Recent Biology 387 



a consciousness of Schein; it is also a play consciousness, inas- 

 much as it is the work of imagination — both the creative and 

 the appreciative art consciousness — and the meaning of imagi- 

 nation here is that it takes Schein for reality. The 'self-con- 

 scious illusion ' of the play consciousness is felt in extreme form 

 in the theatre, and the pleasure of it is felt even when we play 

 with painful situations, as in tragedy. In art the desire to make 

 an impression on others shows the 'pleasure of being a cause.' 

 This intent to work on others is a necessary ingredient in the 

 art impulse (pp. 312 f.). Groos differs from K. Lange, who holds 

 a similar view of the necessary division of consciousness between 

 reality and Schein in the aesthetic psychosis, in that Lange thinks 

 there must be a continual oscillation between the two poles of 

 the divided consciousness, while Groos thinks there is rather a 

 settling down in the state of illusion, as in an artist's preoccupa- 

 tion with his creations, a novelist with his characters, and a child 

 with her doll (pp. 323). In art the other great motive of play, 

 ' experimenting,' is also prominent, and is even more funda- 

 mental from a genetic point of view ; of that a word below. 



Here, again, the question left in my mind is this : whether the 

 play motive is really the same as the art motive. Do we not 

 really distinguish between the drama (to take the case most 

 favourable to the theory) as amusement and the drama as art ? 

 And does the dramatist who is really an artist write to bring on 

 self'illusion in the spectator by presenting to him a SchciJi scene ? 

 Possibly, art theorists would divide here; the realists taking 

 more stock in Schein, since realistic art is more nearly exhausted 

 by imitation. This sort of illusion undoubtedly gives pleasure, 

 and it is undoubtedly part of art pleasure. Yet there does seem 

 to be, in a work of fine art, a strenuous outreach toward truth, 

 which is additional — both in the production and also in the 

 enjoyment — to the instrument of appearance used by the artist. 

 It may be that we should distinguish between truth which comes 

 to us didactically and truth which comes artistically, and make 

 the method of the latter, and that alone, the source of aesthetic 

 impression. In any case the theory of Groos, which has its 

 roots in the views of Lange and v. Hartmann, is extremely in- 



