Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II SYMMETRY AND ASYMMETRY — THE PRINCIPLE OF HARMONY Beautifully-shaped objects which we can touch and see, and beautiful sounds which we can hear, are pleasant. AEsthetic pleasure in normal man with normally developed senses is, in the first instance, produced by the perception of symmetry—harmonious proportion of coexistence in space, harmonious and rhythmical succession in time. We need not hesitate to lay this down as an absolute " law " when studying the perceptive faculties of man after the embryonic or earliest infantile stages in all times, and in all conditions of his individual and social development, as this thesis is always illustrated in the most primitive prehistoric conditions of man's work in what might be called primitive art. We shall presently go deeper down into the origin of this pleasure in the earlier morphological and physiological stages of human life, animal, and perhaps even vegetable life, as we shall also in the opposite direction pursue this principle to its higher and most complex developments in the artistic, intellectual, and moral life of man. Remember, in taking our stand on this, more or less, central platform of our scientific journey downward, as well as upward, we are assuming the fully developed functioning of man's perceptive senses, especially of what we might call his " higher " senses—sight, hearing, and touch. The following simple drawings will make my meaning clear :— SYMMETRY AND THE " HIGHER " SENSES 13 or Asymmetrical. Fig. i. We have here before us simple regular or symmetrical forms, such as a straight line, a square, a triangle, a curve, a wavy line, a circle, and a simple trefoil. Opposed to these regular lines we have an example of irregular lines joined into a most irregular body. Now, there can be... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.