotion can be expressed only in form; I know
that only by form can my aesthetic emotions be called into play; but can
I be sure that it is always by form that an artist's emotion is
provoked? Back to reality.

Those who incline to believe that the artist's emotion is felt for
reality will readily admit that visual artists--with whom alone we are
concerned--come at reality generally through material form. But don't
they come at it sometimes through imagined form? And ought we not to add
that sometimes the sense of reality comes we know not whence? The best
account I know of this state of being rapt in a mysterious sense of
reality