The Breviary of Aesthetic 35
without sound and without colour? How can the bodiless ex-
press a body? How can the spontaneity of fancy and of re-
flection and even technical action coincide in the same act?
When the intuition has been distinguished from the expres-
sion, and the one has been made different from the other, no
ingenuity of terms can reunite them; all the processes of as-
sociation, of habit, of mechanicising, of forgetting, of instinc-
tification, proposed by the psychologists and laboriously de-
veloped by them, allow the scissure to reappear at the end:
on one side the expression, on the other the image. And there
does not seem to be any way of escape, save that of taking
refuge in the hypothesis of a mystery which, according to
poetical or mathematical tastes, will assume the appearance
of a mysterious marriage or of a mysterious psychophysical
parallelism. The first is a parallelism incorrectly overcome;
the second, a marriage deferred to distant ages or to the ob-
scurity of the unknowable.
But before having recourse to mystery (a refuge to which
there is always time to fly), we must enquire whether the
two elements have been correctly distinguished, and if an
intuition without expression be conceivable. It may happen
that the thing is as little existing and as inconceivable as a
soul without a body, which has truly been as much talked of
in philosophies as in religions, but to have talked about it is
not the same thing as to have experienced and conceived it.
In reality, we know nothing but expressed intuitions: a
thought is not thought for us, unless it be possible to formu-
late it in words; a musical fancy, only when it becomes con-
crete in sounds; a pictorial image, only when it is coloured.
We do not say that the words must necessarily be declaimed
in a loud voice, the music performed, or the picture painted
upon wood or canvas; but it is certain that when a thought