320 ART AS INSTINCT 



have been doing, obedient to the "suggestion of 

 contiguity," the subject of the last chapter would 

 have to be continued, and to follow that of art 

 generally and its meaning. Not art as the artist sees 

 it, but art as seen from the outside, as an impulse, 

 an instinct, as sense, in all of us. For albeit we use 

 the word in a metaphorical sense when we speak of 

 the sense of beauty, it is in reality a sense, a subject 

 as proper to the field naturalist as the senses of 

 smell, of direction and of polarity and migration. 

 But to treat it fully as it appears to my mind, would 

 take me far beyond the limits set to this book, and 

 the most I can now do is to indicate as briefly as 

 may be the line the argument would follow. It 

 concerns the meaning of art, as I have said, from the 

 evolutionary naturalist's point of view, founded 

 mainly on observation of one's own feelings and 

 experience. 



Thus, to go back to music: certain sounds attract 

 and please us on account of their intrinsic beauty 

 and novelty: by-and-by they draw to themselves 

 or become mixed with associations, some the result 

 of personal experience, others probably inherited, and 

 the feeling they produce in us is confounded with the 

 desire to express it in just that way — in sounds. 

 Sound is but one thing that makes this kind of 

 appeal to us. Thus, the child that goes bare-footed 

 over the smooth wet sands looks at the perfect 

 impression left by its foot, and is pleased at the sight, 

 and has even a dawning sense of creative power, and 

 eventually this feeling and idea leads to creation. In 



