this very activity of the spirit, which is essentially ourselves, is
so often ignored or denied. Some confound the spiritual activity of
man with the metaphorical and mythological activity of what is called
nature, which is mechanism and has no resemblance to human activity,
save when we imagine, with Æsop, that "_arbores loquuntur non tantum
ferae._" Some affirm that they have never observed in themselves this
"miraculous" activity, as though there were no difference, or only
one of quantity, between sweating and thinking, feeling cold and the
energy of the will. Others, certainly with greater reason, would
unify activity and mechanism in a more general concept, though they
are specifically distinct. Let us, however, refrain for the moment
from examining if such a final unification be possible, and in what
sense, but admitting that the attempt may be made, it is clear that
to unify two concepts in a third implies to begin with the admission
of a difference between the two first. Here it is this difference that
concerns us and we set it in relief.
[Sidenote: _Intuition and association._]
Intuition has sometimes been confused with simple sensation. But since
this confusion ends by being offensive to common sense, it has more
frequently been attenuated or concealed with a phraseology apparently
designed at once to confuse and to distinguish them. Thus, it has
been asserted that intuition is sensation, but not so much simple
sensation as _association_ of sensations. Here a double meaning is
concealed in the word "association." Association is understood, either
as memory, mnemonic association, conscious recollection, and in that
case the claim to unite in memory elements which are not intuited,
distinguished, possessed in some way by the spirit and produced by
consciousness, seems inconceivable: or it is understood as association
of unconscious elements, in which case we remain in the world of
sensation and of nature. But if with certain associationists we speak
of an association which is neither memory nor flux of sensations, but
a _productive_ association (formative, constructive, distinguishing);
then our contention is admitted and only its name is denied to it.
For productive association is no longer association in the sense
of the sensationalists, but _synthesis,_ that is to say, spiritual
activity. Synthesis may be called association; but with the concept of
productivity is already posited the distinction between passivity and
activity, between sensation and intuition.
[Sidenote: _Intuition and representation._]
Other psychologists are disposed to distinguish from sensation
something which is sensation no longer, but is not yet intellectual
concept: the _representation_ or _image._ What is the difference
between their representation or image and our intuitive knowledge?
Everything and nothing: for "representation" is a very equivocal word.
If by representation be understood something cut off and standing
out from the psychic basis of the sensations, then representation is
intuition. If, on the other hand, it be conceived as complex sensation
we are back once more in crude sensation, which does not vary in
quality according to its richness or poverty, or according to whether
the organism in which it appears is rudimentary or highly developed
and full of traces of past sensations. Nor is the ambiguity remedied
by defining representation as a psychic product of secondary degree
in relation to sensation, defined as occupying the first place. What
does secondary degree mean here? Does it mean a qualitative, formal
difference? If so, representation is an elaboration of sensation
and therefore intuition. Or does it mean greater complexity and
complication, a quantitative, material difference? In that case
intuition is once more confused with simple sensation.
[Sidenote: _Intuition and expression._]
And yet there is a sure method of distinguishing true intuition, true
representation, from that which is inferior to it: the spiritual fact
from the mechanical, passive, natural fact. Every true intuition or
representation is also _expression._ That which does not objectify
itself in expression is not intuition or representation, but sensation
and mere natural fact. The spirit only intuites in making, forming,
expressing. He who separates intuition from expression never succeeds
in reuniting them.
Intuitive activity _possesses intuitions to the extent that it
expresses them._ Should this proposition sound paradoxical, that is
partly because, as a general rule, a too restricted meaning is given to
the word "expression." It is generally restricted to what are called
verbal expressions alone. But there exist also non-verbal expressions,
such as those of line, colour and sound, and to all of these must
be extended our affirmation, which embraces therefore every sort of
manifestation of the man, as orator, musician, painter, or anything
else. But be it pictorial, or verbal, or musical, or in whatever other
form it appear, to no intuition can expression in one of its forms be
wanting; it is, in fact, an inseparable part of intuition. How can we
really possess an intuition of a geometrical figure, unless we possess
so accurate an image of it as to be able to trace it immediately upon
paper or on the blackboard?
How can we really have an intuition of the contour of a region, for
example of the island of Sicily, if we are not able to draw it as
it is in all its meanderings? Every one can experience the internal
illumination which follows upon his success in formulating to
himself his impressions and feelings, but only so far as he is able
to formulate them. Feelings or impressions, then, pass by means of
words from the obscure region of the soul into the clarity of the
contemplative spirit. It is impossible to distinguish intuition from
expression in this cognitive process. The one appears with the other at
the same instant, because they are not two, but one.
