32 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
ter that distinguishes it from other contents, since there is no
content beyond reality; and that therefore their fundamental
theory was thus fundamentally negated. These contradic-
tory and ingenuous explosions resemble those of other formal-
istic theorists of the content who maintained the concept of
an æsthetie content, but defined it as that “which interests
man,” and made the interest relating to man to lie in his dif-
ferent historical situations—that is, relative to the individual.
This was another* way of denying the initial assumption, for
it is very clear that the artist would not produce art, did he
not interest himself in something which is the datum or the
problem of his production, but that this something becomes
art only because the artist, by becoming interested in it,
makes it so.—These are evasions of formalists, who after hav-
ing limited art to abstract beautiful forms, void of all content
and only to be summed up with contents, timidly introduced
among beautiful forms that of the harmony of content with
form; or more resolutely declared themselves partisans of a
sort of eclecticism, which makes art to consist of a sort of
“relation” of the beautful content with the beautiful form,
and, with an incorrectness worthy of eclectics, attributed to
terms outside the relation qualities which they assume only
within the relation.
For the truth is really this: content and form must be
clearly distinguished in art, but must not be separately quali-
fied as artistic, precisely because their relation only is artistic
—that is, their unity, understood not as an abstract, dead
unity, but as concrete and living, which is that of the synthe-
sis a priori; and art is a true æsthetie synthesis a priori of feel-
ing and image in the intuition, as to which it may be re-
peated that feeling without image is blind, and image with-
out feeling is void. Feeling and image do not exist for the