not with shadow; with definite realities, not with illusions. In other words, the practical man would have truth. With the spirit, then, which prompts his demand for facts all must sympathize; but the demand itself is a mistake. It assumes that fact is the substantial; that realities addressed to sense-perception hold more of truth than idealities addressed to imagination; that of all knowledge the knowledge of facts is most positive and most important. This we hold to be a false assumption, and on this we join issue squarely with the practical man. If we seem to maintain a paradox, let us first remark that the practical man does not follow out his view consistently, and thus he virtually confesses its weakness. He lives in the real world, a world of material phenomena and current events, a world of facts for sense-perception. These are in themselves unconnected, isolated, individual occurrences. If a man is to confine himself to these, he must take each one by itself, without reference to any other. There are men who do this. There are men who sleep and rise and get their food, and eat and sleep again; contented to take as they come the facts of daily routine and familiar surrounding; drifting with the lazy current of sense perception like the lower animals which crop the grass and bellow at a red rag and are driven by a dog and stumble from particular to particular, knowing no better and knowing no other. These men act consistently on the demand for nothing but facts. They have never generalized such a formula as the practical man's: "let us confine ourselves to facts;" they simply do it. But these men we call savages. Now the practical man is not a savage, and his life is not consistent with the animal theory he professes. His whole action is at variance with this profession, and his whole effort is to transcend facts and arrive at wider truth. No matter how one may determine to cling to immediate facts, or persuade himself that in that way he is keeping hold of the actual, he is nevertheless always engaged in classifying, generalizing, inducing and deducing; transfusing these "stubborn" facts with thought and transforming them into truth. As a practical man, busy in the civilized world, he must always be annulling the sensuous conditions of facts perceived, and widening the sphere of their consideration until they lose their sensuous character as isolated phenomena

and are brought within a view which connects them with a before and after. Suppose he is a merchant dealing in indigo, what a complex of manifold conditions he has to coördinate and reduce to systematic unity in carrying on his business. After all, however purely "practical" one may wish to be, man is by nature a thinking being; and to think is to generalize, and to generalize is to transcend the sphere of sense-perception, which is the sphere of fact as such.

To come to the question more directly: What is fact, and what is its value in relation to truth? We shall find this a test question in respect to intellectuality and culture. As we have intimated, a high valuation of facts is in direct ratio to a low degree of intellectual activity, because facts do not address themselves to thought, but to perception. They will be taken as sufficient in themselves-a man will not care to go beyond them, just in so far as one is an unthinking man. An individual fact is as such obvious to the meanest capacity. He who runs may read. But the question remains, what does it tell, what does it show, what does it teach, what does it represent and signify; in other words, how does it stand related to all other facts, what is its place in the universal system. As to all this the individual fact is silent; it does not explain itself. A fact then is for each observer just as much as he is able to discover in it. The fall of an apple from a tree was a fact of continual occurrence in the sight of men and animals for ages before Newton saw in it the law of planetary motion and the rationale of the material universe. After all, the philosopher and the practical man both seek to grasp the fact, but the ques tion is what is the compass of the fact. Here is where they differ. In its phenomenal aspect it is easily appreciable, but the exposition of it in the whole circle of its ultimate relations will certainly be pronounced "obscure" or "mystical" or "nonsense" by those who are not equal to the task of re-thinking those relations. A fact is simply a relative synthesis; and since it is conditioned and determined by all that exists in the universe, we cannot comprehend a single fact in its entire compass except by thinking the universe. This is to arrive at truth, for Truth is simply the Universal Fact, the whole fact of which the individual fact is a fraction.

Thus in the scale of relation to truth facts stands at the bottom and principles at the top. The value of all intermediate generalization depends upon its relation to these respectively. The farther a generality is from fact and the nearer to principle -that is, the farther from what is particular and the nearer to what is universal-the more valuable and important it is. Fact is apprehended by the senses, law is comprehended by the understanding, and principles are contained in the reason. A fact then, as such, does not take us beyond itself; as fact it is neither universal nor necessary. When by comparison with other facts it is understood as a generality, it is regarded as determined by external necessity and said to be governed by law. This is the present position of the natural sciences. Under the "reign of law" all things are necessitated; there can be no such thing as chance. The inadequacy of this position is obvious at a glance. "All things are necessitated;" all, but by what is the All necessitated? Is there anything more than the All? Can we go beyond the All to something else? If the All is necessitated, then, it must be necessitated by itself; but to be its own necessity, that is precisely freedom. Necessity, or determination by another, rests on freedom, or self-determination. This latter is alone the concrete and absolute principle, and hence it is just as wise to talk about the impossibility of necessity as about the impossibility of chance; these two being but the "moments" of immediacy and of mediation inherent in the principle of the actual all. There is a sphere then into which fact must be carried higher than that of law; a sphere in which it is seen to be what it is not by an external, but by an internal necessity, a necessity in which it shares. We may say that the process of finding truth is a process of reducing fact to principle through the medium of law.

The bearing of these considerations in reference to art is plain. Realism would have truth; that is well; truth is the one object of art. But when men go for it to nature and reality, what they find is not truth, but only fact; and fact is no more the content of art than it is of philosophy. Art is genuine and high in quality just in so far as it is removed from fact. Art, that is, is essentially idealism. For him who truly feels, as for him who truly thinks, that which appears to sense is not that

art.

which is to soul. For the true artist, or the seeker of truth in art, the natural fact is nothing but raw material. It is the error of realism to take the natural fact for the sufficient end of That was but the unintelligence of the child, in whom esthetic perception is yet unawakened, which lauded the genius of the two artists, one of whom painted grapes so that birds pecked at the picture and the other a curtain so that his rival asked him to draw the curtain and display his work. reaction from a false and cramping conventionalism,—

As the

"The musty laws lined out with wretched rule and compass vile," the movement to realism has its part of truth; but the whole truth, which alone is truth, is never found in mere reaction. The realistic spirit, such as found expression, for instance with the English Pre-Raphaelites in their humble veneration for nature and devotion to its faithful reproduction, is a blindness to the true meaning and purpose of art. If art is mere imitation of nature, what is the use of it? We have the original. But in truth to tie up art in nature is to strangle it in its cradle. Nature as nature has no place in art, for art is precisely the transcendence of nature; it is the transfiguration of the real into a revelation of the ideal. That is to find the truth of the fact. In the particular, the relative, the finite the artist must see the universal, the absolute, the infinite, and then his recreative imagination must reproduce that vision so that others shall share it. In so far as he succeeds in this-the representation of the spiritual in the material, he is an artist and his work a work of art.

Aristotle is sometimes quoted as an authority for realism on the strength of his saying that art in general is mimesis, a term which is translated imitation and taken to mean imitation of nature. Prof. Masson in a recent volume of essays refers to this dictum, constrasts it with passages from Bacon advocating idealism in art, and after lengthy consideration concludes that Bacon is right and Aristotle wrong. This conclusion, however, rests on a failure to understand Aristotle, who meant by mimesis not the imitation of sensuous fact, but the representation of rational truth. It has long been the communis error to regard Aristotle as the empiricist who opposed rather than the idealist who completed Plato, but in the matter of art his position

ought to be sufficiently clear. A single quotation from the Poetics will meet the imputation of a shallow realism: "Art is more philosophic and more earnest than History." This indeed will perhaps be going too far for Prof. Masson. What! one

may exclaim, is the record of fact to be assigned a lower place than the inventions of fancy? Do not art-critics from Lessing to Palgrave tell us that the end and aim of art is production of high and refined pleasure, and is this elegant amusement to be declared more serious and more important than the story of all human experience? But the Epicureanism which views art as a ministry to refined enjoyment is as radically mistaken as that which makes the end of virtue to consist in the happiness. it brings the well-doer. What in a word is art? Again Aristotle will furnish us with a definition: "Art is the exercise of a creative faculty based upon reason." In this lies the explanation of the other saying that art is more philosophic and more earnest than history. A few words will make this clear.

The lowest form of mental activity is sensation, which in the lowest organisms does not amount to perception. Next comes this latter, the power of distinguishing between sensations. Higher than this is memory, which reproduces past impressions, and so is the condition of understanding which induces and deduces laws. Above all stands reason, the organ of principles, the vision of inward necessity, as understanding is the organ of laws, or the vision of outward necessity. Now history is the record of past events in their genetic sequence, and hence is based upon perception, memory and understanding; but if art is based on reason, it stands higher in the mental scale, and is plainly more philosophic and more earnest than history." The principles which underlie history are a secret for it. They belong to the philosophy of history, not to history proper. But art has intelligence of principles, and deals consciously with absolute truth.

Art is creation based upon reason; here is a rebuke to that extravagant romanticism which finds anything artistic if it only have a place in reality. Not all that is real is material for art, but only that which contains a rational element. There are artists-take for a specimen Baudelaire-who not only give us a Chinese copy of reality, in which the trivial is as fully and