The name is absent

The Breviary of Aesthetic 37

I have exposed, having denied the existence of a physical
world outside of it, which it looks upon as simply a construc-
tion of our intellect, does not know what to do with the par-
allelism of the thinking substance and of substance extended
in space, and has no need to promote impossible marriages,
because its thinking substance—or, better, its intuitive act—
is perfect in itself, and is that same fact which the intellect
afterwards constructs as extended. And inasmuch as an im-
age without expression is inconceivable, by just so much is
an image which shall be also expression conceivable, and
indeed logically necessary; that is, which shall be really an
image. If we take from a poem its metre, its rhythm, and its
words, poetical thought does not, as some opine, remain be-
hind: there remains nothing. The poetry is bom, like those
words, that rhythm, and that metre. Nor could expression be
compared with the epidermis of organisms, unless it be said
(and perhaps this may not be false even in physiology) that
all the organism in every cell’s cell is also epidermis.

I should, however, be wanting to my methodological con-
victions and to my intention of doing justice to errors (and I
have already done justice to the distinction of form and con-
tent by demonstrating the truth at which they aimed and
failed to grasp), were I not to indicate what truth may also
be active at the base of the false distinction of the indistin-
guishable, intuition and expression. Fancy and technique are
rationally distinguished, though not as elements of art; and
they are related and united between themselves, though not
in the field of art, but in the wider field of the spirit in its
totality. Technical or practical problems to be solved, diffi-
culties to be vanquished, are truly present to the artist, and
there is truly something which, without being really physical,
and being, like everything real, a spiritual act, can be meta-

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