[Sidenote: _Illusion as to their difference._]
The principal reason which makes our view appear paradoxical as we
maintain it, is the illusion or prejudice that we possess a more
complete intuition of reality than we really do. One often hears people
say that they have many great thoughts in their minds, but that they
are not able to express them. But if they really had them, they would
have coined them into just so many beautiful, sounding words, and thus
have expressed them. If these thoughts seem to vanish or to become few
and meagre in the act of expressing them, the reason is that they did
not exist or really were few and meagre. People think that all of us
ordinary men imagine and intuite countries, figures and scenes like
painters, and bodies like sculptors; save that painters and sculptors
know how to paint and carve such images, while we bear them unexpressed
in our souls. They believe that any one could have imagined a Madonna
of Raphæl; but that Raphæl was Raphæl owing to his technical ability
in putting the Madonna upon canvas. Nothing can be more false than
this view. The world which as a rule we intuite is a small thing. It
consists of little expressions, which gradually become greater and
wider with the increasing spiritual concentration of certain moments.
They are the words we say to ourselves, our silent judgments: "Here
is a man, here is a horse, this is heavy, this is sharp, this pleases
me," etc. It is a medley of light and colour, with no greater pictorial
value than would be expressed by a haphazard splash of colours, from
among which one could barely make out a few special, distinctive
traits. This and nothing else is what we possess in our ordinary life;
this is the basis of our ordinary action. It is the index of a book.
The labels tied to things (it has been said) take the place of the
things themselves. This index and these labels (themselves expressions)
suffice for small needs and small actions. From time to time we pass
from the index to the book, from the label to the thing, or from the
slight to the greater intuitions, and from these to the greatest and
most lofty. This passage is sometimes far from easy. It has been
observed by those who have best studied the psychology of artists that
when, after having given a rapid glance at any one, they attempt to
obtain a real intuition of him, in order, for example, to paint his
portrait, then this ordinary vision, that seemed so precise, so lively,
reveals itself as little better than nothing. What remains is found to
be at the most some superficial trait, which would not even suffice for
a caricature. The person to be painted stands before the artist like a
world to discover. Michæl Angelo said, "One paints, not with the hands,
but with the brain." Leonardo shocked the prior of the Convent of the
Graces by standing for days together gazing at the "Last Supper,"
without touching it with the brush. He remarked of this attitude: "The
minds of men of lofty genius are most active in invention when they are
doing the least external work." The painter is a painter, because he
sees what others only feel or catch a glimpse of, but do not see. We
think we see a smile, but in reality we have only a vague impression
of it, we do not perceive all the characteristic traits of which it
is the sum, as the painter discovers them after he has worked upon
them and is thus able to fix them on the canvas. We do not intuitively
possess more even of our intimate friend, who is with us every day
and at all hours, than at most certain traits of physiognomy which
enable us to distinguish him from others. The illusion is less easy as
regards musical expression; because it would seem strange to every
one to say that the composer had added or attached notes to a motive
which was already in the mind of him who is not the composer; as if
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony were not his own intuition and his intuition
the Ninth Symphony. Now, just as one who is deluded as to the amount
of his material wealth is confuted by arithmetic, which states its
exact amount, so he who nourishes delusions as to the wealth of his
own thoughts and images is brought back to reality, when he is obliged
to cross the _Pons Asinorum_ of expression. Let us say to the former,
count; to the latter, speak; or, here is a pencil, draw, express
yourself.
Each of us, as a matter of fact, has in him a little of the poet, of
the sculptor, of the musician, of the painter, of the prose writer:
but how little, as compared with those who bear those names, just
because they possess the most universal dispositions and energies
of human nature in so lofty a degree! How little too does a painter
possess of the intuitions of a poet! And how little does one painter
possess those of another painter! Nevertheless, that little is all
our actual patrimony of intuitions or representations. Beyond these
are only impressions, sensations, feelings, impulses, emotions, or
whatever else one may term what still falls short of the spirit and is
not assimilated by man; something postulated for the convenience of
exposition, while actually non-existent, since to exist also is a fact
of the spirit.
[Sidenote: _Identity of intuition and expression._]
We may thus add this to the various verbal descriptions of intuition,
noted at the beginning: intuitive knowledge is expressive knowledge.
Independent and autonomous in respect to intellectual function;
indifferent to later empirical discriminations, to reality and to
unreality, to formations and apperceptions of space and time, which are
also later: intuition or representation is distinguished as _form_ from
what is felt and suffered, from the flux or wave of sensation, or from
psychic matter; and this form, this taking possession, is expression.
To intuite is to express; and nothing else (nothing more, but nothing
less) than _to express._
II
INTUITION AND ART
[Sidenote: _Corollaries and explanations._]
Before proceeding further, it may be well to draw certain consequences
from what has been established and to add some explanations.
[Sidenote: _Identity of art and intuitive knowledge._]
We have frankly identified intuitive or expressive knowledge with the
æsthetic or artistic fact, taking works of art as examples of intuitive
knowledge and attributing to them the characteristics of intuition, and
_vice versa._ But our identification is combated by a view held even by
many philosophers, who consider art to be an intuition of an altogether
special sort. "Let us admit" (they say) "that art is intuition; but
intuition is not always art: artistic intuition is a distinct species
differing from intuition in general by something _more_."
[Sidenote: _No specific difference._]
But no one has ever been able to indicate of what this something more
consists. It has sometimes been thought that art is not a simple
intuition, but an intuition of an intuition, in the same way as the
concept of science has been defined, not as the ordinary concept,
but as the concept of a concept. Thus man would attain to art by
objectifying, not his sensations, as happens with ordinary intuition,
but intuition itself. But this process of raising to a second power
does not exist; and the comparison of it with the ordinary and
scientific concept does not prove what is intended, for the good
reason that it is not true that the scientific concept is the concept
of a concept. If this comparison proves anything, it proves just the
opposite. The ordinary concept, if it be really a concept and not a
simple representation, is a perfect concept, however poor and limited.
Science substitutes concepts for representations; for those concepts
that are poor and limited it substitutes others, larger and more
comprehensive; it is ever discovering new relations. But its method
does not differ from that by which is formed the smallest universal
in the brain of the humblest of men. What is generally called _par
excellence_ art, collects intuitions that are wider and more complex
than those which we generally experience, but these intuitions are
always of sensations and impressions.
Art is expression of impressions, not expression of expression.
[Sidenote: _No difference of intensity._]
For the same reason, it cannot be asserted that the intuition, which is
generally called artistic, differs from ordinary intuition as intensive
intuition. This would be the case if it were to operate differently on
the same matter. But since the artistic function is extended to wider
fields, yet does not differ in method from ordinary intuition, the
difference between them is not intensive but extensive. The intuition
of the simplest popular love-song, which says the same thing, or very
nearly, as any declaration of love that issues at every moment from the
lips of thousands of ordinary men, may be intensively perfect in its
poor simplicity, although it be extensively so much more limited than
the complex intuition of a love-song by Leopardi.
[Sidenote: _The difference is extensive and empirical._]
The whole difference, then, is quantitative, and as such is indifferent
to philosophy, _scientia qualitatum._ Certain men have a greater
aptitude, a more frequent inclination fully to express certain
complex states of the soul. These men are known in ordinary language
as artists. Some very complicated and difficult expressions are not
often achieved, and these are called works of art. The limits of
the expression-intuitions that are called art, as opposed to those
that are vulgarly called non-art, are empirical and impossible to
define. If an epigram be art, why not a simple word? If a story, why
not the news-jottings of the journalist? If a landscape, why not a
topographical sketch? The teacher of philosophy in Molière's comedy was
right: "whenever we speak, we create prose." But there will always be
scholars like Monsieur Jourdain, astonished at having spoken prose for
forty years without knowing it, who will have difficulty in persuading
themselves that when they call their servant John to bring their
slippers, they have spoken nothing less than--prose.
We must hold firmly to our identification, because among the principal
reasons which have prevented Æsthetic, the science of art, from
revealing the true nature of art, its real roots in human nature,
has been its separation from the general spiritual life, the having
made of it a sort of special function or aristocratic club. No one
is astonished when he learns from physiology that every cell is an
organism and every organism a cell or synthesis of cells. No one is
astonished at finding in a lofty mountain the same chemical elements
that compose a small stone fragment. There is not one physiology of
small animals and one of large animals; nor is there a special chemical
theory of stones as distinct from mountains. In the same way, there is
not a science of lesser intuition as distinct from a science of greater
intuition, nor one of ordinary intuition as distinct from artistic
intuition. There is but one Æsthetic, the science of intuitive or
expressive knowledge, which is the æsthetic or artistic fact. And this
Æsthetic is the true analogue of Logic, which includes, as facts of the
same nature, the formation of the smallest and most ordinary concept
and the most complicated scientific and philosophical system.
[Sidenote: _Artistic genius._]
Nor can we admit that the word _genius_ or artistic genius, as
distinct from the non-genius of the ordinary man, possesses more than
a quantitative signification. Great artists are said to reveal us to
ourselves. But how could this be possible, unless there were identity
of nature between their imagination and ours, and unless the difference
were only one of quantity? It were better to change _poeta nascitur_
into _homo nascitur poeta_: some men are born great poets, some small.
