ARE SCIENCE AND ART ANTAGONISTIC? 359 



from physiology and history, and others from psychology. We will 

 inquire, first, what the natural and historical sciences teach us concern- 

 ing the medium in which art can live. 



Art, to reach its full development, requires around the artist and 

 within him a cultivation of beauty of which the Greeks have given 

 an example. This people had, for purity of form, for the harmo- 

 nious proportion of the limbs, and for beautiful nudities, a love that 

 went to the verge of adoration ; and beauty was, in their eyes, in- 

 vested with something sacred. This worship of beauty was revived 

 at the renascence. In our days, on the other hand, strength and 

 beauty of body are not the ideal. Many things seem to show that a 

 too exclusive preoccupation with pleasing forms, as well as with orna- 

 ments and decorations, are a sign by which we can recognize primitive 

 conditions of civilization. With those modern people who are still in 

 an inferior grade of civilization, as with the Arabs, the male sex itself 

 displays mifch coquetry, and seeks to please especially with its strength 

 and physical beauty, its vesture, and its adornments. Civilization 

 gradually destroys these primitive instincts, which have been, how- 

 ever, according to Mr. Darwin and Mr. Spencer, the germ of art. 

 The man of our days does not care whether he has, under the conven- 

 ient and ungraceful vestments that hide him, a well-developed torso 

 and vigorous muscles. Coquetry survives and will doubtless continue 

 to survive with women, but it too often tends to stray from its pur- 

 pose, which is to bring out the beauty of the members. Women, 

 who ought, more than all other persons, to endeavor to preserve pure 

 and correct forms, take a thousand devices to hinder the development 

 of their bodies and the circulation of their blood. So, not only the 

 ancient culture, but beauty itself, seems to be falling into decadence, 

 and the principal object of the arts is tending to disappear. 



Many circumstances in our artificial modern life are combining to 

 produce a tendency to diminution of stature and an augmentation of 

 bodily deformities ; among them the constantly increasing division 

 of labor, under which the j)hysical systems of workmen become devel- 

 oped in a single direction only, and too often cramped in other direc- 

 tions ; the eiforts of philanthropic science to preserve the sick and 

 deformed, and help them propagate their race ; the agglomeration of 

 multitudes in cities ; conscription, taking the most vigorous men for 

 the army; and the dissipations of society and fashionable life, are pro- 

 ducing a kind of reverse selection that may encourage infirmity and 

 ugliness. The brain is becoming more and more the pre-eminently 

 active organ. According to some anthropologists, the nervous system 

 of the civilized man is thirty per cent larger than that of the savage, 

 and it is destined to go on increasing at the expense of the muscular 

 system. It is not probable, however, that this process will go so far 

 as to result in permanent injury, for with the expanding development 

 of the brain will go an increased quickness in detecting whatever evils 



