ther at its roots, and branches out from the vital
processes of sensation and reaction. Diversity arises centrifugally,
according to the provinces explored and the degree of mutual checking
and control to which the various extensions are subjected.

[Sidenote: Sensuous values are primordial and so indispensable.]

Organisation, both internal and adaptive, marks the dignity and
authority which each art may have attained; but this advantage,
important as is must seem to a philosopher or a legislator, is not what
the artist chiefly considers. His privilege is to remain capricious in
his response to the full-blown universe of science and passion, and to
be still sensuous in his highest imaginings. He cares for structure only
when it is naturally decorative. He thinks gates were invented for the
sake of triumphal arches, and forests for the sake of poets and deer.
Representation, with all it may represent, means to him simply what it
says to his emotions. In all this the artist, though in one sense
foolish, in another way is singularly sane; for, after all, everything
must pass through the senses, and life, whatever its complexity, remains
always primarily a feeling.

To render this feeling delightful, to train the senses to their highest
potency and harmony in operation, is to begin life well. Were the
foundations defective and subject to internal strain there could be
little soundness in the superstructure. AEsthetic activity is far from
being a late or adventitious ornament in human economy; it is an
elementary factor, the perfection of an indispensable vehicle. Whenever
science or morals have done violence to sense they have decreed their
own dissolution. To sense a rebellious appeal will presently be
addressed, and the appeal will go against rash and empty dogmas. A keen
aesthetic sensibility and a flourishing art mark the puberty of reason.
Fertility comes later, after a marriage with the practical world. But a
sensuous ripening is needed first, such as myth and ornament betray in
their exuberance. A man who has no feeling for feeling and no felicity
in expression will hardly know what he is about in his further
undertakings. He will have missed his first lesson in living
spontaneously and well. Not knowing himself, he will be all hearsay and
pedantry. He may fall into the superstition of supposing that what gives
life value can be something external to life. Science and morals are
themselves arts that express natura