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ESTHETIC experience is imaginative. This fact, in connection with a false idea of the nature of imagination, has obscured the larger fact that all conscious experience has of necessity some degree of imaginative quality. For while the roots of every experience are found in the interaction of a live creature with its environment, that experience becomes conscious, a matter of perception, only when meanings enter it that are derived from prior experiences. Imagination is the only gateway through which these meanings can find their way into a present interaction; or rather, as we have just seen, the conscious adjustment of the new and the old is imagination. Interaction of a living being with an environment is found in vegetative and animal life. But the experience enacted is human and conscious only as that which is given here and now is extended by meanings and values drawn from what is absent in fact and present only imaginatively. *

There is always a gap between the here and now of direct interaction and the past interactions whose funded result constitutes the meanings with which we grasp and understand what is now occurring. Because of this gap, all conscious perception involves a risk; it is a venture into the unknown, for as it assimilates the present to the past it also brings about some reconstruction of that past. When past and present fit exactly into one another, when there is only recurrence, complete uniformity, the resulting experience is routine and mechanical; it does not come to consciousness in perception. The inertia of habit overrides adaptation of the meaning of the here and now with that of experiences, without which there is no consciousness, the imaginative phase of experience.

Mind, that is the body of organized meanings by means of which events of the present have significance for us, does not always enter into the activities and undergoings that are going on here and now. Sometimes it is baffled and arrested. Then the stream of meanings aroused into activity by the present contact remain aloof. Then it forms the matter of reverie, of dream; ideas are floating, not anchored to any existence as its property, its possession of meanings. Emotions that are equally loose and floating cling to these ideas. The pleasure they afford is the reason why they are entertained and are allowed to occupy the scene; they are attached to existence only in a way that, as long as sanity abides, is felt to be only fanciful and unreal.

In every work of art, however, these meanings are actually embodied in a material which thereby becomes the medium for their expression. This fact constitutes the peculiarity of all experience that is definitely esthetic. Its imaginative quality dominates, because meanings and values that are wider and deeper than the particular here and now in which they are anchored are realized by way of expressions although not by way of an object that is physically efficacious in relation to other objects. Not even a useful object is produced except by the intervention of imagination. Some existent material was perceived in the light of relations and possibilities not hitherto realized when the steam engine was invented. But when the imagined possibilities were embodied in a new assemblage of natural materials, the steam engine took its place in nature as an object that has the same physical effects as those belonging to any other physical object. Steam did the physical work and produced the consequences that attend any expanding gas under definite physical conditions. The sole difference is that the conditions under which it operates have been arranged by human contrivance.

The work of art, however, unlike the machine, is not only the outcome of imagination, but operates imaginatively rather than in the realm of physical existences. What it does is to concentrate and enlarge an immediate experience. The formed matter of esthetic experience directly expresses, in other words, the meanings that are imaginatively evoked; it does not, like the material brought into new relations in a machine, merely provide means by which purposes over and beyond the existence of the object may be executed. And yet the meanings imaginatively summoned, assembled, and integrated are embodied in material existence that here and now interacts with the self. The work of art is thus a challenge to the performance of a like act of evocation and organization, through imagination, on the part of the one who experiences it. It is not just a stimulus to and means of an overt course of action.

This fact constitutes the uniqueness of esthetic experience, and this uniqueness is in turn a challenge to thought. It is particularly a challenge to that systematic thought called philosophy. For esthetic experience is experience in its integrity. Had not the term "pure" been so often abused in philosophic literature, had it not been so often employed to suggest that there is something alloyed, impure, in the very nature of experience and to denote something beyond experience, we might say that esthetic experience is pure experience. For it is experience freed from the forces that impede and confuse its development as experience; freed, that is, from factors that subordinate an experience as it is directly had to something beyond itself. To esthetic experience, then, the philosopher must go to understand what experience is.

For this reason, while the theory of esthetics put forth by a philosopher is incidentally a test of the capacity of its author to have the experience that is the subject-matter of his analysis, it is also much more than that. It is a test of the capacity of the system he puts forth to grasp the nature of experience itself. There is no test that so surely reveals the one-sidedness of a philosophy as its treatment of art and esthetic experience. Imaginative vision is the power that unifies all the constituents of the matter of a work of art, making a whole out of them in all their variety. Yet all the elements of our being that are displayed in special emphases and partial realizations in other experiences are merged in esthetic experience. And they are so completely merged in the immediate wholeness of the experience that each is submerged: — it does not present itself in consciousness as a distinct element.

Yet philosophies of esthetics have often set out from one factor that plays a part in the constitution of experience, and have attempted to interpret or "explain" the esthetic experience by a single element; in terms of sense, emotion, reason, of activity; imagination itself is viewed not as that which holds all other elements in solution but as a special faculty. The philosophies of esthetics are many and diverse. It is impossible to give even a resume of them in a chapter. But criticism has a clue that, if it is followed, furnishes a sure guide through the labyrinth. We can ask what element, in the formation of experience, each system has taken as central and characteristic. If we start from this point, we find that theories fall of themselves into certain types, and that the particular strand of experience that is offered reveals, when it is placed in contrast with esthetic experience itself, the weakness of the theory. For it is shown that the system in question has superimposed some preconceived idea upon experience instead of encouraging or even allowing esthetic experience to tell its own tale.

