Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/83

68 its physical embodiment is something secondary and incidental, and merely brought into being for the sake of permanence and communication — this seems to me a profound error of principle, a false idealism. It meets us, however, throughout Croce’s system, according to which “intuition” — the inward vision of the artist — is the only true expression. External media, he holds, are, strictly speaking, superfluous, so that there is no meaning in distinguishing between one mode of expression and another (as between paint and musical sound and language). Therefore there can be no classification of the arts, and no fruitful discussion of what can better be done by one art than by another. And aesthetic — the philosophy of expression — is set down as all one with linguistic — the philosophy of speech. For there is no meaning in distinguishing between language in the sense of speech, and other modes of expression. Of course, if he had said that speech is not the only form of language, but that every art speaks to