ld be preserved. It is an
essential expression of life, and its disappearance would be tantamount
to death, making an end to voluntary transition and ideal
representation. All objects envisaged either in vulgar action or in the
airiest cognition must be at first ideal and distinct from the given
facts, otherwise action would have lost its function at the same moment
that thought lost its significance. All life would have collapsed into a
purposeless datum.

The ideal requires, then, that opportunities should be offered for
realising it through action, and that transition should be possible to
it from a given state of things. One form of such transition is art,
where the ideal is a possible and more excellent form to be given to
some external substance or medium. Art needs to find a material
relatively formless which its business is to shape; and this initial
formlessness in matter is essential to art's existence. Were there no
stone not yet sculptured and built into walls, no sentiment not yet
perfectly uttered in poetry, no distance or oblivion yet to be abolished
by motion or inferential thought, activity of all sorts would have lost
its occasion. Matter, or actuality in what is only potentially ideal, is
therefore a necessary condition for realising an ideal at all.

[Sidenote: Each must be definite and congruous with the other.]

This potentiality, however, in so far as the ideal requires it, is a
quite definite disposition. Absolute chaos would defeat life as surely
as would absolute ideality. Activity, in presupposing material
conditions, presupposes them to be favourable, so that a movement
towards the ideal may actually take place. Matter, which from the point
of view of a given ideal is merely its potentiality, is in itself the
potentiality of every other ideal as well; it is accordingly responsible
to no ideal in particular and proves in some measure refractory to all.
It makes itself felt, either as an opportune material or as an
accidental hindrance, only when it already possesses definite form and
affinities; given in a certain quantity, quality, and order, matter
feeds the specific life which, if given otherwise, it would impede or
smother altogether.

[Sidenote: A sophism exposed]

Art, in calling for materials, calls for materials plastic to its
influence and definitely predisposed to its ends. Unsuitableness in the
data far from grounding action renders it abortive, and no expedient
could be more