Since experience is rendered conscious by means of that fusion of old meanings and new situations that transfigures both (a transformation that defines imagination), the theory that art is a form of make-believe suggests itself as the natural one with which to begin. The theory grows out of, and depends upon, contrast between the work of art as an experience and experience of the "real." Now there is no doubt that because of the domination of esthetic experience by imaginative quality, it exists in a medium of light that never was on land or sea. Even the most "realistic" work, if it is one of art, is not an imitative reproduction of the things that are so familiar, so regular, and so importunate that we call them real. In departure from theories of art that define it as "imitative," and that conceive the pleasure that attends it as one of sheer recognition, the make-believe theory has laid hold of a genuine strand of the esthetic.

Moreover, I do not think it can be denied that an element of reverie, of approach to a state of dream, enters into the creation of a work of art, nor that the experience of the work when it is intense often throws one into a similar state. Indeed, it is safe to say that "creative" conceptions in philosophy and science come only to persons who are relaxed to the point of reverie. The subconscious fund of meanings stored in our attitudes have no chance of release when we are practically or intellectually strained. For much the greater part of this store is then restrained, because the demands of a particular problem and particular purpose inhibit all except the elements directly relevant. Images and ideas come to us not by set purpose but in flashes, and flashes are intense and illuminating, they set us on fire, only when we are free from special preoccupations.

The error of the make-believe or illusion theory of art does not, then, proceed from the fact that esthetic experience lacks the elements upon which the theory builds. Its falsity proceeds from the fact that in isolating one constituent, it denies explicitly or implicitly other elements equally essential. No matter how imaginative the material for a work of art, it issues from the state of reverie to become the matter of a work of art only when it is ordered and organized, and this effect is produced only when purpose controls selection and development of material.

The characteristic of dream and reverie is absence of control by purpose. Images and ideas succeed one another according to their own sweet will, and the sweetness of the succession to feeling is the only control that is exercised. In philosophical terminology, the material is subjective. An esthetic product results only when ideas cease to float and are embodied in an object, and the one who experiences the work of art loses himself in irrelevant reverie unless his images and emotions are also tied to the object, and are tied to it in the sense of being fused with the matter of the object. It is not enough that they should be occasioned by the object: in order to be an experience of the object they must be saturated with its qualities. Saturation means an immersion so complete that the qualities of the object and the emotions it arouses have no separate existence. Works of art often start an experience going that is enjoyable in itself, and this experience is sometimes worth having, not merely an indulgence in irrelevant sentimentality. But such an experience is not an enjoyed perception of the object merely because it is provoked by it.

The significance of purpose as a controlling factor in both production and appreciation is often missed because purpose is identified with pious wish and what is sometimes called a motive. A purpose exists only in terms of subject matter. The experience that gave birth to a work like the "Joie de Vivre" of Matisse is highly imaginative; no such scene ever occurred. It is an example as favorable to the dreamlike theory of art as can be found. But the imaginative material did not and could not remain dreamlike, no matter what its origin. To become the matter of a work, it had to be conceived in terms of color as a medium of expression; the floating image and feeling of a dance had to be translated into rhythms of space, line, and distributions of light and colors. The object, the expressed material, is not merely the accomplished purpose, but it is as object the purpose from the very beginning. Even if we were to suppose that the image first presented itself in an actual dream, it would still be true that its material had to be organized in terms of objective materials and operations that moved consistently and without a break to consummation in the picture as a public object in a common world.

At the same time, purpose implicates in the most organic way an individual self. It is in the purposes he entertains and acts upon that an individual most completely exhibits and realizes his intimate selfhood. Control of material by a self is control by more than just "mind"; it is control by the personality that has mind incorporate within it. All interest is an identification of a self with some material aspect of the objective world, of the nature that includes man. Purpose is this identification in action. Its operation in and through objective conditions is a test of its genuineness; the capacity of the purpose to overcome and utilize resistance, to administer materials, is a disclosure of the structure and quality of the purpose. For, as I have already said, the object finally created is the purpose both as conscious objective and as accomplished actuality. The thoroughgoing integration of what philosophy discriminates as "subject" and "object" (in more direct language, organism and environment) is the characteristic of every work of art. The completeness of the integration is the measure of its esthetic status. For defect in a work is always traceable ultimately to an excess on one side or the other, injuring the integration of matter and form. Detailed criticism of the make-believe theory is unnecessary because it is based upon violation of the integrity of the work of art. It expressly denies or virtually ignores that identification with objective material and constructive operation that is the very essence of art.

The theory that art is play is akin to the dream theory of art. But it goes one step nearer the actuality of esthetic experience by recognizing the necessity of action, of doing something. Children are often said to make-believe when they play. But children at play are at least engaged in actions that give their imagery an outward manifestation; in their play, idea and act are completely fused. The elements of strength and of weakness in the theory may be viewed by noting an order of progression that marks forms of play. A kitten plays with a spool or ball. The play is not wholly random because it is controlled by the structural organization of the animal, though not, presumably, by a conscious purpose, for the kitten rehearses the kind of actions the cat employs in catching its prey. But the play of the kitten, while it has a certain order as an activity, in consonance with the structural needs of the organism, does not modify the object played with except by a change of its spatial position, a more or less accidental matter. The spool, the object, is the stimulus and occasion, the excuse as it were, for an enjoyable free exercise of activities, but it is not, save in an external way, their matter.

