In this remembrance, Berlyne's seminal ideas about collative motivation and its role in aesthetic phenomena are first briefly reviewed. It is noted that these ideas had not been developed into a formal theory in Berlyne's lifetime. Next, Martindale's negative conclusions about three aspects of the collative-motivation “theory”—a) the relative significance of collative, psychophysical, and ecological variables, b) the Wundt curve, and c) the trade-off between the variables that affect the arousal potential of stimuli—are challenged on conceptual and methodological grounds. It is further claimed that Berlyne's unfortunate fascination with the reticular arousal system sidetracked him from examining the role of sympathetic arousal, whereas the Hullian “baggage” blinded him to the involvement of emotion (with its cognitive, facial-musculature, and sympathetic arousal determinants) in various aesthetic phenomena. A number of pertinent experiments from Konečni's laboratory, which cause problems for both Berlyne's and Martindale's notions, are reviewed, with an emphasis on the importance of context and the type of dependent variable that is used in studying aesthetic phenomena. The article concludes with doubts about (proto)typicality as a key factor in aesthetic preference.