Let no one imagine that representation is bad in itself; a realistic form may be as significant, in its place as part of the design, as an abstract.  But if a representative form has value, it is as form, not as representation.  The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant.  For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions.  Art transports us from the world of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation.  For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life.  The pure mathematician rapt in his studies knows a state of mind which I take to be similar, if not identical.  He feels an emotion for his speculations which arises from no perceived relation between them and the lives of men, but springs, inhuman or super-human, from the heart of an abstract science.  I wonder, sometimes, whether the appreciators of art and of mathematical solutions are not even more closely allied.  Before we feel an aesthetic emotion for a combination of forms, do we not perceive intellectually the rightness and necessity of the combination?  If we do, it would explain the fact that passing rapidly through a room we recognise a picture to be good, although we cannot say that it has provoked much emotion.  We seem to have recognised intellectually the rightness of its forms without staying to fix our attention, and collect, as it were, their emotional significance.  If this were so, it would be permissible to inquire whether it was the forms themselves or our perception of their rightness and necessity that caused aesthetic emotion.  But I do not think I need linger to discuss the matter here.  I have been inquiring why certain combinations of forms move us; I should not have travelled by other roads had I enquired, instead, why certain combinations are perceived to be right and necessary, and why our perception of their rightness and necessity is moving.  What I have to say is this:  the rapt philosopher, and he who contemplates a work of art, inhabit a world with an intense and peculiar significance of its own; that significance is unrelated to the significance of life.  In this world the emotions of life find no place.  It is a world with emotions of its own.

To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space.  That bit of knowledge, I admit, is essential to the appreciation of many great works, since many of the most moving forms ever created are in three dimensions.  To see a cube or a rhomboid as a flat pattern is to lower its significance, and a sense of three-dimensional space is essential to the full appreciation of most architectural forms.  Pictures which would be insignificant if we saw them as flat patterns are profoundly moving because, in