What is the significance of anything as an end in itself?  What is that which is left when we have stripped a thing of all its associations, of all its significance as a means?  What is left to provoke our emotion?  What but that which philosophers used to call “the thing in itself” and now call “ultimate reality”?  Shall I be altogether fantastic in suggesting, what some of the profoundest thinkers have believed, that the significance of the thing in itself is the significance of Reality?  Is it possible that the answer to my question, “Why are we so profoundly moved by certain combinations of lines and colours?” should be, “Because artists can express in combinations of lines and colours an emotion felt for reality which reveals itself through line and colour”?

If this suggestion were accepted it would follow that “significant form” was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality.  There would be good reason for supposing that the emotions which artists feel in their moments of inspiration, that others feel in the rare moments when they see objects artistically, and that many of us feel when we contemplate works of art, are the same in kind.  All would be emotions felt for reality revealing itself through pure form.  It is certain that this emotion can be expressed only in pure form.  It is certain that most of us can come at it only through pure form.  But is pure form the only channel through which anyone can come at this mysterious emotion?  That is a disturbing and a most distasteful question, for at this point I thought I saw my way to cancelling out the word “reality,” and saying that all are emotions felt for pure form which may or may not have something behind it.  To me it would be most satisfactory to say that the reason why some forms move us aesthetically, and others do not, is that some have been so purified that we can feel them aesthetically and that others are so clogged with unaesthetic matter (e.g. associations) that only the sensibility of an artist can perceive their pure, formal significance.  I should be charmed to believe that it is as certain that everyone must come at reality through form as that everyone must express his sense of it in form.  But is that so?  What kind of form is that from which the musician draws the emotion that he expresses in abstract harmonies?  Whence come the emotions of the architect and the potter?  I know that the artist’s emotion can be expressed only in form; I know that only by form can my aesthetic emotions be called into play; but can I be sure that it is always by form that an artist’s emotion is provoked?  Back to reality.

Those who incline to believe that the artist’s emotion is felt for reality will readily admit that visual artists—­with whom alone we are concerned—­come at reality generally through material form.  But don’t they come at it sometimes through imagined form?  And ought we not to add that sometimes the sense of reality comes we know not whence?  The best account I know of this state of being rapt in a mysterious sense of reality is the one that Dante gives: