The Breviary of Aesthetic 9
world has not only been proved in an indisputable manner
and is admitted by all philosophers (who are not crass mate-
rialists and are not involved in the strident contradictions of
materialism), but is professed by these same physicists in the
spontaneous philosophy which they mingle with their phys-
ics, when they conceive physical phenomena as products of
principles that are beyond experience, of atoms or of ether,
or as the manifestation of an Unknowable: besides, the
matter itself of the materialists is a supermaterial principle.
Thus physical facts reveal themselves, by their internal logic
and by common consent, not as reality, but as a construction
of our intellect for the purposes of science. Consequently,
the question whether art be a physical fact must rationally
assume this different signification: that is to say, whether
it be possible to construct art physically. And this is cer-
tainly possible, for we indeed carry it out always, when,
turning from the sense of a poem and ceasing to enjoy it,
we set ourselves, for example, to count the words of which
the poem is composed and to divide them into syllables and
letters; or, disregarding the aesthetic effect of a statue, we
weigh and measure it: a most useful performance for the
packers of statues, as is the other for the typographers who
have to “compose” pages of poetry; but most useless for
the Contemplator and student of art, to whom it is neither
useful nor licit to allow himself to be “distracted” from his
proper object. Thus art is not a physical fact in this second
sense, either; which amounts to saying that when we propose
to ourselves to penetrate its nature and mode of action, to
construct it physically is of no avail.
Another negation is implied in the definition of art as in-
tuition: if it be intuition, and intuition is equivalent to theory
in the original sense of contemplation, art cannot be a Utili-