expression of these spontaneous responses of the nervous organism; but what we call an 'æsthetic response' appears to be only a practical response checked at a certain, or rather at a quite uncertain, point. The spontaneous response is still frequently recorded in dreams. A man to whom every kind of cruelty is abhorrent, having speculated in a waking hour with a kind of curious horror upon the kind of person who could have obeyed that injunction: 'Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone,' dreams in the following night that he and another are engaged in casting stones upon some person in a pit; and wakes himself by the intensity of his aversion from the spontaneous and merely mimetic cruelty of his imagination.
In our waking hours, the check on the imagination, which prevents it from stimulating the nerves to a visible 'motor response,' is sometimes in this form: 'This is not real—I am in a theatre.' Often it takes the form of a moral consideration: 'I shall make a fool of myself.' 'What would people think of me?' The indeterminate moving line between practical conduct and so-called æsthetic experience depends upon moral and kindred 'inhibitions'; so that we may almost assert that our æsthetic experience is determined and, in a sense, created by our moral discipline.
But common experience proves that, in impressionable persons, the activity of nerves and imagination stimulated by works of art has the possessive and unopposable force of a dream, and controls the
