Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/533

 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOt loi.i Mi KM. SIIDY OK ART. ft 10 quite isolated from all the practical utilities of life, it would be nothing less than a miracle that art can be met with in tribes, which have not yet learnt to satisfy, nor even to fo 1, the most elementary necessities of life. In such a case it is not music only which would, as Wallace thinks, have to be explained by supernatural causes ; pnimtuo art in all its departments would baffle our attempts at rational interpreta- tion. By studying, however, the artistic activities of s;r. and barbarous man in their connexion with his non-aesthetic life, authors on evolutionary (esthetic have succeeded in solving this great crux of art history. The dances, poems, and even the formative arts of the lower tribes possess in- deed, as every ethnologist will admit, unquestionable aesthetic value. But this art is never free and disinterested ; it has always a usefulness real or supposed and is often even a necessity of life. An historical conception of art is thus, it appears, incom- patible with a strict maintenance of the aesthetic criterion. But it may still be asked whether we are therefore compelled to join Guyau in abolishing all distinctions between art and other manifestations of life. By doing away with the only definition which is common to the majority of aesthetic systems, we should dissociate ourselves from all previous views on art. And it seems hard to believe that all dogmatic writers on aesthetic, one-sided as they may often seem, have founded their theories on a pure fiction. The independent aesthetic activity, which simply aims at its own satisfaction, cannot have been invented for the sake of the systems. The mere fact that so many theories have been proposed for its explanation furnishes, it seems to us, a sufficient proof that the conception of this activity corresponds to some psycho- logical reality. The "self-purpose" has certainly not played so important a part in the practice of artists, as writers on aesthetic would have us believe. It is also impossible to distinguish its effects in individual aesthetic manifestations. But from all we know of the life and work of artists, there appears to be a tendency more or less consciously followed, it is true, in different cases to make the work its own end. And in the public we can in the same way notice an inclina- tion which grows with increasing culture to regard art as something which exists for its own sake, and to contem- plate its manifestations with independent aesthetic attention. Whatever we may think about the genesis of particular pictures and poems, we know that they at least need no utilitarian, non-aesthetic justification in order to be appre- ciated by us. And with as much assurance as we can