object, being able in that way to live in it as an embodiment of our feeling.
Now I am uneasy about this word “contemplate.” No doubt it makes a very good distinction against the practical and the theoretical frames of mind; which in contrast with it are very like each other. For, I think, we must distinguish the theoretical, at least in modern usage, from the “theoretic.” “Theoretic” is pretty much “contemplative,” while “theoretical” indicates a very busy activity aimed at putting together hypotheses and testing them by facts. It is in this sense that it is so sharply opposed to “theoretic” or contemplative.
This word contemplative seems to fit the attitude of three kinds of people — the lover of Nature, the looker-on at the spectacle of art, and the critic. But it does not seem to me to fit, prima facie, the attitude of the person who is surely most to be considered in aesthetic, that is, the artist. And I should not be easily persuaded that an attitude in the spectator
