Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/125

110 nothing if it only tells you that the aim of art is to do what art truly aims to do. But if it means that art is some limiting conception, some general standard accepted beforehand, then I suggest that it becomes actively mischievous. The aim of art can then no longer be the full self-developing aim which is the aim of art, because art as an abstract conception has been thrown into the idea of the aim, carrying with it a fatal and restricting self-consciousness. In applying a method or principle rightly, you do not think of the method or principle. You think of the work, and live the method or principle. Art, like knowledge, is creative and individual, and you cannot lay down beforehand where either of them will take you. And if you make the attempt, you must be unfaithful to their freedom.

I have not attempted in these lectures to give a systematic account either of the forms of beauty, for example the tragic and the sublime, or of the historical development of art. What I desired was