The first manifestations of play by a child do not differ much from those of a kitten. But as experience matures, activities are more and more regulated by an end to be attained; purpose becomes a thread that runs through a succession of acts; it converts them into a true series, a course of activity having a definite inception and steady movement toward a goal. As the need for order is recognized, play becomes a game; it has "rules." There is also a gradual transition, such that play involves not only an ordering of activities toward an end but also an ordering of materials. In playing with blocks the child builds a house or a tower. He becomes conscious of the meaning of his impulsions and acts by means of the difference made by them in objective materials. Past experiences more and more give meaning to what is done. The tower or fort that is to be constructed not only regulates the selection and arrangement of acts performed but is expressive of values of experience. Play as an event is still immediate. But its content consists of a mediation of present materials by ideas drawn from past experience.

This transition effects a transformation of play into work, provided work is not identified with toil or labor. For any activity becomes work when it is directed by accomplishment of a definite material result, and it is labor only as the activities are onerous, undergone as mere means by which to secure a result. The product of artistic activity is significantly called the work of art. The truth in the play theory of art is its emphasis upon the unconstrained character of esthetic experience, not in its intimation of an objectively unregulated quality in activity. Its falsity lies in its failure to recognize that esthetic experience involves a definite reconstruction of objective materials; a reconstruction that marks the arts of dance and song as well as the shaping arts. The dance, for example, involves the use of the body and its movements in a way that transforms their "natural" state. The artist is concerned with exercise of activities having a definitely objective reference; an effect upon material so as to convert it into a medium of expression. Play remains as an attitude of freedom from subordination to an end imposed by external necessity, as opposed, that is, to labor; but it is transformed into work in that activity is subordinated to production of an objective result. No one has ever watched a child intent in his play without being made aware of the complete merging of playfulness with seriousness.

The philosophical implications of the play theory are found in its opposition of freedom and necessity, of spontaneity and order. This opposition goes back to the same dualism between subject and object that infects the make-believe theory. Its underlying note is the idea that esthetic experience is a release and escape from the pressure of "reality." There is an assumption that freedom can be found only when personal activity is liberated from control by objective factors. The very existence of a work of art is evidence that there is no such opposition between the spontaneity of the self and objective order and law. In art, the playful attitude becomes interest in the transformation of material to serve the purpose of a developing experience. Desire and need can be fulfilled only through objective material, and therefore playfulness is also interest in an object.

One form of the theory that art is play attributes play to the existence of a surplus of energy in the organism demanding outlet. But the idea passes over a question that needs to be answered. How is excess of energy measured? With respect to what is there a surplus? The play theory assumes that energy is in excess with respect to activities that are necessary because of demands of the environment that must be met practically. But children are not conscious of any opposition between play and necessary work. The idea of the contrast is a product of the adult life in which some activities are recreative and amusing because of their contrast with work that is infected with laborious care. The spontaneity of art is not one of opposition to anything, but marks complete absorption in an orderly development. This absorption is characteristic of esthetic experience; but it is an ideal for all experience, and the ideal is realized in the activity of the scientific inquirer and the professional man when the desires and urgencies of the self are completely engaged in what is objectively done.

The contrast between free and externally enforced activity is an empirical fact. But it is largely produced by social conditions and it is something to be eliminated as far as possible, not something to be erected into a differentia by which to define art. There is a place for farce and diversion in experience; "a little nonsense now and then is relished by the best of men." Works of art outside of comedy are often diverting. But these facts are no reason for defining art in terms of diversion. This conception has its roots in the notion that there is such an inherent and deep-seated antagonism between the individual and the world (by means of which an individual lives and develops) that freedom can be attained only through escape.

Now there is enough conflict between the needs and desires of the self and the conditions of the world to give some point to the escape theory. Spenser said of poetry that "it is the world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil." The issue does not concern this trait, true of all the arts, but has to do with the way in which art performs liberation and release. The matter at stake is whether release comes by way of anodyne or by transfer to a radically different realm of things, or whether it is accomplished by manifesting what actual existence actually becomes when its possibilities are fully expressed. The fact that art is production and that production occurs only through an objective material that has to be managed and ordered in accord with its own possibilities seem to be conclusive in the latter sense. As Goethe said: "Art is formative long before it is beautiful. For man has within him a formative nature that displays itself in action as soon as existence is secure. . . . When formative activity operates on what lies around it from single, individual, independent feeling, careless and ignorant of all that is alien to it, then, whether born of rude savagery or cultivated sensibility, it is whole and living." The activity that is free from the standpoint of the self is ordered and disciplined from the side of objective material undergoing transformation.

As far as the delight found in contrast is concerned, it is as true that we go for satisfaction from works of art to natural things as it is that we turn from the latter to art. At times we turn gladly from fine art to industry, science, politics, and domestic life. As Browning said:

"And that's your Venus — whence we turn
To yonder girl that fords the burn."

Soldiers get too much of fighting; philosophers of philosophizing, and the poet goes gladly to the meal he shares with his fellows. Imaginative experience exemplifies more fully than any other kind of experience what experience itself is in its very movement and structure. But we also want the tang of overt conflict and the impact of harsh conditions. Moreover, without the latter art has no material; and this fact is more important for esthetic theory than is any contrast supposed to exist between play and work, spontaneity and necessity, freedom and law. For art is the fusion in one experience of the pressure upon the self of necessary conditions and the spontaneity and novelty of individuality.*

Individuality itself is originally a potentiality and is realized only in interaction with surrounding conditions. In this process of intercourse, native capacities, which contain an element of uniqueness, are transformed and become a self. Moreover, through resistances encountered, the nature of the self is discovered. The self is both formed and brought to consciousness through interaction with environment. The individuality of the artist is no exception. If his activities remained mere play and merely spontaneous, if free activities were not brought against the resistance offered by actual conditions, no work of art would ever be produced. From the first manifestation by a child of an impulse to draw up to the creations of a Rembrandt, the self is created in the creation of objects, a creation that demands active adaptation to external materials, including a modification of the self so as to utilize and thereby overcome external necessities by incorporating them in an individual vision and expression.

From the philosophic point of view, I see no way to resolve the continual strife in art theories and in criticism between the classic and the romantic save to see that they represent tendencies that mark every authentic work of art. What is called "classic" stands for objective order and relations embodied in a work; what is called "romantic" stands for the freshness and spontaneity that come from individuality. At different periods and by different artists, one or the other tendency is carried to an extreme. If there is a definite overbalance on one side or the other the work fails; the classic becomes dead, monotonous, and artificial; the romantic, fantastic and eccentric. But the genuinely romantic becomes in time established as a recognized constituent in experience, so that there is force in the saying that after all the classic means nothing more than that a work of art has won an established recognition.

Desire for the strange and unusual, the remote in space and time, marks romantic art. Yet escape from the familiar environment to a foreign one is often a means of enlarging subsequent experience, because the excursions of art create new sensitivities that in time absorb what was alien and naturalize it within direct experience. Delacroix as a painter who was unduly romantic was at least a precursor of the artists of two generations later who made Arabian scenes a part of the common material of painting, and who, because their form is adapted to subject-matter, more justly than was that of Delacroix, do not arouse a sense of anything so remote as to seem outside the natural scope of experience. Sir Walter Scott is classed as a romanticist in literature. Yet even in his own day, William Hazlitt, who savagely denounced Scott's reactionary political opinions, said of his novels that "by going a century or so back and laying the scene in a remote and uncultivated district, all becomes new and startling in the present advanced period" The italicized words with another phrase, "all is fresh as from the hand of nature," indicate the possibility of incorporation of the romantically strange into the meaning of the present environment. Indeed, since all esthetic experience is imaginative, the pitch of intensity to which the imaginative may be raised without becoming outre and fantastic is determined only by the doing, not by the a priori rules of pseudo-classicism. Charles Lamb had, as Hazlitt said, "distaste to new faces, to new books, to new buildings, to new customs" and was "tenacious of the obscure and remote." Lamb himself said: "I cannot make these present times real to me." Yet Pater in quoting these words said that Lamb felt the poetry of things old indeed but, "surviving as an actual part of the life of the present and as something quite different from the poetry of things gone from us and antique."

The two theories criticized (as well as that of self-expression criticized in the chapter on The Act of Expression) are discussed because they typify philosophies that isolate the individual, the "subject"; one of them selecting material that is private, like that of a dream, the other activities that are exclusively individual. These theories are comparatively modern; they correspond to the overemphasis of the individual and the subjective in modern philosophy. The theory of art that has had by far the longest historical vogue and that is still so entrenched that many critics regard individualism in art as an heretical innovation, went to the opposite extreme. It regarded the individual as a mere channel, the more transparent the better, through which objective material is conveyed. This older theory conceived of art as representation, as imitation. Adherents of this theory appeal to Aristotle as the great authority. Yet, as every student of that philosopher knows, Aristotle meant something radically different from imitation of particular incidents and scenes — from "realistic" representation in its present sense.

For to Aristotle the universal was more real, metaphysically, than the particular. The gist of his theory is at least suggested by the reason he gives for regarding poetry as more philosophical than history. "It is not the business of the poet to tell what has happened but the kind of thing that might happen — what is possible whether necessary or probable." . . . For poetry tells us, rather, the universals, history the particulars.

Since no one can deny that art deals with the possible, Aristotle's interpretation of it as dealing with the necessary or the probable needs to be stated in terms of his system. For according to him, things are necessary or probable in kinds or species not simply as particulars. By their own nature some kinds are necessary and eternal, while other kinds are only probable. The former kinds are always so, the latter kinds are so usually, as a rule, generally. Both kinds are universals, since they are made what they are by an inherent metaphysical essence. Thus Aristotle completes the passage just quoted by saying "the universal is the kind of thing which a person of certain character would necessarily or probably do or say. And this is what poetry aims at, though it gives proper names to the persons. The particular, for example, is what Alcibiades did or underwent."

Now the term here translated "character" is likely to give the modern reader a totally wrong impression. He would agree that the deeds and sayings attributed to a character in fiction, drama, or poetry should be such as flow necessarily or with great probability from that individual's character. But he thinks of character as intimately individual, while "character" in the passage signifies a universal nature or essence. To Aristotle the esthetic significance of the portrayal of Macbeth, Pendennis, or Felix Holt consists in fidelity to the nature found in a class or species. To the modern reader, it signifies fidelity to the individual whose career is exhibited; the things done, underwent, and said belong to him in his unique individuality. The difference is radical.

The influence of Aristotle upon subsequent ideas of art may be gathered by a brief quotation from the lectures of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He said of painting that its office is "exhibition of the general forms of things," for "in each class of objects there is one common idea and central form, which is the abstract of the various individual forms belonging to the class." This general form, antecedently existent in nature, which indeed is nature when nature is true to itself, is reproduced or "imitated" in art. "The idea of beauty in each species of things is invariable."

