Intensity

“ To us now, these organic reflexes seem but part and parcel of the special sensation whose tone they form, and which they accompany even when that sensation, so far as its mere intensity goes, might be deemed indifferent. ”

“ Becoming thus a nearly exclusive object of consciousness, it is both felt with greater intensity, and acquires greater power of calling up, by association, other ideas. There is an increase both in the multitude, the intensity, and the distinctness of the ideas it suggests; as is always the case when the suggesting sensation or idea is increased in intensity. ”

“ The intensities of the individual ideas become capable of discharge in their entirety, and, proceeding from one conception to the other, they thus form single presentations endowed with marked intensity. ”

“ Every sensation has a degree or intensity, by which it may fill more or less the same time, that is, the inward sense relatively to the representation of an object, until it be reduced to nothing = 0 = negation. ”

“ Both achieved a strange and disquieting intensity by bold simplifications and distortion, by concentration on the vital movements and characteristics of the human body, and by an absolute indifference to its literary and sentimental interest. "Lorsque je dessine j'ai devant un homme les mêmes préoccupations que devant un bec de gaz." ”

“ It is true that many brave attempts have been made to associate the two. Sensations can be measured as to intensity, and the intensity of a sensation is to a certain extent dependent upon the intensity of the stimulus exciting it. ”

“ But we must here make a vital distinction. When I myself pass through a certain psychic state, I know exactly the intensity of this state and its importance in relation to the others, not by measurement or comparison, but because the intensity of e.g. a deep-seated feeling is nothing else than the feeling itself. ”

“ The character of the feeling, therefore, as distinct from its intensity, is already determined for it by a previous process. And its intensity is undoubtedly greater amongst primitive and uneducated men than it is in civilized life. ”

“ If, however, the object is accompanied with feeling—with pleasure or pain—a new element is introduced, to which other epithets are applicable. A feeling is more or less strong or intense; and the addition of an intense feeling to an intellectual conception is a sum, combining both sets of attributes—distinctness and adequacy in the conception, and intensity in the feeling. An object whose perception or conception is thus accompanied with the animation of strong feeling, is called lively, or vivid ”

“ The satisfaction it gives is almost esthetic in its intensity and quality. We feel the same sort of pleasurable shock as when from the crest of some melancholy pass we first see far below us the sudden glories of plain, river and mountain. ”

“ One of the most noticeable things about colors is their difference in intensity. Colors are intense when they excel both in purity and brightness; for it is quite evident that, however pure the colored light may be, it still will produce very little effect on the eye if its total quantity be small; and, on the other hand, it is plain that its action on the same organ will not be considerable if it is diluted with much white light. Purity and brightness, or luminosity, are, then, the factors on which intensity depends. ”

“ Or of sweet sound, or fair proportion'd form,
The grace of motion, or the bloom of light,
Thrills thro' imagination's tender frame,
From nerve to nerve: all naked and alive⁠120
They catch the spreading rays: till now the soul
At length discloses every tuneful spring,
To that harmonious movement from without
Responsive. ”

“ We give ourselves up to a soft sensation of repose, and whilst our senses, touched by the harmony of the colors, the forms, and the sounds, experience the agreeable in the highest, the mind is rejoiced by the easy and rich flow of the ideas, the heart by the sentiments which overflow in it like a torrent. All at once a storm springs up, darkening the sky and all the landscape, surpassing and silencing all other noises, and suddenly taking from us all our pleasures. ”

“ The mutual checking of impulses in a balance, a tension, a conflict which is yet a bond; and this it is which is the clue to the excitement or exaltation which in the dramatic experience usurps the place of definite feeling. We have met this phenomenon before. Aesthetic emotion in general, we have heard, consists just in the union of a kind of stimulation or enhanced life, with repose; a heightening of the vital energies unaccompanied by any tendency to movement,--in short, that gathering of forces which we connect with action, and which is felt the more because action is checked. ”

“ It gave us a new sensation, a new and a higher notion of what the mind of man can put into, and bring out of, landscape painting; how its representative and suggestive truthfulness may be perfect, forming the material elements,—the body, as it were, of the picture,—while, at the same time, there may be superadded that fine sense of the indefinable relation of the visible world to mental emotion, which is its essence and vivifying soul. ”

“ But those human energies which are informed with mind, realize themselves in ardent or rational thought, or in uttered words, or in products of the artfully devising hand. All this clearly is expression, and corresponds, if it is not one and the same, with the passing of energy from potency to the actuality which is its end and consummation. Thus love, seeking its end, thereby seeks expression, through which it is enhanced, and in which it is realized. ”

“ Whether it came and went, grew and shrank, following delicately the moods or reflections of the spirit within, or whether it was a purely fortuitous effect of light and refraction, no man was ever able to say. ”

“ Throughout this discussion of the elements of the experience of art, I have used the terms emotion and feeling with an inclusive meaning, to cover impulses as well as feelings in the narrower sense. For in the aesthetic experience, there are impulses—impulses to move when action is represented in picture and statue, impulses to act, as when, in watching a play, we put ourselves in the place of the persons. ”

“ For the power in fire to produce a new colour, or consistency, in wax or clay, – by its primary qualities, is as much a quality in fire, as the power it has to produce in me a new idea or sensation of warmth or burning, which I felt not before, – by the same primary qualities, viz. the bulk, texture, and motion of its insensible parts.
11. How bodies produce ideas in us. The next thing to be considered is, how bodies produce ideas in us ; and that is manifestly by impulse, the only way which we can conceive bodies to operate in. ”

“ Sensations of color, taste, sound, smell, touch, heat and cold, perceptions of magnitude, and temporal and spatial relations, is the sum of what we know; and yet we are conscious that reason means infinitely more than this, that its proper object is the eternal world of truth, goodness, and beauty. ”

