itself imaginatively to decoration; and
decoration in turn would never be willingly representative if the forms
which illustration requires were not decorative in themselves.

[Sidenote: Transition to illustration.]

Illustration has nevertheless an intellectual function by which it
diverges altogether from decoration and even, in the narrowest sense
of the word, from art: for the essence of illustration lies neither
in use nor in beauty. The illustrator's impulse is to reproduce
and describe given objects. He wishes in the first place to force
observers--overlooking all logical scruples--to call his work by the
name of its subject matter; and then he wishes to inform them further,
through his representation, and to teach them to apprehend the real
object as, in its natural existence, it might never have been
apprehended. His first task is to translate the object faithfully into
his special medium; his second task, somewhat more ambitious, is so to
penetrate into the object during that process of translation that this
translation may become at the same time analytic and imaginative, in
that it signalises the object's structure and emphasises its ideal
suggestions. In such reproduction both hand and mind are called upon to
construct and build up a new apparition; but here construction has
ceased to be chiefly decorative or absolute in order to become
representative. The aesthetic element in art has begun to recede before
the intellectual; and sensuous effects, while of course retained and
still studied, seem to be impressed into the service of ideas.

CHAPTER VIII

PLASTIC REPRESENTATION

[Sidenote: Psychology of imitation.]

Imitation is a fertile principle in the Life of Reason. We have seen
that it furnishes the only rational sanction for belief in any fellow
mind; now we shall see how it creates the most glorious and interesting
of plastic arts. The machinery of imitation is obscure but its
prevalence is obvious, and even in the present rudimentary state of
human biology we may perhaps divine some of its general features. In a
motor image the mind represents prophetically what the body is about to
execute: but all images are more or less motor, so that no idea,
apparently, can occupy the mind unless the body has received some
impulse to enact the same. The plastic instinct to reproduce what is
seen is therefore simply an uninterrupted and adequate seeing; these two
phenomena, separable logically and d