62 
eye open to see the beauty and glory of the universe. But to re- 
turn from this digression. 
We sometimes hear it said that man isa religious animal, and yet 
it might just as well be said that man is an artistic animal—artistic 
in the constitution of his mind. Metaphysicians commonly divide 
mental faculties into reason, sensibility and will. This metaphysics 
—whose tendency is to view mind by sections, as it were, or as a 
congeries of faculties, each distinct from each, and which assigns its 
own value to different powers, giving to some an undue value—is 
apt to make the so-called intellectual faculty an exclusive object of 
consideration, losing sight of the truth that the mind is one and 
indivisible, that it acts as a whole, and that, in every act, all its 
energies enter, some more and some less ; that there is a vital inter- 
play of functions in mental acts, intellect in feeling and feeling in 
intellect, the rational nature resting on the moral and the moral 
moved to activity and choice by the sensibilities and imagination, 
so that, however convenient this metaphysical classification may be 
for the analysis and study of philosophical concepts, you cannot 
erect such distinctions in the inner spiritual substance of the mind, 
and to do this sometimes leads to grave errors; for you cannot 
really say that any one part of the mind is of more value than an- 
other and that any part of the mind can be ignored, or affirm that 
it does not belong to mind as mind, and therefore deserves no spe- 
cial attention. Shall we neglect that rich domain where lie the 
springs of feeling for the beautiful, the productive powers in the 
achievements of art? In this realm, called, in metaphysical lan- 
guage, the sensibility, is found mainly the domain of art, though it | 
is by no means confined to this, since all the faculties are involved 
in art—reason, invention, will, the use of the intellectual and logi- 
cal faculty that pervades a work of art, the judgment as well as 
feeling. But there is, nevertheless, a quality of sensibility, of emo- 
tional susceptivity, which is the mind’s power of receiving impres- 
sions from the outward world and its beauty. This feeling is not a 
mere excitation of the senses, the sensual nature, but it is a mental 
susceptibility which not only feels but acts, and, when roused to act 
by impressions from objects, it becomes a power of self-differentia- 
tion, or a power of contemplating itself, a power capable of recog- 
nizing its cwn acts and impressions made on it, and of reproducing 
these impressions, being the correspondent within to the nature 
without; and it is thus a permanent quality, to which we give, 
eh mn 
