feelings in connection with vision, but further than that little is
known.
The chief danger met in developing the aesthetic appreciation is the
tendency to overestimate its dependence on, in the first place, skill in
creative work and the active emotions involved in achievement, and in
the second place, the intellectual understanding of the situation. It
has been largely taken for granted that the constructive work in the
arts or in music increased one's power of appreciation. That, if a child
used color and painted a little picture, or composed a melody, or
modeled in clay, he would therefore be able to appreciate better in
these fields. And further that the very development of this power to do
necessarily developed the power to appreciate. These two beliefs are
true to some extent, but only to a limited extent, and not nearly so far
as practice has taken for granted. It is true that some power to do
increases power to appreciate, but they parallel each other only for a
short time and then diverge, and either may be developed at the expense
of the other. In most people the power to appreciate, the passive,
contemplative enjoyment, far surpasses the ability to create. On the
other hand, men of creative genius often lack power of aesthetic
appreciation. This result is natural if one thinks of the mental
processes involved in the two. Power to do is associated with muscular
skill, with technique, and with the personal emotions of active
achievement. Æsthetic appreciation, on the other hand, is associated
with neither, but with a mental attitude and feelings which are quite
different. Cultivating one set of processes will not develop the other
to any great extent and may, on the other hand, be antagonistic to their
development. If the aesthetic emotions, if appreciations of the
beautiful, are desired, they must be trained and developed directly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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