beginning, with at
best some vague help given by their parents' example. But when the
fruits of experience exist in the common environment, when new
instruments, unknown to nature, are offered to each individual for his
better equipment, although he must still learn for himself how to live,
he may learn in a humaner school, where artificial occasions are
constantly open to him for expanding his powers. It is no longer merely
hidden inner processes that he must reproduce to attain his
predecessors' wisdom; he may acquire much of it more expeditiously by
imitating their outward habit--an imitation which, furthermore, they
have some means of exacting from him. Wherever there is art there is a
possibility of training. A father who calls his idle sons from the
jungle to help him hold the plough, not only inures them to labour but
compels them to observe the earth upturned and refreshed, and to watch
the germination there; their wandering thought, their incipient
rebellions, will be met by the hope of harvest; and it will not be
impossible for them, when their father is dead, to follow the plough of
their own initiative and for their own children's sake. So great is the
sustained advance in rationality made possible by art which, being
embodied in matter, is teachable and transmissible by training; for in
art the values secured are recognised the more easily for having been
first enjoyed when other people furnished the means to them; while the
maintenance of these values is facilitated by an external tradition
imposing itself contagiously or by force on each new generation.

[Sidenote: Beauty an incident in rational art.]

Art is action which transcending the body makes the world a more
congenial stimulus to the soul. All art is therefore useful and
practical, and the notable aesthetic value which some works of art
possess, for reasons flowing for the most part out of their moral
significance, is itself one of the satisfactions which art offers to
human nature as a whole. Between sensation and abstract discourse lies a
region of deployed sensibility or synthetic representation, a region
where more is seen at arm's length than in any one moment could be felt
at close quarters, and yet where the remote parts of experience, which
discourse reaches only through symbols, are recovered and recomposed in
something like their native colours and experienced relations. This
region, called imagination, has pleasures more airy and lumin