The weakness, in a relative sense, of the paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds is doubtless to be attributed to defects in his own artistic capacity rather than to acceptance of the theory he expounds. Many a person in both plastic and literary arts held the same theory and rose superior to it. And up to a certain point, the theory is a just reflection of the actual state of works of art for a long period, because of their search for the typical and their avoidance of anything that might be considered accidental and contingent. Its prevalence in the eighteenth century reflects not only canons followed in the art of that century (outside of painting in France through the earlier part of the century), but also the general condemnation of the baroque and the Gothic.*

But the question raised is a general one. It cannot be disposed of merely by pointing out that modern art, in all its modes, has tended to search for and express the distinctively individual traits of objects and scenes, any more than it can be settled by an ipse dixit that these exhibitions of the modern spirit are willful departures from true art, to be explained by desire for mere novelty and attendant notoriety. For, as we have already seen, the more a work of art embodies what belongs to experiences common to many individuals, the more expressive it is. Indeed, failure to take account of the control exercised by objective subject-matter is the just ground for the criticism directed against the subjectivist theories lately under discussion. The problem for philosophic reflection concerns, then, not the presence or absence of such objective material but its nature and the way in which it operates in the developing movement of an esthetic experience.

The question of the nature of the objective material that enters a work of art and the way in which it operates cannot be separated. In a true sense, the way in which material of other experiences enters into esthetic experience is its nature for art. But it may be pointed out that the terms general and common are equivocal. The meaning they possess for Aristotle and for Sir Joshua are not, for example, the meaning that most naturally comes to mind with a contemporary reader. For the former, they refer to a species or kind of objects, and, moreover, a kind already in existence by the very constitution of nature. For a reader innocent of the underlying metaphysics, they have a simpler, more direct and more experimental significance. The "common" is that which is found in the experience of a number of persons; anything in which a number of persons participate is by that very fact common. The more deep-seated it is in the doings and undergoing that form experience, the more general or common it is. We live in the same world; that aspect of nature is common to all. There are impulsions and needs that are common to humanity. The "universal" is not something metaphysically anterior to all experience but is a way in which things function in experience as a bond of union among particular events and scenes. Potentially anything whatsoever in nature or in human associations is "common"; whether or not it is actually common depends upon diverse conditions, especially those that affect the processes of communication.

For it is by activities that are shared and by language and other means of intercourse that qualities and values become common to the experience of a group of mankind. Now art is the most effective mode of communication that exists. For this reason the presence of common or general factors in conscious experience is an effect of art. Anything in the world, no matter how individual in its own existence is potentially common, as I have said, because it is something that may, just because it is part of the environment, interact with any living being. But it becomes a conscious common possession, or is shared, by means of works of art more than by any other means. The idea that the general is constituted by the existence of fixed kinds of things, has, moreover, been destroyed by the advance of science, physical and biological. The idea was a product of the cultural conditions, with respect both to the state of knowledge and social organization, that subordinated the individual in politics as well as in art and philosophy.

The question of the way potential common material enters into art has been dealt with in connection with other matters, especially that of the nature of the expressive object and the medium. A medium as distinct from raw material is always a mode of language and thus of expression and communication. Pigments, marble and bronze, sounds, are not media of themselves. They enter into the formation of a medium only when they interact with the mind and skill of an individual. Sometimes in a painting we are conscious of the paint; the physical means obtrude; they are not so absorbed into union with what the artist contributes as to carry us transparently over to the texture of the object, drapery, human flesh, the sky or whatever it may be. Even great painters do not always achieve a complete union, Cezanne being a notable example. On the other hand, there are lesser artists in whose work we are not made aware of the material means used. But since only scant material is supplied by the human meanings that interact, the work is slight in expressiveness.

Such facts as these give convincing evidence that the medium of expression in art is neither objective nor subjective. It is the matter of a new experience in which subjective and objective have so cooperated that neither has any longer an existence by itself. The fatal defect of the representative theory is that it exclusively identifies the matter of a work of art with what is objective. It passes by the fact that objective material becomes the matter of art only as it is transformed by entering into relations of doing and being undergone by an individual person with all his characteristics of temperament, special manner of vision, and unique experience. Even did there exist (as there does not) special fixed kinds of beings to which all particulars are subordinate, it would still be true that they would not be the matter of art. They would be at best material for, and would become matter o/a work of art only after they had been transfigured by fusion with material that has undergone incorporation with an individual living creature. Since the physical material used in production of a work of art is not of itself a medium, no rules can be laid a priori down for its proper use. The limits of its esthetic potentialities can be determined only experimentally and by what artists make out of it in practice; another evidence that the medium of expression is neither subjective nor objective, but is an experience in which they are integrated in a new object.

The philosophic basis of the representative theory is compelled to omit this qualitative novelty that characterizes every genuine work of art.

This neglect is a logical consequence of virtual denial of the inherent role of individuality in the matter of a work of art. The theory of reality that defines the real in terms of fixed kinds is bound to regard all elements of novelty as accidental and esthetically irrelevant, even though they are practically unavoidable. Moreover, philosophies that have been marked by bias in favor of universal natures and "characters" have always regarded only the eternal and unchanging as truly real. Yet no genuine work has ever been a repetition of anything that previously existed. There are indeed works that tend to be mere recombinations of elements selected from prior works. But they are academic — that is to say, mechanical — rather than esthetic. Not only critics but historians of art have been misled by the factitious prestige of the concept of the fixed and unchanging. They have tended to find the explanation of works of art of each period as mere recombinations of those predecessors, recognizing novelty only when a new "style" appeared, and even then acknowledging it only in a grudging way. The interpenetration of the old and new, their complete blending in a work of art, is another challenge issued by art to philosophic thought. It gives a clue to the nature of things that philosophic systems have rarely followed.

