63 
with other elements combined, the name of ¢he esthetic sense, or, 
from the faculty through which this instinct chiefly operates, the 
perception or sense of the imagination. The imagination is the 
idealizing, the image-making power—the power that receives and 
communicates the form of things (form-sinn, as the Germans name 
it), even as the intellectual faculty receives and communicates the 
truth of things. This esthetic power of the imagination, when 
acted upon by correspondent objects in nature that are sympathetic 
to man’s spiritual conditions, seeks to reproduce the essential form 
of these objects, since they exist in the mind only in their forms— 
some philosophers deny any other real existence to objective matter 
—and on seeking thus to reproduce the forms of things, by a law 
of the mind it strives to reproduce the perfect form in which the 
mind delights and was made to delight. The mind’s susceptibility 
to be impressed by the world of nature through the organ of the 
imagination, which not only receives but imparts impressions of 
objects, since it is full of energy and creative power, is the mind’s 
function of form, and, necessarily, in a rational nature, of perfect 
form or beauty, and here dwell the ideas of beauty in the mind. 
If the imagination works simply in order to body forth the form of 
things as an ‘‘idealized imitation,’’ to interpret nature in all its 
forms, it works artistically and its products are what are termed 
‘‘art.’’ The artist, in fact, is the poet ; he is poet of another sort, 
who tells in line, form and color, as the poet in words, what nature 
tells him ; and this is the more important because we ourselves are 
parts of this nature, inframed in her subtle organism. ‘The artist, 
by his imaginative or guasz creative power, reconstructs nature, be- 
comes nature’s interpreter, and finds in nature the responsive image 
of the soul. Art is poetry, mainly poetry—I believe this. 
We see thus in all mind, though in a less degree in most men, 
but especially, and sometimes supremely, in the artist, this esthetic 
power, this artistic faculty, by which it must and will express itself 
in the sphere of art as surely as the mind must and will express 
itself in the sphere of knowledge, and, indeed, so related are the 
mental powers that, as we cannot keep out any of them from the 
esthetic faculty, so we cannot keep out the esthetic sense from any 
of these, and we cannot say—in the investigation of truth, the 
highest truth, which is moral—that the imagination, which is the 
organ of the sensibility, can be excluded, for here dwell the forms 
of truth and beauty. Iama Platonist. I believe art belongs to 