“ They are only the infinitely rapid movements of an infinitely delicate substance, the ether. But when these meet our consciousness, they spin themselves within us into this world of light and colour, of brilliance and beauty. ”

“ Suppose, one day, some one were to hit upon the utmost perfection in arrangement of sound, color and form, would it open up a straight path like a shaft of light for our spirits to glide upon into some other world than this? ”

“ In these compositions, where it is evident from the rhythm, the tone, and the general character, that the author intends to inspire melancholy, this obstinate joy, being unable to show itself openly, is transformed into energy and strength. ”

“ The simple, vital germ of thought or feeling, inherent in the theme, as the life principle inheres in the germ of wheat, is seen to expand gradually and develop through the successive variations into new and changing forms of ever-increasing beauty and suggestiveness until every latent possibility of expression has been matured and exhausted, and the idea has been presented to us in every practicable light and from every attainable standpoint ”

“ When a certain degree of energy of contraction rather than another is thought of by us, this complex aggregate of afferent feelings, forming the material of our thought, renders absolutely precise and distinctive our mental image of the exact strength of movement to be made, and the exact amount of resistance to be overcome. ”

“ This element of expression, perhaps more than any other, manifests the artistic nature of the reader; artistic, inasmuch as the atmosphere, or vocal color, shows the sensitiveness of the reader to sense stimuli; shows that he is moved by the contemplation of the beautiful, the sublime, the tender, the pathetic. This element is called by different names, but perhaps none is more significant than Atmosphere. This effect is not easy to describe, and yet it is as real as rhythm or inflection or any other of the elements discussed in this book. ”

“ For example, the amount and character of thinking done while we read determines the rate of utterance; the purpose or motive of the thought and its completeness or incompleteness are indicated by an upward or downward slide of the voice; the nervous tension expresses itself in a certain key; the physical and mental energy, in a certain power or volume of the voice; and the character of the emotion is reflected in the quality. ”

“ Every object and scene appeals so forcibly to the senses, enraptures the eye, and so sweetly attunes the mind, as to place this feeling among even the extacies of our nature, and; the most refined we are capable of enjoying. ”

“ There come upon us, it seems to me, in those times, fits of musing far deeper and more intense, excitability of feeling—perhaps of imagination too—more acute than at any other time. Perhaps, also, a determination, an energy of will is added, necessary to carry us through, with power and firmness, the struggle, or the change, or the temptation that awaits us. ”

“ That harmonious, imitative response, the psychophysical state known on its feeling side as aesthetic pleasure, we have seen to be, first, a kind of physiological equilibrium, a "coexistence of opposing impulses which heightens the sense of being while it prevents action," like the impulses to movement corresponding to geometrical symmetry ”

“ And must not the soul be perplexed at this intimation which the sense gives of a hard which is also soft? What, again, is the meaning of light and heavy, if that which is light is also heavy, and that which is heavy, light?
Yes, he said, these intimations which the soul receives are very curious and require to be explained.
Yes, I said, and in these perplexities the soul naturally summons to her aid calculation and intelligence, that she may see whether the several objects announced to her are one or two. ”

“ These subject-moments are studied to advantage in bursts of intense pleasure, or intense pain, in fits of engrossed reflection, especially reflection upon mental facts; but they are seldom sustained in purity beyond a very short interval; we are constantly returning to the object-side of things—to [Pg 216] the world where extension and place have their being. ”

“ Felix Clay, The Origin of the Sense of Beauty, p. 95: "The mind or the eye, brought face to face with a number of disconnected and apparently different facts, ideas, shapes, sounds or objects, is bothered and uneasy; the moment that some central conception is offered or discovered by which they all fall into order, so that their due relation to one another can be perceived and the whole grasped, there is a sense of relief and pleasure which is very intense." ”

“ Consciousness, thought, even the commonest sensation of pleasure and pain, or the simplest sense-perception, cannot be compared with “matter and energy,” with the movements of masses. They represent a foreign and altogether inexplicable guest in this world of matter, molecules, and elements. ”

“ That energy too, we feel, was in a manner an improvisation—so closely allied somehow are both the currents, the flow of literary composition admirably instinctive and free, and the handling power, as we are constantly moved to call it, the flow of a splendid intelligence all the while at its fullest expressional ease, for the actual situations created by her, for whatever it might be that vitally confronted her. ”

“ The leading principle of the Inquiry is, that something extended, solid, and movable is directly manifested in our sensuous experiences, equally with the direct manifestations of our own sensations and other feelings when we are conscious of them; and also that we are obliged by common sense to regard extended, solid, and movable things as other than mere transitory sensation or idea. ”

“ In reply to this we must immediately insist that æsthetic emotion, pure and simple, the pleasure given us by certain lines and masses, and combinations of colors and sounds, is an absolutely sensational experience, an optical or auricular feeling that is primary, and not due to the repercussion backwards of other sensations elsewhere consecutively aroused. ”

“ Poetry and other forms of the fine arts express sentiments, states of mind, and emotional reactions on experience. As new stimuli they affect the imagination and produce new states of thought and emotion. ”

“ There is an adjustment of our feelings as well as our muscles not merely to the present sensation, but to the future one, and a buzz of continuing adjustment to the past. There is a holding over and a holding on, a reacting backwards and forwards of our attention, and quite a little drama of expectation, fulfilment and disappointment, or as psychologists call them, of tensions and relaxations. ”

“ By presenting to us a perfect piece of form, a highly complex yet ultimately single organism of tones, it calls into full play our most fundamental perceptions; and this satisfying exercise of our faculties gives us a pervasive happiness, a diffused sense of efficient vitality, ineffably more delightful than any particularized emotion or isolated intellectual process. ”