The sense of increase of understanding, of a deepened intelligibility on the part of objects of nature and man, resulting from esthetic experience, has led philosophic theorists to treat art as a mode of knowledge, and has induced artists, especially poets, to regard art as a mode of revelation of the inner nature of things that cannot be had in any other way. It has led to treating art as a mode of knowledge superior not only to that of ordinary life but to that of science itself. The notion that art is a form of knowledge (though not one superior to the scientific mode) is implicit in Aristotle's statement that poetry is more philosophical than history. The assertion has been expressly made by many philosophers. A reading of these philosophers in connection with one another suggests, however, that they either have not had an esthetic experience or have allowed preconceptions to determine their interpretation of it. For the alleged knowledge can hardly be at the same time that of fixed species, as with Aristotle; of Platonic Ideas, as with Schopenhauer; of the rational structure of the universe, as with Hegel; and of states of mind, as with Croce; of sensations with associated images, as with the sensational school; to mention a few of the outstanding philosophic instances. The varieties of incompatible conceptions put forth prove that the philosophers in question were anxious to carry a dialectical development of conceptions framed without regard to art into esthetic experience more than they were willing to allow this experience to speak for itself.

Nevertheless, the sense of disclosure and of heightened intelligibility of the world remains to be accounted for. That knowledge enters deeply and intimately into the production of a work is proved by the works themselves. Theoretically, it follows of necessity from the part played by mind, by the meanings funded from prior experiences that are actively incorporated in esthetic production and perception. There are artists who have been definitely influenced in their work by the science of their time — as Lucretius, Dante, Milton, Shelley, and, although not to advantage of their paintings, Leonardo and Durer in the larger compositions of the latter. But there is a great difference between the transformation of knowledge that is effected in imaginative and emotional vision, and in expression through union with sense-material and knowledge. Wordsworth declared that "poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." Shelley said: "Poetry ... is at once the center and circumference of all knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science and to which all science must be referred."

But these men were poets and are speaking imaginatively. "Breath and finer spirit" of knowledge are far from being knowledge in any literal sense, and Wordsworth goes on to say that poetry "carries sensation into the objects of science." And Shelley also says, "poetry awakens and enlarges the mind by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought." I cannot find in such remarks as these any intention to assert that esthetic experience is to be defined as a mode of knowledge. What is intimated to my mind, is, that in both production and enjoyed perception of works of art, knowledge is transformed; it becomes something more than knowledge because it is merged with non-intellectual elements to form an experience worthwhile as an experience. I have from time to time set forth a conception of knowledge as being "instrumental." Strange meanings have been imputed by critics to this conception. Its actual content is simple: Knowledge is instrumental to the enrichment of immediate experience through the control over action that it exercises. I would not emulate the philosophers I have criticized and force this interpretation into the ideas set forth by Wordsworth and Shelley. But an idea similar to that I have just stated seems to me to be the most natural translation of their intent.

Tangled scenes of life are made more intelligible in esthetic experience: not, however, as reflection and science render things more intelligible by reduction to conceptual form, but by presenting their meanings as the matter of a clarified, coherent, and intensified or "impassioned" experience. The trouble I find with the representative and cognitive theories of the esthetic is that they, like the play and illusion theories, isolate one strand in the total experience, a strand, moreover, that is what it is because of the entire pattern to which it contributes and in which it is absorbed. They take it to be the whole. Such theories either mark an arrest of esthetic experience on the part of those who hold them, an arrest eked out by induced cerebral reveries, or they are evidence of forgetfulness of the nature of the actual experience in favor of enforcement of some prior philosophical conception to which their authors have been committed.

There is a third general type of theories that combines the escape phase of the first type of theories considered with the overintellectualized conception of art characteristic of the second type. The historic origin of this third type, in western thought, goes back to Plato. He sets out from the imitation conception, but to him there is an element of sham and deceit in every imitation, and the true function of the beauty in every object, natural or artistic, is to lead us from sense and phenomena to something beyond. Plato says, in one of his more genial reference,. . . "the rhythmic and harmonious elements of art, like a breeze blowing in a goodly place, may from earliest childhood lead us peacefully into harmony with the beauty of reasonableness; one so nurtured will, beyond others, welcome reason when its time comes and know it as his own." Upon this view, the object of art is to educate us away from art to perception of purely rational essences. There is a ladder of successive rungs leading from sense upwards. The lowest stage consists in the beauty of sensible objects; a stage that is morally dangerous because we are tempted to remain there. From thence we are invited to mount to the beauty of mind, thence to the beauty of laws and institutions, whence we should ascend to the beauty of the sciences and then we may move on to the one intuitive knowledge of beauty absolute. Plato's ladder is, moreover, a one-way ascent; there is no return from the highest beauty to perceptual experience.

The beauty of things that are in change — as are all things of experience — is to be regarded then but as a potential becoming of the soul toward apprehension of eternal patterns of beauty. Even their intuition is not final. "Recall how in that communion alone, through beholding beauty with the eye of mind, one will be able to bring forth not mere images of beauty but reality itself. In thereby bringing forth and nurturing true excellence, one will be able to become the friend of God and as divine as any mortal may be." Following Plato in a time that is well designated by Gilbert Murray a "failure of nerve," Plotinus carried further the logical implications of the last clause. Proportion, symmetry, and harmonious adaptation of parts no more constitute the beauty of natural and artistic objects than does their sensuous charm. The beauty of these things is conferred upon them by the eternal essence or character that shines through them. The Creator of all things is the supreme artist by which is "conferred upon the creatures" that which causes them to be beautiful. Plotinus thought it unworthy of absolute being to conceive it as personal. Christianity did not share this scruple, and, in its version of Neo-Platonism, beauty of nature and art were conceived to be manifestations within the limits of the perceptible world of the Spirit who is above nature and beyond perception.

