Chapter XXXII: , p. 249.)

The result of the co-ordination of a great number of impulses of different kinds is very often that no _overt_ action takes place. There is a danger here of supposing that no action whatever results or that there is something incomplete or imperfect about such a state of affairs. But imaginal action and incipient action which does not go so far as actual muscular movement are more important than Overt action in the well-developed human being. Indeed the difference between the intelligent or refined, and the stupid or crass person is a difference in the extent to which overt action can be replaced by incipient and imaginal action. An intelligent man can ‘see how a thing works’ when a less intelligent man has to ‘find out by trying’. Similarly with such responses as are aroused by a work of art. The difference between ‘understanding’ it and failing to do so is, in most cases, a difference between being able to make the required responses in an imaginal or incipient degree, adjusting them to one another at that stage, and being unable to produce them or adjust them except overtly and at their fullest development. Though the kinds of activity involved are different, the analogy with the case of the mathematician is not misleading. The fact that he will not make half so many marks on paper as a schoolboy does not show that he is any less active. His activity takes place at an earlier stage in which his responses are merely incipient or imaginal. In a similar manner the absence of any overt movements or external signs of emotion in an experienced reader of poetry, or concert-goer, compared to the evident disturbances which are sometimes to be seen in the novice, is no indication of any lack of internal activity. The response required in many cases by works of art is of a kind which can only be obtained in an incipient or imaginal stage. Practical considerations often prevent their being worked out in overt form, and this is, as a rule, not in the least to be regretted. For these responses are commonly of the nature of solutions to problems, not of intellectual research, but of emotional accommodation and adjustment, and can usually be best achieved while the different impulses which have to be reconciled are still in an incipient or imaginal stage, and before the matter has become further complicated by the irrelevant accidents which attend overt responses.

These imaginal and incipient activities or tendencies to action, I shall call attitudes. When we realise how many and how different may be the tendencies awakened by a situation, and what scope there is for conflict, suppression and interplay—all contributing something to our experience—it will not appear surprising that the classification and analysis of attitudes is not yet far advanced. A thousand tendencies to actions, which do not overtly take place, may well occur in complicated adjustments. For these what evidence there is must be indirect. In fact, the only attitudes which are capable of clear and explicit analysis are those in which some simple mode of observable behaviour gives the clue to what has been taking place, and even here only a part of the reaction is open to this kind of examination.

Among the experiences which are by the nature of the case hidden from observation are found almost all those with which criticism is concerned. The outward aspect and behaviour of a man reading _The Prioresses’ Tale_ and _The Miller’s Tale_ may well be indistinguishable. But this should not lead us to overlook how great a part in the whole experience is taken by attitudes. Many experiences which, if examined by introspection for their actual content of sensation and imagery, differ very little, are totally diverse in the kind and degree of implicit activity present. This aspect of experiences as filled with incipient promptings, lightly stimulated tendencies to acts of one kind or another, faint preliminary preparations for doing this or that, has been constantly overlooked in criticism. Yet it is in terms of attitudes, the resolution, inter-inanimation, and balancing of impulses—Aristotle’s definition of Tragedy[46] is an instance—that all the most valuable effects of poetry must be described.

[46] “Tragedy is an imitation of an action... effecting through Pity and Terror the correction and refinement (_κάθαρςις_) of such passions.” _Poetics_, VI. Cf. p. 247, _infra_.