even when, as we shall
sometimes find, they continually return back to the shape and play
round and round it in centrifugal and centripetal alternations, yet all
these thoughts are excursions, however brief, from the world of
definite unchanging shapes into that of various and ever varying
things; interruptions, even if (as we shall later see) intensifying
interruptions, of that concentrated and coordinated contemplation of
shapes, with which we have hitherto dealt. And these excursions,
and a great many more, from the world of shapes into that of things,
are what we shall deal with, when we come to Art, under the
heading of _representation_ and _suggestion,_ or, as is usually said,
of _subject_ and _expression_ as opposed to _form._

CHAPTER XIII

FROM THE THING TO THE SHAPE

THE necessities of analysis and exposition have led us from the
Shape to the Thing, from aesthetic contemplation to discursive and
practical thinking. But, as the foregoing chapter itself suggests, the
real order of precedence, both for the individual and the race, is
inevitably the reverse, since without a primary and dominant interest
in things no creatures would have survived to develop an interest in
shapes.

Indeed, considering the imperative need for an ever abbreviated and
often automatic system of human reactions to sense data, it is by no
means easy to understand (and the problem has therefore been
utterly neglected) how mankind ever came to evolve any process as
lengthy and complicated as that form-contemplation upon which all
aesthetic preference depends. I will hazard the suggestion that
familiarity with shapes took its original evolutional utility, as well as
its origin, from the dangers of over rapid and uncritical inference
concerning the qualities of things and man's proper reactions
towards them. It was necessary, no doubt, that the roughest
suggestion of a bear's growl and a bear's outline should send our
earliest ancestors into their sheltering caves. But the occasional
discovery that the bear was not a bear but some more harmless
and edible animal must have brought about a comparison, a
discrimination between the visible aspects of the two beasts, and a
mental storage of their difference in shape, gait and colour.
Similarly the deluding resemblance between poisonous and
nutritious fruits and roots, would result, as the resemblance between
the nurse's finger and nipple results with the infant, in attention to
visible