TEE FESTAL DEVELOPMENT OF ART. 735 



other powers of man's nature, under its guidance and command, 

 is imagination. This is the combining faculty which, like an in- 

 forming spirit, shapes the pre-existent elements and proximate 

 forms of Nature for human needs and human pleasure. Its 

 stimulus comes from the sphere of feeling, but its products are 

 not the organic consequences of this stimulation. If they bore 

 this relation of necessary effect to feeling as organic cause, they 

 would be in the fullest sense the products of Nature, and the dis- 

 tinction between Nature and art would be effaced. But, in fact, 

 the whole of man's being as rational intelligence intervenes be- 

 tween the impulse of feeling and the work of art. This is prob- 

 ably what Wilhelm von Humboldt intended when he said, " Art 

 is the faculty of making imagination productive, according to 

 law." 



The primary impulse to imaginative activity is utility, the 

 satisfaction of distinct vital needs. Of these the first is that of 

 food, universal and peremptory for all living beings. Then 

 shelter, clothing, weapons of defense and attack, implements, and 

 utensils of various kinds, are demanded. In the lower animals, 

 instinct directs the creature how to satisfy the simple organic 

 needs ; but in man, even with a low degree of intelligence, im- 

 agination contrives new ways and means of supplying these re- 

 quirements. A sharpened flint serves as a knife ; attached to a 

 wooden handle, it becomes a spear ; projected from a bow-string, 

 it is an arrow. Thus, along lines of very gradual ascent, all the 

 complicated equipment of home and chase and war was slowly 

 acquired by the constant search for better means with which to 

 accomplish necessary ends. In all invention, from the stone axe 

 to the telephone, imagination has been the active faculty. The 

 impulse of utility, " making imagination productive," has gener- 

 ated the " useful," " industrial," or " economic " arts ; or, as the 

 anthropologist Tylor calls them, the " arts of life." 



A secondary impulse to imaginative activity is the sense of 

 freedom, the satisfaction derived from a free exercise of power. 

 After the strictly vital needs of the body are provided for, unless 

 the whole store of force is exhausted in satisfying them, there re- 

 mains a surplus, especially in the unused organs, which impels to 

 activity not directed toward useful ends. The pressure of this 

 exuberant energy for expression is probably the primitive im- 

 pulse toward the decorative, representative, and imitative arts. 

 These are called the " fine arts," the " aesthetic arts," and by Tylor 

 the " arts of pleasure." In many languages they are designated 

 as the "beautiful arts" — the Italian name being belli arti; the 

 French, beaux arts ; the German, schone Kiinste. To these forms 

 of art we shall confine the remainder of our discussion. 



In his Principles of Psychology, Herbert Spencer begins his 



