ins an inwardly grounded and perfectly blind tendency
of its own; but this tendency may agree or clash with the motor
impulses subtending whatever ideas may at the same time people the
fancy. If the blind and the ideal impulses agree, spontaneous action is
voluntary and its result intentional; if they clash, the ideas remain
speculative and idle, random, ineffectual wishes; while the result, not
being referable to any idea, is put down to fate. The sense of power,
accordingly, shows either that events have largely satisfied desire, so
that natural tendency goes hand in hand with the suggestions of
experience, or else that experience has not been allowed to count at all
and that the future is being painted _a priori_. In the latter case the
sense of power is illusory. Action will then never really issue in the
way intended, and even thought will only seem to make progress by
constantly forgetting its original direction.

Though life, however, is initially experimental and always remains
experimental at bottom, yet experiment fortifies certain tendencies and
cancels others, so that a gradual sediment of habit and wisdom is formed
in the stream of time. Action then ceases to be merely tentative and
spontaneous, and becomes art. Foresight begins to accompany practice
and, as we say, to guide it. Purpose thus supervenes on useful impulse,
and conscious expression on self-sustaining automatism. Art lies between
two extremes. On the one side is purely spontaneous fancy, which would
never foresee its own works and scarcely recognise or value them after
they had been created, since at the next moment the imaginative current
would as likely as not have faced about and might be making in the
opposite direction; and on the other side is pure utility, which would
deprive the work of all inherent ideality, and render it inexpressive of
anything in man save his necessities. War, for instance, is an art when,
having set itself an ideal end, it devises means of attaining it; but
this ideal end has for its chief basis some failure in politics and
morals. War marks a weakness and disease in human society, and its best
triumphs are glorious evils--cruel and treacherous remedies, big with
new germs of disease. War is accordingly a servile art and not
essentially liberal; whatever inherent values its exercise may have
would better be realised in another medium. Yet out of the pomp and
circumstance of war fine arts may arise--music, armoury, h