Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/699

Rh not only all these, but the material consequences of the act or the thing painted. So of agriculture, navigation, and the rest. Exception might also be taken to Dr Johnson s definition on the ground that it excludes all actions of instinct from the genus Art, whereas usage has in more languages than one given the name of Art to several of those ingenuities in the lower animals which popular theory at the same time declares to be instinctive. Dante, for instance, speaks of boughs shaken by the wind, but not so violently as to make the birds forego their Art,— &quot; Non per5 dal lor esser dritto sparto Tanto, che gl augelletti per lor cime Lasciasser d operar ogni lor arte.&quot; And Fontenelle, speaking the language not of poetry but of science : &quot; Most animals as, for instance, bees, spiders, and beavers have a kind of art peculiar to themselves ; but each race of animals has no more than one art, and this one has had no first inventor among the race. Man, on the other hand, has an infinity of different arts which were not born with his race, and of which the glory is his own.&quot; Dr John son might reply that those properties of variety and of originality or individual invention, which Fontenelle him self alleges in the ingenuities of man but not in those of the lower animals, are sufficient to make a generic differ ence, and to establish the impropriety of calling a honey comb or a spider s web a work of Art. It is not our pur pose to trespass on ground so debateable as that of the nature of consciousness in the lower animals. Enough that when we use the term Art of any action, it is because we are thinking of properties in the action from which we infer, whether justly or not, that the agent voluntarily and designedly puts forth skill for known ends and by regular and uniform methods. If, then, we were called upon to frame a general definition of Art, leaving room for every accepted usage of the word, it would run thus:—Every regulated operation or dexterity by which organised beings pursue ends which they know beforehand, together with the rules and the result of every such operation or dexterity. Here it will be well tc consider very briefly the natural history of the name which has been given to this very com prehensive conception by the principal branches of civilised mankind. Our own word Art the English language has taken, as all the Romance languages of modern Europe have taken theirs, directly from the Latin. The Latin ars proceeds from a root the primitive force of which is open to question. One distinguished philologist thinks that this syllable AR, in that root from which ars is descended, means to plough, and is the same as appears in the Greek [ Greek ], [ Greek ], [ Greek ], and Latin ar-are, ar-atrum, ar-vum. &quot; As agriculture was the principal labour in that early state of society when we must have supposed most of our Aryan words to have been formed and applied to their definite meanings, we may well understand how a word which originally meant this special kind of labour was after wards used to signify labour in general And as ploughing was not only one of the earliest kinds of labour, but also one of the most primitive arts, I have no doubt that the Latin ars, artis, and our own word art, meant originally the art of all arts, first taught by the goddess of all wisdom, the art of cultivating the land.&quot; (Max Muller, Lect. on Science of Language, i. 294.) The more common supposition refers the word to a root AR, of which the primitive signification will have been to put or fit two things together, and which is to be found in a large family of Greek words, such as [ Greek ], [ Greek ], [ Greek ], [ Greek ]), K.T.. As a question of historical probability, the latter account seems the likelier, inasmuch as predatory and nomadic man was certainly in possession of many dexterities, as that of fitting a stone arrow-head to its shaft, or say, that of putting two and two together, from which, rather than from the later invention of agriculture, the group of human dexterities in general is likely to have received its name. The Greek [ Greek ], the name both for arts in the particular and art in the abstract, is by its root related both to [ Greek ] and [ Greek ], and thus contains the allied ideas of making and begetting. The proprium of art in the logic of the Stoics &quot;to create and beget&quot; (see above) was strictly in accordance with this etymology. The Teutonic Kunst is formed from konnen, and konnen is developed from a primitive Ich kann. In kann philology recognises a preterite form of a lost verb, of which we find the traces in Kin-d, a child ; and the form Ich kann, thus meaning originally &quot; I begot,&quot; contains the germ of the two several developments, konnen, &quot; to be master,&quot; &quot; to be able,&quot; and kennen, &quot; to know.&quot; Putting by, then, as too doubtful the etymology of ars from ploughing, we see that the chief Aryan languages have with one consent extended a name for the most elementary exercise of a constructive or productive power, till that name has covered the whole province of the skilled and deliberate operations of sentient beings. In proportion as men left out of sight the idea of creation, of constructing or producing, &quot; artificiosum esse ad giguen- dum,&quot; which is the primitive half of this extended notion, and attended only to the idea of skill, of proceeding by regular and disciplined methods, &quot; progredi via,&quot; which is the superadded half, the whole notion Art, and the name for it, might become subject to a process of thought which, if analysed, would be like this : What is done by regular and disciplined methods is Art ; facts are observed and classified, and a systematic view of the order of the uni verse obtained, by regular and disciplined methods ; the observing and classifying of facts, and obtaining a syste matic view of the order of the universe, is therefore Art. To a partial extent this did unconsciously take place. Science, of which the essence is only in knowledge and contemplation, came to be spoken of as Art, of which the essence is all in practice and production. Cicero, notwithstanding his citation of the Stoical dictum that practice and production were of the essence of Art, else where divides Art into two kinds one by which things are only contemplated in the mind, another by which some thing is produced and done. (&quot; Quumque artium aliud eiusmodi sit, ut tantummodo rem cernat; aliud, ut moliatur aliquid et faciat.&quot; Acad. ii. 7.) Of the former kind his instance is geometry ; of the latter the art of the violin player. Now geometry, understanding by geometry an acquisition of the mind, that is, a collected body of observa tions and deductions concerning the properties of space and magnitude, is a science and not an art; although there is an art of the geometer, which is the skill by which ho solves any given problem in his science, and the rules of that skill, and his exertion in putting it forth. And so every science has its instrumental art or practical discip line ; and in as far as the word Art is used only of the practical discipline or dexterity of the geometer, the astronomer, the logician, the grammarian, or other person whose business it is to collect and classify facts for con templation, in so far the usage is just. The same justifica tion may be extended to another usage, whereby in Latin, and some of its derivative languages, the name Art came to be transferred in a concrete sense to the body of rules, the written code or manual, which lays down the discipline and regulates the dexterity ; as ars grammatica, ars rhe- torica, and the rest. But when the word is stretched so as to mean the sciences themselves as acquisitions of the mind, that meaning is illegitimate. Whether or not Cicero, in the passage above quoted, had in his mind the science of geometry as a collected body of observations and do- 