Life as a Fine Art. 411 



bitual round of commonplaces. Keligious observances would 

 degenerate into formal conventionalisms. The sense of sin 

 for law-violation and of the hopelessness of escape there- 

 from by personal effort would be unduly intensified in indi- 

 vidual souls. Human nature, held in the grasp of inexora- 

 ble law, would lose its feeling of dignity and true responsi- 

 bility. Life, robbed of its natural buoyancy and sponta- 

 neity, would become a dull and spiritless routine. In the 

 effort to escape from this bondage of legalism, old supersti- 

 tions would be revived, and sweep like baleful epidemics 

 through communities. Aspiring souls would eagerly clutch 

 at any wild expedient which seemed to promise an escape 

 from the bondage of legalism and fatalism to the freedom 

 of the spirit. 



To the human mind as normally constituted, two things 

 are absolutely essential : a substratum of reality, a pou sto, 

 a fulcrum for the leverage of the intellectual and moral as 

 well as of the physical activities of man ; and an ideal out- 

 look, a belief in an infinite opportunity for improvement, 

 which would become an incentive to hope, conquest, faith in 

 the essential beneficence of life. The mind of man is not 

 satisfied to rest in a fairyland of conjecture and imagination ; 

 it must seek its permanent dwelling-place in a region of 

 solid facts and substantial realities. Neither is it willing to 

 accept the imperfection of present attainments, however 

 real and substantial, as a finality. It must push on to new 

 discoveries of truth, and seek for new applications of such 

 discoveries to the practical problems of life. Its thirst for 

 the ideal is no less normal and imperative than its hunger 

 for the real. Its faith is firm that 



" There are things whose strong reality 

 Outshines our fairyland ; in shapes and hues 

 More beautiful than our fantastic sky, 

 And the strange constellations which the Muse 

 O'er her wild universe is skillful to diffuse." 



So the art-impulse spontaneous, vital, creative breaks 

 through the guerdon of constraining legalism, and, while 

 appropriating all that is helpful and beneficent in science 

 and in the conception of the universality of law, emanci- 

 pates this conception from its fettering limitations and re- 

 stores the soul to freedom. 



What I conceive to be the essential characteristics of this 

 art-impulse will incidentally appear in the subsequent dis- 



