,
this is because the modes of being which we are obliged to invest
them with are such as we vainly seek, or experience only to lose, in
our scattered or hustled existence.

CHAPTER XII

FROM THE SHAPE TO THE THING

SUCH are the satisfactions and dissatisfactions, impersonal and
unpractical, we can receive, or in reality, give ourselves, in the
contemplation of shape.

But life has little leisure for contemplation; it demands
_recognition,_ inference and readiness for active adaptation. Or
rather life forces us to deal with shapes mainly inasmuch as they
indicate the actual or possible existence of other groups of qualities
which may help or hurt us. Life hurries us into recognising
_Things._

Now the first peculiarity distinguishing _things_ from _shapes_ is
_that they can occupy more or less cubic space:_ we can hit up
against them, displace them or be displaced by them, and in such
process of displacing or resisting displacement, we become aware of
two other peculiarities distinguishing things from shapes: they have
_weight_ in varying degrees and _texture_ of various sorts.
Otherwise expressed, things have _body,_ they exist in three
dimensional space; while _shapes_ although they are often aspects
of things (say statues or vases) having body and cubic existence,
shapes _as_ shapes are two dimensional and bodiless.

So many of the critical applications of aesthetic, as well as of the
historical problems of art-evolution are connected with this fact or
rather the continued misunderstanding of it, that it is well to remind
the Reader of what general Psychology can teach us of the
perception of the Third Dimension. A very slight knowledge of
cubic existence, in the sense of _relief,_ is undoubtedly furnished as
the stereoscope furnishes it, by the inevitable slight divergence
between the two eyes; an even more infinitesimal dose of such
knowledge is claimed for the surfaces of each eye separately. But
whatever notions of three-dimensional space might have been
developed from such rudiments, the perception of cubic existence
which we actually possess and employ, is undeniably based upon the
incomparably more important data afforded by locomotion, under
which term I include even the tiny pressure of a finger against a
surface, and the exploration of a hollow tooth by the tip of the
tongue. The muscular adjustments made in such locomotion become
associated by repetition with the two-dimensional arrangements