BEAUTY AND HUMAN NATURE: ELEMENTS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL AESTHETICS

By Albert R. Chandler '08. D. Appleton-Century Company, 1934. PP. viii, 381.

This work by Professor Chandler of the Philosophy Department of Ohio State University, published in The Century Psychology Series, is an approach to aesthetics through the psychological and experimental method. The author admits that

"the results of experimental aesthetics are often inadequate or conflicting" but believes that "they are, nevertheless, the most objective data available." The book includes a survey of experimental aesthetics from Fechner, the founder of the subject, to the present; and a discussion of several of the major arts (the three chapters devoted to music seemed to me particularly valuable).

The data for experiment are the elements of the various arts (shapes, colors, sounds, etc.) and their various ways of combination (e.g. of sounds into melody). The usual method of the investigators is to show the subjects submitting to the experiment objects that may vary all the way from elements presented singly (certain colors, or shapes, etc.) to completed works of art; and in general the subjects are asked to decide what the various objects express (e.g. colors may be characterized as being warm or cool, exciting or soothing, heavy or light, etc.), or to grade the objects in the order of their pleasantness or unpleasantness. Professor Chandler claims only a "modicum of uniformity" in the results: there appears to be more uniformity under expressiveness than under pleasantness. The progress of this subject will depend in part, it appears to me, upon an improvement in the nature, scope, and decision of the questions asked of the subjects submitting to experiment.

Professor Chandler defines the aesthetic experience as "satisfaction in contemplation," the broad conditions of which are "isolation," "unity," and "significance." One of the sources of significance that he particularly stresses is the expressiveness of objects due to empathy. In the definition, "satisfaction" is broader than if not different from "pleasantness": the latter might possibly be regarded, in Professor Chandler's theory and in view of the experimental work, as one of the sources of "satisfaction in contemplation."