An echo of this philosophy is found in Carlyle, when he says that, in art, "the infinite is made to blend with the finite; to stand visible and as it were attainable there. Of this sort are all true works of art; in this (if we know the true work from the daub of artifice), we discern eternity looking through time, the Godlike rendered visible." It is quite definitely stated by Bosanquet, a modern idealist of the German tradition, when he asserts that the spirit of art is faith in the "life and divinity with which the external world is instinct and inspired, so that the 'idealizations' characteristic of art are not so much products of an imagination that departs from reality as they are revelations of the life and divinity that is alone ultimately real."

Contemporary metaphysicians who have abandoned the theological tradition have seen that logically essences can stand alone and do not need the support that was supposed to be given them by residence in any mind or spirit. A contemporary philosopher, Santayana, writes: "The nature of essence appears in nothing better than in the beautiful, when this is a positive presence to the spirit, and not a vague title conventionally bestowed. In a form felt to be beautiful an obvious complexity composes an obvious unity; a marked intensity and individuality are seen to belong to a reality utterly immaterial and incapable of existing otherwise than speciously. This divine beauty is evident, fugitive, impalpable, and homeless in a world of material fact; yet it is unmistakably individual and sufficient unto itself, and although perhaps soon eclipsed is never really extinguished; for it visits time, but belongs to eternity." And again: "The most material thing in as far as it is felt to be beautiful, is instantly immaterialized, raised above external personal relations, concentrated and deepened in its proper being, in a word sublimated into an essence." The implications of the view are contained in the essence that says, "Value lies in meaning, not in substance; in the ideal which things approach, not in the energy which they embody." (Italics not in the original.)

I think there is an empirical fact involved in even this conception of esthetic experience. I have had occasion to speak more than once of a quality of an intense esthetic experience that is so immediate as to be ineffable and mystical. An intellectualized rendering of this immediate quality of experience translates it into the terms of a dream-metaphysics. In any event, when this conception of ultimate essence is compared with concrete esthetic experience it is seen to suffer from two fatal defects. All direct experience is qualitative, and qualities are what make life-experience itself directly precious. Yet reflection goes behind immediate qualities, for it is interested in relations and neglects qualitative setting. Philosophic reflection has carried this indifference to qualities to the point of aversion. It has treated them as obscurations of truth, as veils cast over reality by sense. The desire to derogate from immediate sense-qualities — and all qualities are mediated through some mode of sense — is reenforced by fear of sense, moralistic in origin. Sense seems, as to Plato, to be a seduction that leads man away from the spiritual. It is tolerated only as a vehicle through which man may be brought to an intuition of immaterial and non-sensuous essence. In view of the fact that the work of art is the impregnation of sensuous material with imaginative values, I know of no way to criticize the theory save to say that it is a ghostly metaphysics irrelevant to actual esthetic experience.

The term "essence" is highly equivocal. In common speech it denotes the gist of a thing; we boil down a series of conversations or of complicated transactions and the result is what is essential. We eliminate irrelevancies and retain what is indispensable. All genuine expression moves, in this sense, toward "essence." Essence here denotes an organization of meanings that have been dispersed in and more or less obscured by incidents attending a variety of experiences. What is essential or indispensable is also so in reference to a purpose. For why are certain considerations indispensable rather than others? The gist of a variety of transactions is not the same for a lawyer, a scientific inquirer and a poet. A work of art may certainly convey the essence of a multitude of experiences, and sometimes in a remarkably condensed and striking way. Selection and simplification occur for the sake of expressing the essential. Courbet often conveys the essence of a liquidity that saturates a. landscape; Claude, that of the genius loci and of an arcadian scene; Constable, the essence of simple rural scenes of England; Utrillo, that of the buildings in a Paris street. Dramatists and novelists construct characters that extricate the essential from the incidental.

Since a work of art is the subject-matter of experiences heightened and intensified, the purpose that determines what is esthetically essential is precisely the formation of an experience as an experience. Instead of fleeing from experience to a metaphysical realm, the material of experiences is so rendered that it becomes the pregnant matter of a new experience. Moreover, the sense we now have for essential characteristics of persons and objects is very largely the result of art, while the theory that is under discussion holds that art depends upon and refers to essences already in being, thus reversing the actual process. If we are now aware of essential meanings, it is mainly because artists in all the various arts have extracted and expressed them in vivid and salient subject-matter of perception. The forms or Ideas which Plato thought were models and patterns of existing things actually had their source in Greek art, so that his treatment of artists is a supreme instance of intellectual ingratitude.

The term "intuition" is one of the most ambiguous in the whole range of thought. In the theories just considered, it is supposed to have essence as its proper object. Croce has combined the idea of intuition with that of expression. Their identification with each other and of both with art has given readers a good deal of trouble. It can be understood, however, on the basis of his philosophic background, and it affords an excellent instance of what happens when the theorist superimposes philosophic preconceptions upon an arrested esthetic experience. For Croce is a philosopher who believes that the only real existence is mind, that "the object does not exist unless it is known, that it is not separable from the knowing spirit." In ordinary perception, objects are taken as if they were external to mind. Therefore, awareness of objects of art and of natural beauty is not a case of perception, but of an intuition that knows objects as, themselves, states of mind. "What we admire in a work of art is the perfect imaginative form in which a state of mind has clothed itself." "Intuitions are truly such because they represent feelings." Hence the state of mind that constitutes a work of art is expression as a manifestation of a state of mind, and is intuition as knowledge of a state of mind. I do not refer to the theory for the purpose of refutation but as indication of the extreme to which philosophy may go in superimposing a preconceived theory upon esthetic experience, resulting in arbitrary distortion.

