Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/246

 ordinary language and that the realm, of art certainly must be content, joy and sorrow as such, colour and sound in itself. No one can feel more strongly than I do that the greatest miracles on earth are wrought by the poet and that no revelations and values can compare with those given to us by art, and I have the greatest admiration for the expressive power of poetry, but at the same time I know that the poet cannot express anything that could not be expressed by science, and that most certainly a volume of poetry does not communicate content any more than a scientific book. We must acknowledge the great magic of art, but we must not attribute it to the wrong causes. The merit of poetry does not lie in its wonderful capacity of expression, it is to be found in the great effects it produces in our souls by that which it expresses. While the ultimate purpose of science is knowledge, perfect expression of real facts the purpose of art is to evoke in us certain emotions, and expression is but a means to this end. Emotions are content (possessing, of course, a certain structure), they are not communicated by poetry, but produced by it. We have had occasion to speak of this distinction before. You will say: "but the poet knows what kind of emotion he wants to produce, and does it — is not this a kind of communication of his feelings from his soul to mine ? You are right, but if you speak this way you deal with the structure of emotions and feelings, not with their content. It is true, the poet introduces Falstaff to make you gay, and you laugh when you see Falstaff; the poet makes Lear suffer to arouse your sympathy for him, and the tears come to your eyes when you see Lear. The poet is satisfied to see you laugh and cry and he knows that you really feel the way he wants you to feel. How does he know it? He sees your laughter and your tears that is all. You say he concludes that you are gay or sad because gaity causes laughter, and sadness causes tears. Perhaps you are right, but this means simply: he infers that something is going on "in your mind" which has a similar structure as the joy or sadness with which he is acquainted from his own experience. William James may have been wrong when he taught that the emotions are identical with the corresponding physiological processes in the body, but it is certain that the structure of laughter has something in common with the structure of hilarity, and the structure of crying with that of grief.

Thus we see that in the case of poetry and art — just as well as in all other cases of human interest and action — we deal only with structure.