Adding And Taking Away

"Anybody who has ever tried to arrange a bunch of flowers, to shuffle and shift the colours, to add a little here and take away there, has experienced this strange sensation of balancing forms and colours without being able to tell exactly what kind of harmony it is he is trying to achieve..........   In every such case, however trivial, we may feel that a shade too much or too little upsets the balance and that there is only one relationship which is as it should be."  (Ernst Gombrich: The History of Art)

As ever Gombrich manages to nail a fundamental idea in simple words.  What else are we doing when we squint through the viewfinder at the world out there, than looking for 'that one relationship which is as it should be'?  While there might be a good deal of dispute about what that relationship consists of, would anybody deny that it exists?   It  seems to be some kind of subconscious template that has infinite variety in the world of form.