THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHERS 355
presents them nothing more." 81 Because imagination precedes thought,
and is necessary to it, the artistic, or image-forming, activity of the mind
is prior to the logical, concept-forming, activity. Man is an artist as soon
as he imagines, and long before he reasons.
The great artists understood the matter so. "One paints not with the
hands but with the brain," said Michelangelo; and Leonardo wrote:
"The minds of men of lofty genius are most active in invention when
they are doing the least external work." Everybody knows the story told of
da Vinci, that when he was painting the "Last Supper," he sorely dis-
pleased the Abbot who had ordered the work, by sitting motionless for
days before an untouched canvas; and revenged himself for the importunate
Abbot's persistent query When would he begin to work? by
using the gentleman as an unconscious model for the figure of Judas.
The essence of the esthetic activity lies in this motionless effort of the
artist to conceive the perfect image that shall express the subject he has
in mind ; it lies in a form of intuition that involves no mystic insight, but
perfect sight, complete perception, and adequate imagination. The
miracle of art lies not in the externalization but in the conception of the
idea; externalization is a matter of mechanical technique and manual
skill.
"When we have mastered the internal word, when we have vividly and
clearly conceived a figure or a statue, when we have found a musical theme,
expression is born and is complete, nothing more is needed. If, then, we
open our mouth, and speak or sing, . . . what we do is to say aloud what
we have already said within, to sing aloud what we have already sung with-
in. If our hands strike the keyboard of the pianoforte, if we take up pencil
or chisel, such actions are willed" (they belong to the practical, not to the
esthetic, activity), "and what we are then doing is executing in great movements
what we have already executed briefly and rapidly within." 82
Does this help us to answer that baffling question, What is beauty?
Here certainly there are as many opinions as there are heads; and every
lover, in this matter, thinks himself an authority not to be gainsaid. Groce
answers that beauty is the mental formation of an image (or a series of
images) that catches the essence of the thing perceived. The beauty belongs,
again, rather to the inward image than to the outward form in
which it is embodied. We like to think that the difference between ourselves
and Shakespeare is largely a difference in technique of external expression;
that we have thoughts that lie too deep for words. But this is a
fond illusion: the difference lies not in the power of externalizing the
image but in the power of inwardly forming an image that expresses the
object.
Even that esthetic sense which is contemplation rather than creation
a ln Garr; The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce, London, 1917; p. 35.
m E$thetic, p, 50.