Schopenhauer, like Croce, shows in many incidental references, more, not less, sensitiveness to works of art than most philosophers. But his version of esthetic intuition is worth referring to as another instance of complete failure of philosophy to meet the challenge that art offers to reflective thought. He wrote when Kant had set the problem of philosophy by instituting a sharp separation between sense and phenomena, reason and phenomena: and to set a problem is the most effective way of influencing subsequent thought. Schopenhauer's theory of art, in spite of many acute remarks, is but a dialectical development of his solution of the Kantian problem of the relation of knowledge to reality, and of phenomena to ultimate reality.

Kant had made the moral will, controlled by consciousness of duty that transcends sense and experience, the only gateway to assurance of ultimate reality. To Schopenhauer, an active principle he termed "Will" is the creative source of all phenomena of both nature and the moral life, while will is a form of restless and insatiable striving that is doomed to everlasting frustration. The only road to peace and enduring satisfaction is escape from will and all its works. Kant had already identified esthetic experience with contemplation. Schopenhauer declared that contemplation is the sole mode of escape, and that, in contemplating works of art, we contemplate the objectifications of will, and thereby free ourselves from the hold will has upon us in all other modes of experience. The objectification of Will are universals; they are like Plato's eternal forms and patterns. In pure contemplation of them we lose ourselves, therefore, in the universal, and obtain the "blessedness of will-less perception."

The most effective criticism of Schopenhauer's theory is found in his own development of the theory. He rules charm out from art, because charm signifies attraction, and attraction is a mode of response by will, being indeed the positive aspect of that relation of desire to the object which is expressed in its negative aspect by disgust. More important is the fixed hierarchical arrangement he institutes. Not only are beauties of nature lower than those of art since will obtains a higher degree of objectification in man than in nature, but an order from inferior to superior runs through both nature and art. The emancipation we obtain in contemplating verdures, trees, flowers is slighter than that which we get from contemplating forms of animal life, while the beauty of human beings is the highest, since Will is freed from slavery in the latter modes of its manifestations.

In works of art, architecture ranks as the lowest. The reason given is a logical deduction from his system. The forces of Will upon which it depends are of the lowest order, namely, cohesion and gravity as manifest in solid rigidity and massive weight. Hence no building made of wood can be truly beautiful, and all human accessories must be ruled out of esthetic effect because they are bound to desire. Sculpture is higher than architecture, because though it is still bound to low forms of Will-force, it deals with them as manifested in the human figure. Painting deals with shapes and figures and thus comes nearer to metaphysical forms. In literature, especially poetry, we rise to the essential Idea of man himself, and thus reach the acme of the results of Will.

Music is the highest of the arts, because it gives us not merely the external objectifications of Will but also sets before us for contemplation the very processes of Will. Moreover, the "definite intervals of the scale are parallel to definite grades of objectification of Will, corresponding to definite species in nature." Bass notes represent the workings of the lowest forces, while higher notes represent for cognition the forces of animal life, and melody presents the intellectual life of man, the highest thing in objective existence.

For the purpose of giving information my summary is scant; and, as I have already said, many of Schopenhauer's incidental remarks are just and illuminating. But the very fact that he shows many evidences of genuine and personal appreciation affords all the better evidence of the sort of thing that happens when the reflections of a philosophic thinker are not projections in thought of the actual subject-matter of art as an experience, but are developed without respect to art and are then forced into a substitute for it. My intention throughout this chapter has not been to criticize various philosophies of art as such, but to elicit the significance that art has for philosophy in its broadest scope. For philosophy like art moves in the medium of imaginative mind, and, since art is the most direct and complete manifestation there is of experience as experience, it provides a unique control for the imaginative ventures of philosophy.

In art as an experience, actuality and possibility or ideality, the new and the old, objective material and personal response, the individual and the universal, surface and depth, sense and meaning, are integrated in an experience in which they are all transfigured from the significance that belongs to them when isolated in reflection. "Nature," said Goethe, "has neither kernel nor shell." Only in esthetic experience is this statement completely true. Of art as experience it is also true that nature has neither subjective nor objective being; is neither individual nor universal, sensuous nor rational. The significance of art as experience is, therefore, incomparable for the adventure of philosophic thought.

*"Mind denotes a whole system of meanings as they are embodied in the workings of organic life. . . . Mind is a constant luminosity; consciousness is intermittent, a series of flashes of different intensities." — Experiences and Nature, p. 303.

*The most explicit philosophic statement of what is implied in the play theory is that of Schiller in his Letters on the Esthetic Education of Man. Kant had limited freedom to moral action controlled by the rational (supra-empirical) conception of Duty. Schiller put forward the idea that play and art occupy an intermediate transitional place between the realms of necessary phenomena and transcendent freedom, educating man to recognition and to assumption of the responsibilities of the latter. His views represent a valiant attempt on the part of an artist to escape the rigid dualism of the Kantian philosophy, while remaining within its frame.

*It is not without interest to note that the good Bishop Berkeley, when he wishes to condemn anything in the way of opinion and action, as well as in art, as extravagant and fantastic speaks of it as "Gothic."