8 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
The inclination toward this error of physicising art is al-
ready present in ordinary thought, and as children who
touch the soap-bubble and would wish to touch the rainbow,
so the human spirit, admiring beautiful things, hastens spon-
taneously to trace out the reasons for them in external na-
ture, and proves that it must think, or believes that it
should think, certain colours beautiful and certain other col-
ours ugly, certain forms beautiful and certain other forms
ugly. But this attempt has been carried out intentionally
and with method on several occasions in the history of
thought: from the “canons” which the Greek theoreticians
and artists fixed for the beauty of bodies, through the specu-
lations as to the geometrical and numerical relations of
figures and sounds, down to the researches of tire æsthe-
ticians of the nineteenth century (Fechner, for example),
and to the “communications” presented in our day by the
inexpert, at philosophical, psychological, and natural science
congresses, concerning the relations of physical phenomena
with art. And if it be asked why art cannot be a physical
fact, we must reply, in the first place, that physical facts do
not possess reality, and that art, to which so many devote
their whole lives and which fills all with a divine joy, is
supremely real; thus it cannot be a physical fact, which is
something unreal. This sounds at first paradoxical, for
nothing seems more solid and secure to the ordinary man
than the physical world; but we, in the seat of truth, must
not abstain from the good reason and substitute for it one
less good, solely because the first should have the appear-
ance of a lie; and besides, in order to surpass what of
strange and difficult may be contained in that truth, to be-
come at home with it, we may take into consideration the
fact that the demonstration of the unreality of the physical