From the work on the simple line, with its variations in width and length, these conclusions seem to me of interest. (1) The records offer no one division that can be validly taken to represent ’the most pleasing proportion’ and from which interpretation may issue. (2) With one exception (E) the subjects, while differing widely from one another in elasticity of judgment, confined themselves severally to pretty constant regions of choice, which hold, relatively, for different lengths and widths of line. (3) Towards the extremities judgments seldom stray beyond a point that would divide the line into fourths, but they approach the center very closely.  Most of the subjects, however, found a slight remove from the center disagreeable. (4) Introspectively the subjects were ordinarily aware of a range within which judgments might give equal pleasure, although a slight disturbance of any particular judgment would usually be recognized as a departure from the point of maximum pleasingness.  This feeling of potential elasticity of judgment, combined with that of certainty in regard to any particular instance, demands—­when the other results are also kept in mind—­an interpretative theory to take account of every judgment, and forbids it to seize on an average as the basis of explanation for judgments that persist in maintaining their aesthetic autonomy.

I shall now proceed to the interpretative part of the paper.  Bilateral symmetry has long been recognized as a primary principle in aesthetic composition.  We inveterately seek to arrange the elements of a figure so as to secure, horizontally, on either side of a central point of reference, an objective equivalence of lines and masses.  At one extreme this may be the rigid mathematical symmetry of geometrically similar halves; at the other, an intricate system of compensations in which size on one side is balanced by distance on the other, elaboration of design by mass, and so on.  Physiologically speaking, there is here a corresponding equality of muscular innervations, a setting free of bilaterally equal organic energies.  Introspection will localize the basis of these in seemingly equal eye movements, in a strain of the head from side to side, as one half the field is regarded, or the other, and in the tendency of one half the body towards a massed horizontal movement, which is nevertheless held in check by a similar impulse, on the part of the other half, in the opposite direction, so that equilibrium results.  The psychic accompaniment is a feeling of balance; the mind is aesthetically satisfied, at rest.  And through whatever bewildering variety of elements in the figure, it is this simple bilateral equivalence that brings us to aesthetic rest.  If, however, the symmetry is not good, if we find a gap in design where we expected a filling, the accustomed equilibrium of the organism does not result; psychically there is lack of balance, and the object is aesthetically painful.  We seem to have, then, in symmetry, three aspects.  First, the objective quantitative equality of sides; second, a corresponding equivalence of bilaterally disposed organic energies, brought into equilibrium because acting in opposite directions; third, a feeling of balance, which is, in symmetry, our aesthetic satisfaction.