Ruskin at the weekly evening meeting of the
Royal Institution (see _Proceedings_, vol. iv., pp. 142-46), June 5,
1863.--ED.]

THE RANGE OF INTELLECTUAL CONCEPTION PROPORTIONED TO THE RANK IN
ANIMATED LIFE.[36]

A THEOREM.

298. I suppose this theorem to be a truism; but I venture to state it,
because it is surely desirable that it should be recognized as an axiom
by metaphysicians, and practically does not seem to me yet to have been
so. I say "animated life" because the word "life" by itself might have
been taken to include that of vegetables; and I say "animated" instead
of "spiritual" life because the Latin "anima," and pretty Italian
corruption of it, "alma," involving the new idea of nourishment of the
body as by the Aliment or Alms of God, seems to me to convey a better
idea of the existence of conscious creatures than any derivative of
"spiritus," "pneuma," or "psyche."

I attach, however, a somewhat lower sense to the word "conception" than
is, I believe, usual with metaphysicians, for, as a painter, I belong to
a lower rank of animated being than theirs, and can only mean by
conception what I know of it. A painter never conceives anything
absolutely, and is indeed incapable of conceiving anything at all,
except as a phenomenon or sensation, or as the mode or locus of a
phenomenon or sensation. That which is not an appearance, or a feeling,
or a mode of one or the other, is to him nothing.

299. For instance, he would deny the definition of the phenomenon which
he is himself first concerned in producing--a line--as "length without
breadth." He would say, "That which has no breadth is nothing, and
nothing cannot be long." He would define a line as a narrow and long
phenomenon, and a mathematician's idea of it as an idea of the
direction of such a phenomenon.

The act of conception or imagination with him, therefore, is merely the
memory, simple or combined, of things that he has seen or felt. He has
no ray, no incipience of faculty beyond this. No quantity of the
sternest training in the school of Hegel, would ever enable him to think
the Absolute. He would persist in an obstinate refusal to use the word
"think" at all in a transitive sense. He would never, for instance, say,
"I think the table," but "I think the table is turning," or is not, as
the case might be. And if he were to be taught in any school whatever to
conceive a table, his first demand would be that he should be shown one,
or refer