Be this as it may, one thing seems certain, that the artistic
activities are those which bring man into emotional communion with
external nature; and that such emotional communion is necessary for
man's thorough spiritual health. Perception of cause and effect,
generalisation of law, reduces the universe indeed to what man's
intellect can grasp; but in the process of such reduction to the laws
of man's thought, the universe is shorn of its very power to move
man's emotion and overwhelm his soul. The abstract which we have made
does not vivify us sufficiently. And the emotional communion of man
with nature is through those various faculties which we call æsthetic.
It is not to no purpose that poetry has for ever talked to us of skies
and mountains and waters; we require, for our soul's health, to think
about them otherwise than with reference to our material comfort and
discomfort; we require to feel that they and ourselves are brethren
united by one great law of life. And what poetry suggests in explicit
words, bidding us love and be united in love to external nature; art,
in more irresistible because more instinctive manner, forces upon our
feelings, by extracting, according to its various kinds, the various
vital qualities of the universe, and making them act directly upon our
mind: rhythms of all sorts, static and dynamic, in the spatial arts of
painting and sculpture; in the half spatial, half temporal art of
architecture: in music, which is most akin to life, because it is the
art of movement and change.