28 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
an æsthetie reason to justify what it has produced. A cele-
brated sentence uttered by an English critic, and become
one of tire commonplaces of journalism, states that “all the
arts tend to the condition of music”; but it would have been
more accurate to say that all the arts are music, if it be thus
intended to emphasise the genesis of æsthetie images in feel-
ing, excluding from their number those mechanically con-
structed or realistically ponderous. And another not less
celebrated utterance of a Swiss semi-philosopher, which has
had the like good or bad fortune of becoming trivial, dis-
covers that “every landscape is a state of the soul”: which is
indisputable, not because the landscape is landscape, but
because the landscape is art.
Artistic intuition, then, is always lyrical intuition: this lat-
ter being a word that is not present as an adjective or defini-
tion of the first, but as a synonym, another of the synonyms
that can be united to the several that I have mentioned al-
ready, and which, all of them, designate the intuition. And
if it be sometimes convenient that instead of appearing as a
synonym, it should assume the grammatical form of the ad-
jective, that is only to make clear the difference between the
intuition-image, or nexus of images (for what is called im-
age is always a nexus of images, since image-atoms do not
exist any more than thought-atoms), which constitutes the
organism, and, as organism, has its vital principle, which is
the organism itself,—between this, which is true and proper
intuition, and that false intuition which is a heap of images
put together in play or intentionally or for some other practi-
cal purpose, the connection of which, being practical, shows
itself to be not organic, but mechanic, when considered from
the æsthetie point of view. But the word lyric would be re-
dundant save in this explicative or polemical sense; and art
is perfectly defined when it is simply defined as intuition.