The cult of the genius with all its attendant superstitions has arisen
from this quantitative difference having been taken as a difference of
quality. It has been forgotten that genius is not something that has
fallen from heaven, but humanity itself. The man of genius who poses or
is represented as remote from humanity finds his punishment in becoming
or appearing somewhat ridiculous. Examples of this are the _genius_ of
the romantic period and the _superman_ of our time.
But it is well to note here, that those who claim unconsciousness as
the chief quality of an artistic genius, hurl him from an eminence
far above humanity to a position far below it. Intuitive or artistic
genius, like every form of human activity, is always conscious;
otherwise it would be blind mechanism. The only thing that can be
wanting to artistic genius is the _reflective_ consciousness, the
superadded consciousness of the historian or critic, which is not
essential to it.
[Sidenote: _Content and form in Æsthetic._]
The relation between matter and form, or between _content_ and
_form,_ as is generally said, is one of the most disputed questions
in Æsthetic. Does the æsthetic fact consist of content alone, or of
form alone, or of both together? This question has taken on various
meanings, which we shall mention, each in its place. But when these
words are taken as signifying what we have above defined, and matter is
understood as emotionality not æsthetically elaborated, or impressions,
and form as intellectual activity and expression, then our view cannot
be in doubt. We must, that is to say, reject both the thesis that makes
the æsthetic fact to consist of the content alone (that is, the simple
impressions), and the thesis which makes it to consist of a junction
between form and content, that is, of impressions plus expressions.
In the æsthetic fact, expressive activity is not added to the fact of
the impressions, but these latter are formed and elaborated by it. The
impressions reappear as it were in expression, like water put into a
filter, which reappears the same and yet different on the other side.
The æsthetic fact, therefore, is form, and nothing but form.
From this was inferred not that the content is something superfluous
(it is, on the contrary, the necessary point of departure for the
expressive fact); but that _there is no passage_ from the qualities of
the content to those of the form. It has sometimes been thought that
the content, in order to be æsthetic, that is to say, transformable
into form, should possess some determined or determinable qualities.
But were that so, then form and content, expression and impression,
would be the same thing. It is true that the content is that which
is convertible into form, but it has no determinable qualities until
this transformation takes place. We know nothing about it. It does not
become æsthetic content before, but only after it has been actually
transformed. The æsthetic content has also been defined as the
_interesting._ That is not an untrue statement; it is merely void of
meaning. Interesting to what? To the expressive activity? Certainly
the expressive activity would not have raised the content to the
dignity of form, had it not been interested in it. Being interested is
precisely the raising of the content to the dignity of form. But the
word "interesting" has also been employed in another and a illegitimate
sense, which we shall explain further on.
[Sidenote: _Criticism of the imitation of nature and of the artistic
illusion._]
The proposition that art is _imitation of nature_ has also several
meanings. Sometimes truths have been expressed or at least shadowed
forth in these words, sometimes errors have been promulgated. More
frequently, no definite thought has been expressed at all. One of
the scientifically legitimate meanings occurs when "imitation" is
understood as representation or intuition of nature, a form of
knowledge. And when the phrase is used with this intention, and in
order to emphasize the spiritual character of the process, another
proposition becomes legitimate also: namely, that art is the
_idealization_ or _idealizing_ imitation of nature. But if by imitation
of nature be understood that art gives mechanical reproductions,
more or less perfect duplicates of natural objects, in the presence
of which is renewed the same tumult of impressions as that caused
by natural objects, then the proposition is evidently false. The
coloured waxen effigies that imitate the life, before which we stand
astonished in the museums where such things are shown, do not give
æsthetic intuitions. Illusion and hallucination have nothing to do
with the calm domain of artistic intuition. But on the other hand if
an artist paint the interior of a wax-work museum, or if an actor
give a burlesque portrait of a man-statue on the stage, we have work
of the spirit and artistic intuition. Finally, if photography have in
it anything artistic, it will be to the extent that it transmits the
intuition of the photographer, his point of view, the pose and grouping
which he has striven to attain. And if photography be not quite an art,
that is precisely because the element of nature in it remains more or
less unconquered and ineradicable. Do we ever, indeed, feel complete
satisfaction before even the best of photographs? Would not an artist
vary and touch up much or little, remove or add something to all of
them?
[Sidenote: _Criticism of art conceived as a fact of feeling, not a
theoretical fact. Æsthetic appearance, and feeling._]