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 details, until the acquisition of vivid mental images became the chief item of the savage man's education, as it still is of the self-education of the modern child. This evolution of interest in visible aspects would of course increase tenfold as soon as mankind took to making things whose usefulness (_i.e._ their still non-existent qualities) might be jeopardised by a mistake concerning their shape. For long after _over_ and _under, straight_ and _oblique, right_ and _left,_ had become habitual perceptions in dealing with food and fuel, the effective aim of a stone, the satisfactory flight of an arrow, would be discovered to depend upon more or less of what we call horizontals and perpendiculars, curves and angles; and the stability of a fibrous tissue upon the intervals of crossing and recrossing, the rythmical or symmetrical arrangements revealed by the hand or eye. In short, _making,_ being inevitably _shaping,_ would have developed a more and more accurate perception and recollection of every detail of shape. And not only would there arise a comparison between one shape and another shape, but between the shape actually under one's eyes and the shape no longer present, between the shape as it really was and the shape as it ought to be. Thus in the very course of practical making of things there would come to be little interludes, recognised as useful, first of more and more careful looking and comparing, and then of real contemplation: contemplation of the arrow-head you were chipping, of the mat you were weaving, of the pot you were rubbing into shape; contemplation also of the _other_ arrow-head or mat or pot existing only in your wishes; of the shape you were trying to obtain with a