finally, in pertinence, and in width of
appeal.--Art may grow classic by idealising the familiar, or by
reporting the ultimate.--Good taste demands that art should be rational,
_i.e._, harmonious with all other interests.--A mere "work of art" a
baseless artifice.--Human uses give to works of art their highest
expression and charm.--The sad values of appearance.--They need to be
made prophetic of practical goods, which in turn would be suffused with
beauty Pages 191-215

CHAPTER XI

ART AND HAPPINESS

Aesthetic harmonies are parodies of real ones, which in turn would be
suffused with beauty, yet prototypes of true perfections.--Pros and cons
of detached indulgences.--The happy imagination is one initially in line
with things, and brought always closer to them by experience.--Reason is
the principle of both art and happiness.--Only a rational society can
have sure and perfect arts.--Why art is now empty and
unstable.--Anomalous character of the irrational artist.--True art
measures and completes happiness. Pages 216-230

REASON IN ART

CHAPTER I

THE BASIS OF ART IN INSTINCT AND EXPERIENCE

[Sidenote: Man affects his environment, sometimes to good purpose.]

Man exists amid a universal ferment of being, and not only needs
plasticity in his habits and pursuits but finds plasticity also in the
surrounding world. Life is an equilibrium which is maintained now by
accepting modification and now by imposing it. Since the organ for all
activity is a body in mechanical relation to other material objects,
objects which the creature's instincts often compel him to appropriate
or transform, changes in his habits and pursuits leave their mark on
whatever he touches. His habitat must needs bear many a trace of his
presence, from which intelligent observers might infer something about
his life and action. These vestiges of action are for the most part
imprinted unconsciously and aimlessly on the world. They are in
themselves generally useless, like footprints; and yet almost any sign
of man's passage might, under certain conditions, interest a man. A
footprint could fill Robinson Crusoe with emotion, the devastation
wrought by an army's march might prove many things to a historian, and
even the disorder in which a room is casually left may express very
vividly the owner's ways and character.

Sometimes, however, man's traces are traces of useful action which has
so changed natural objects as to make them c