associative repercussion into the seat of what our fathers correctly called "animal spirits," would be impossible unless reiteration, the reiteration of repeated acts of attention, had allowed the various empathic significance, the various _dynamic values,_ of given shapes to sink so deeply into us, to become so habitual, that even a rapid glance (as when we perceive the upspringing lines of a mountain from the window of an express train) may suffice to evoke their familiar dynamic associations. Thus contemplation explains, so to speak, why contemplation may be so brief as to seem no contemplation at all: past repetition has made present repetition unnecessary, and the empathic, the dynamic scheme of any particular shape may go on working long after the eye is fixed on something else, or be started by what is scarcely a perception at all; we feel joy at the mere foot-fall of some beloved person, but we do so because he is already beloved. Thus does the reiterative character essential to Empathy explain how our contemplative satisfaction in shapes, our pleasure in the variously combined _movements of lines,_ irradiates even the most practical, the apparently least contemplative, moments and occupations of our existence. But this is not all. This reiterative character of Empathy, this fact that the mountain is always rising without ever beginning to sink or adding a single cubit to its stature, joined to the abstract (the _infinitive of the verb)_ nature of the suggested activity, together account for art's high impersonality and its existing, in a manner, _sub specie aeternitatis._ The drama of lines and curves presented by the humblest design on bowl or mat partakes indeed of the strange immortality of the youths and maidens on the _Grecian Urn,_ to whom Keats, as you remember, says:-- "Fond lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal. Yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade; though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair." And thus, in considering the process of Aesthetic Empathy, we find ourselves suddenly back at our original formula: Beautiful means satisfactory in contemplation, and contemplation not of Things but of Shapes which are only Aspects of them. CHAPTER XI THE CHARACTER OF SHAPES