sophistical than that into which theodicy, in its
desperate straits, has sometimes been driven, of trying to justify as
conditions for ideal achievement the very conditions which make ideal
achievement impossible. The given state from which transition is to take
place to the ideal must support that transition; so that the desirable
want of ideality which plastic matter should possess is merely relative
and strictly determined. Art and reason find in nature the background
they require; but nature, to be wholly justified by its ideal functions,
would have to subserve them perfectly. It would have to offer to reason
and art a sufficient and favourable basis; it would have to feed sense
with the right stimuli at the right intervals, so that art and reason
might continually flourish and be always moving to some new success. A
poet needs emotions and perceptions to translate into language, since
these are his subject-matter and his inspiration; but starvation,
physical or moral, will not help him to sing. One thing is to meet with
the conditions inherently necessary for a given action; another thing is
to meet with obstacles fatal to the same. A propitious formlessness in
matter is no sort of evil; and evil is so far from being a propitious
formlessness in matter that it is rather an impeding form which matter
has already assumed.

[Sidenote: Industry prepares matter for the liberal arts.]

Out of this appears, with sufficient clearness, the rational function
which the arts possess. They give, as nature does, a form to matter, but
they give it a more propitious form. Such success in art is possible
only when the materials and organs at hand are in a large measure
already well disposed; for it can as little exist with a dull organ as
with no organ at all, while there are winds in which every sail must be
furled. Art depends upon profiting by a bonanza and learning to sail in
a good breeze, strong enough for speed and conscious power but placable
enough for dominion and liberty of soul. Then perfection in action can
be attained and a self-justifying energy can emerge out of apathy on the
one hand and out of servile and wasteful work on the other. Art has
accordingly two stages: one mechanical or industrial, in which untoward
matter is better prepared, or impeding media are overcome; the other
liberal, in which perfectly fit matter is appropriated to ideal uses and
endowed with a direct spiritual function. A premonition or rehea