The name is absent

The Breviary of Aesthetic 49
by the practice of art. Everything depends upon not con-
founding hints with reality, and hypothetic warnings or im-
peratives with categoric imperatives: a confusion which
multiple and continuous temptations are certainly apt to in-
duce, whence it is easy to be dominated by them, but not at
all inevitable. Books of literary origin, rhetoric, grammar
(with their divisions into parts of speech and their grammat-
ical and syntactical laws), of the art of musical composition,
of metre, of painting, and so on, contain the principal hints
and collections of precepts. Tendencies toward a definite ex-
pression of art are manifested in them either only in a sec-
ondary manner,—and in this case it is art that is still abstract,
art in elaboration (the poetic arts of classicism or romanti-
cism, purist or popular grammars, etc.),—or as tendencies to-
ward the philosophical comprehension of their argument,
and then they give rise to the divisions into kinds and into
arts, an error which I have criticised: an error which, by its
contradictions, opens the way to the true doctrine of the in-
dividuality of art.

Certainly this doctrine produces at first sight a sort of be-
wilderment: individual, original, untranslatable, unclassifia-
ble intuitions seem to escape the rule of thought, which
would seem unable to dominate them without placing them
in relation with one another; and this appears to be precisely
forbidden by the doctrine that has been developed, which
has rather the air of being anarchic or anarchoid than liberal
and Iiberistic.

A little piece of poetry is aesthetically equal to a poem; a
tiny little picture or a sketch, to an altar picture or an af-
fresco; a letter is a work of art, no less than a romance; even
a fine translation is as original as an original work! These
propositions will be indubitable, because logically deduced
from verified premises; they will be true, although (and this

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