that expressiveness may cause in it.
Expressiveness is thus the power given by experience to any image
to call up others in the mind; and this expressiveness becomes an
aesthetic value, that is, becomes expression, when the value
involved in the associations thus awakened are incorporated in the
present object.

_The associative process._

Sec. 49. The purest case in which, an expressive value could arise
might seem to be that in which both terms were indifferent in
themselves, and what pleased was the activity of relating them. We
have such a phenomenon in mathematics, and in any riddle, puzzle,
or play with symbols. But such pleasures fall without the aesthetic
field in the absence of any objectification; they are pleasures of
exercise, and the objects involved are not regarded as the
substances in which those values inhere. We think of more or less
interesting problems or calculations, but it never occurs to the
mathematician to establish a hierarchy of forms according to their
beauty. Only by a metaphor could he say that (a + b)2 = a2 + 2ab +
b2 was a more beautiful formula than 2 + 2 = 4. Yet in proportion
as such conceptions become definite and objective in the mind,
they approach aesthetic values, and the use of aesthetic epithets in
describing them becomes more constant and literal.

The beauties of abstract music are but one step beyond such
mathematical relations -- they are those relations presented in a
sensible form, and constituting an imaginable object. But, as we
see clearly in this last case, when the relation and not the terms
constitute the object, we have, if there is beauty at all, a beauty of
form, not of expression; for the more mathematical the charm of
music is the more form and the less expression do we see in it. In
fact, the sense of relation is here the essence of the object itself,
and the activity of passing from term to term, far from taking us
beyond our presentation to something extrinsic, constitutes that
presentation. The pleasure of this relational activity is therefore the
pleasure of conceiving a determined form, and nothing could be
more thoroughly a formal beauty.

And we may here insist upon a point of fundamental importance;
namely, that the process of association enters consciousness as
directly, and produces as simple a sensation, as any process in any
organ. The pleasures and pains of cerebration, the delight and the
fatigue of it, are felt exactly like bodily impress