“The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action.”
Stephen Hero (1944)
Context: Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty. … No esthetic theory, pursued Stephen relentlessly, is of any value which investigates with the aid of the lantern of tradition. What we symbolise in black the Chinaman may symbolise in yellow: each has his own tradition. Greek beauty laughs at Coptic beauty and the American Indian derides them both. It is almost impossible to reconcile all tradition whereas it is by no means impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty which has ever been adored on the earth by an examination into the mechanism of esthetic apprehension whether it be dressed in red, white, yellow or black. We have no reason for thinking that the Chinaman has a different system of digestion from that which we have though our diets are quite dissimilar. The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action.
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James Joyce 191
Irish novelist and poet 1882–1941Related quotes

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 563.

Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1898)
Context: A formidable range of phenomena must be scientifically sifted before we effectually grasp a faculty so strange, so bewildering, and for ages so inscrutable as the direct action of mind on mind. This delicate task needs a rigorous employment of the method of exclusion — a constant setting aside of irrelevant phenomena that could be explained by known causes, including those far too familiar causes, conscious and unconscious fraud. The inquiry unites the difficulties inherent in all experimentation connected with mind, with tangled human temperaments, and with observations dependent less on automatic record than on personal testimony. But difficulties are things to be overcome even in the elusory branch of research known as experimental psychology.

How the Semblances of Things are to be combated, Chap. xviii.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Human Immortality: its Positive Argument, p.297
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 5.

As quoted in The Anchor Book of Latin Quotations: with English translations (1990) by Norbert Guterman, p. 375
Disputed

“Goethe; or, the Writer,” pp. 271-272
1850s, Representative Men (1850)

“Beauty … is a relation, and the apprehension of it a comparison.”
"On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue"
Letters, etc