THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
is also inward expression; the degree in which we understand or ap~
predate a work of art depends upon our ability to see by direct intuition
the reality portrayed, our power to form for ourselves an expressive
image. "It is always our own intuition we express when we are enjoying
a beautiful work of art. ... It can only be my own intuition when, read-
ing Shakespeare, I form the image of Hamlet or Othello." 83 Both in the
artist creating and in the spectator contemplating beauty, the esthetic
secret is the expressive image. Beauty is adequate expression: and since
there is no real expression if it be not adequate, we may answer very
simply the ancient question, and say, Beauty is expression. 84
4. CRITICISM
All this is as clear as a starless night; and not wiser than it should be.
The Philosophy of the Spirit lacks spirit, and discourages a sympathetic
exposition. The Philosophy of the Practical is unpractical, and lacks the
breath of living reference. The essay On History catches one leg of the
truth, by proposing a union of history and philosophy; but it misses the
other by failing to see that history can become philosophy only by being
not analytic but synthetic; not shredded history (giving in separate books
the separate story of the supposedly insulated activities of men economic,
political, scientific, philosophical, religious, literary, and artistic) but
what one might call, not too seriously, wedded history, history in which
all the phases of human life in a given period made as brief as in-
dividual frailty may require shall be studied in their correlation, in their
common response to similar conditions, and in their varied mutual influ-
ence. That would be the picture of an age, the image of the complexity
of man; it would be such history as a philosopher would consent to write.
As to the Esthetic, let others judge. At least one student cannot under-
stand it. Is man an artist as soon as he forms images? Does the essence
of art lie only in the conception, and not in the externalization? Have
we never had thoughts and feelings more beautiful than our speech?
How do we know what the inward image was, in the artist's mind, or
whether the work that we admire realizes or misses his idea? How shall
we call Rodin's "Harlot" beautiful, except because it is the expressive
embodiment of an adequate conception? conception though it be of an
ugly and distressing subject? Aristotle notes that it pleases us to see the
faithful images of things that are repugnant to us in reality; why, except
that we reverence the art that has so well embodied the idea?
It would be interesting, and no doubt disconcerting, to know what
artists think of these philosophers who tell them what is. beauty The
greatest living artist has abandoned the hope of answering the question.
"I believe," he writes, "that we shall never know exactly why a thing is
*In Carr, p. 7*. ^Esthetic, p. 79.