producing works of finished perfection which often bring them posthumous fame. All these characteristics correspond to introversion.
We find a further very valuable example in the aesthetic theory of Warringer. Borrowing from A. Riegl his expression “Volonté d’art absolue” to express the internal force which inspires the artist, he distinguishes two forms, viz. sympathy (Einfühlung) and abstraction; and the term which he employs indicates that here, too, we witness the activity of the push of the libido, the stirring of the élan vital. “In the same way,” says Warringer, “as the sympathetic impulse finds its satisfaction in organic beauty, so abstract impulse discovers beauty in the inorganic, which is the negation of all life, in crystallised forms, and in a general manner wherever the severity of abstract law reigns.” Whilst sympathy represents the warmth of passion which carries it into the presence of the object in order to assimilate it and penetrate it with emotional values; abstraction, on the other hand, despoils the object of all that could recall life, and grasps it by purely intellectual thought, crystallised and fixed into the rigid forms of law,—the universal, the typical. Bergson also makes use of these images of crystallisation, solidification, etc., to illustrate the essence of intellectual abstraction.
Warringer’s “Abstraction” represents the process which I have already remarked as a consequence of introversion, namely, the exaltation of the intellect, in the place of the depreciated reality of the external world. “Sympathy” corresponds in fact to extraversion, for, as Lipps has pointed out, “What I perceive sympathetically in an object is, in a general manner life, and life is power, internal work, effort, and execution. To live, in a word, is to act, and to act is to experience intimately the force which we give out; experience creates activity, which is essentially of a spontaneous character.” “Æsthetic enjoyment,” said Warringer, “is the enjoyment of one’s own self projected into the “object,” a formula which corresponds absolutely with our definition of transference. This aesthetic conception does not refer to the positivist in James’s sense; it is rather the attitude
