CHAPTER XI

THE BEAUTY OF KNOWLEDGE

§ 41. Aesthetic impressions and scientific facts. § 42. History as a branch of art.

Ο 3

NE of the more obvious objections to any concep

tion of the unity of the spirit is that which takes

the form of saying that there is no element either

of the moral or of the aesthetic, no element of choice or of taste, in our knowledge of facts. Facts, it is said, are in no sense formed or created, they are simply given. The question is too large for comprehensive treatment, and the present brief chapter is merely to suggest what can be said for the thesis that knowledge of fact involves creative imagination. This suggestion I will convey through a more or less free rendering of Croce's theory of “impressions" and of his seemingly paradoxical theory that history is a branch of art.

8 41

According to Croce art is expression; the expression of an impression, as he also says-that and nothing more. This means that in a certain perhaps proper sense of the word art is absolutely democratic. A peasant or a duke, a mill-worker or a poet, a hotel-waiter or a gentleman-andscholar-one subject has as much of the possibility of beauty in him as the other. There is no intrinsically ugly. And thus Croce takes issue with an authoritarian aesthetics

which, like authoritarian ethics, believes that God in his wisdom has put a finer kind of human nature into some frames than into others and has marked each with an appropriate sign.1

But he also faces a scepticism more coldly factual. Art the communication of impressions! one may exclaim. What nonsense! When the cook tells me that she finds in the refrigerator only one pound of butter and four eggs she communicates an impression, but the communication is not art. It seems (so runs the objection) that Croce has missed the difference between two kinds of impressions. On the one hand we have the painter's impression of a landscape, or of a person, which he tries to express on canvas. Of this kind are the properly aesthetic impressions, and these we welcome as art. On the other hand are those ordinary impressions of matter of fact which the psychologist calls sensations, or sense-perceptions. The communication of these impressions is not art but plain information, or perhaps science.

Now to the reader of Croce it will be clear that he has not for a moment forgotten this difference. It is rather the chief purpose of his argument to show that this difference, the difference between the aesthetic and the matterof-fact impression, is not in the last analysis a real difference. At best it is a difference of degree and circumstance. And if we remember that in the Greek the term "aesthetic" covers both the artistic impression and the matter-of-fact perception we shall find ourselves asking whether after all every experience of matter of fact is not

1 Here let me repeat a caveat. Croce also offends authoritarian ethics by teaching "art for art's sake"-along with, as it happens, "duty for duty's sake". This blind service of two irresponsible masters implies that art is irrelevant to morality, and this it is my chief purpose to disprove.

in its own measure an artistic experience. If so it will mean that all of our experience is in its own measureso far indeed as it is any conscious experience-aesthetic experience; in other words, that all experience is, just as experience, a "sense of life".

This I believe to be profoundly true, but how to make it demonstratively true is another matter. For in most of our experience we seem to take the world just as it is given, most of all the world of common fact. Here we talk about "data" and "presentations". And here at least it seems that the mind is truly a tabula rasa, taking what comes just as it comes, without exercise of taste, with no regard for taste; nay, forewarned-by the scientist and the logician, by the psychiatrist, and most effectively by the brutal common sense of the plain man-against any exercise of taste. And thus the word "impression" comes to mean an inertly passive experience, to be described not as an activity of mind but as a "mental state".

Yet to any one initiated into the practice of selfconsciousness, to one become curious about his "mental states", it will be clear, I think, that the passive character of the perceptive "states" is chiefly a convention. Even those who insist most upon the "given" character of senseexperience recognize the seeming activity of "apperception", or selective attention. But what this means we may best realize in the fatigue that follows a multitude of impressions-for example, after a day spent in a comfortable Pullman car. Then it seems that, so far from receiving passive impressions, it has required a day-long strain of attention to keep our world straight through a welter of shifting scenes. Here at least, it seems that the world is not given to us in a rational, intelligible, and harmonious

picture. We have to form the picture. And to form an intelligible picture out of the daily run of modern experience is often a terrible effort. A pupil of mine just recovering from nervous prostration told me that in Chicago, where he lived, he could not venture down into the business district, since the sign-boards alone were too much for him. One need not succumb to nervous prostration to understand this.

Perception of fact is not, then, as it seems, a case of having an impression stamped upon us; it is always a process of forming and creating. We do not simply get an impression of the world before us, we form an impression. If the activity of forming is not always in evidence it is because in our transactions with the routine of daily fact the process is more or less mechanical and stereotyped. It is in the experience of, so to speak, coming back to fact that we best catch ourselves in the act of forming. Waking from sleep in the morning, especially from a sound sleep-if you attend to this, I think you will see that it is never instantaneous and never a mere change of state, a substitution of one picture for another, but a complex and very interesting logical and artistic process of reforming out of chaotic matter a world that you have for the time lost. Sitting before the fire, let your mind wander; in other words, loosen for a moment your "grip on reality"; at once your world, now indeed rather passively perceived, assumes shapes most illogical and fantastic; suggestions present themselves which at other times never even show their faces; and ideas and images (so-called) assume new and strange and often forbidden fellowships. It is thus, I will suggest, that dreams occur; by a relative cessation of the forming process; and thus also the ravings

of delirium and the obsessions of the insane. For the matter of that, if you are looking for a world of passively received impression, a world characterized by the innocence of the mind, I suspect that in the experience of the insane you will find it at its passive best.

When you have once caught the forming in the actin the process of coming back to fact-you may then, I believe, find it, vestigially at least, in half of the perceptions of daily life; especially if you happen to be an absent-minded philosopher and college professor whose punctual engagements, demanding alertness when they occur, are few as compared with those of the business man, and who may thus let his mind wander from fact a good part of the time. The clock strikes; the telephone rings; I need the scissors which lie just before me on the desk. Even the scissors I seem not to perceive without a complex, though exceedingly rapid, formative activity, logical and aesthetic. And if you say, Yes, but it is the fact of the scissors that determines the outcome, well, that is just the question, the very big question, that I wish to suggest as lying in the background. It is true that practical perception is confronted by a seemingly resistant "matter", but so also in some degree is artistic creation. And it may be that the resistance is a question only of my insistent demand for the scissors. For my own part, at any rate, I can see no essential difference between coming back to fact after a night of sleep and coming back to any other interrupted activity of the spirit; coming back to a pleasant day-dream after an unwelcome ring of the telephone, or to the composition of a novel, a poem, or a song, a philosophical or a scientific theory. And for a typically aesthetic activity give me the process of con