Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/83

Rh (principles of action) wider than those expressed in previous civilization; ideas demanding therefore new forms of embodiment and calling for new art, ideas which since they had not found embodiment for themselves appeared at the time to be hostile to all embodiment and thus to all art. The growing up of this distinction between commonplace reality and art seems to be due to just those historical periods when man has become aware of new principles of action just enough to condemn old action, but not sufficiently to secure expression for them. Commonplace reality, in other words, is simply the material which art has not yet conquered, which has not yet become a plastic medium of expression. Such a conception, indeed, is in line with Mr. Bosanquet's remarks about the future of art, when he says that in spite of the present apparent interruption of the art tradition, in spite of the fact that the discord of life has now cut deeper than ever before, we may feel sure that the human mind will find a way to resolve this discord and " the way to satisfy its imperious need for beauty." Two conceptions of art, finally, seem to be struggling with each other throughout Mr. Bosanquet's history : one of art as essentially a form of symbolism, the other of art as the expression of life in its entire range. The former can be reconciled with Mr. Bosanquet's fundamental philosophy only by a great stretch of the idea of symbolism; it agrees, however, with the fixed distinction between commonplace reality and artistic reality, and at once lends itself to a conception of art which marks it off into a little realm by itself. The conception of art as expression of life leaves no room for any such division. Art becomes one with fulness of life. As Emerson says, "There is higher work for Art than the arts. ... No less than the creation of man and nature is its end."

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Dr. Waller's tone, in this essay, is modest, but his reasonings are too laboriously expressed. He suggests that experiments on the objective phenomena of muscular fatigue after voluntary movement may throw light on the vexed question of the peripheral or central origin of the feeling of effort. Effort is a sensation accompanying muscular action, fatigue a sensation following it. The concomitant feeling and the after feeling, Dr. Waller reasons, should presumably have the same organic seat, just as in vision an image and its after-image involve the same optic tracts. If experiments show the source of objective fatigue phenomena