conscious, but we know nothing but that bare fact. We do not know how an object swims into our consciousness. We do not know in the scientific meaning of knowledge, how we come to know any object. Our abysmal ignorance is this, that, of the thing known, and of that which knows, and of the process of knowing, we know nothing. Who can tell us how the movement of matter in the brain causes what we call thought. Is it a cause, or merely a concurrence? When we can know this much, then art may have a philosophy in which we can all agree. But, what signs are there of even the beginnings of agreement? Certainly art is not known as we know a science—perhaps we do not wish it ever to be so. And the process of art is as indescribable as the process of knowing. The advance we have made in philosophy seems to be this, that whereas one philosopher after another according to his temperament has thought he knew and has supplied us with hypotheses, and with successive clues to the mystery of Being, and with many systems of thought, we know now that none of them were adequate to supply even initial steps, and so, for the most part, we fall back on the knowledge that comes to us from living, from being, from knowing appearances, from action, and from feeling; on that position in short which Schopenhauer thought so despicable in a human being, i.e., Refuge in the common sense attitude, and practically the giving up of philosophy. The outcome of all the brain work on philosophy, since the time of the Greeks, is that despair has entered into our minds of ever achieving any knowledge of the Real, beneath and beyond Phenomena, of a knowledge which commands assent. Can even a Hegel write a convincing Philosophy of Art—which implies a philosophy of complex knowing and feeling; the feeling or emotion, or sensation, which vibrates in music and colour and poetry. Could Hegel himself answer this objection: that poetry eludes all tests—that that which you can thoroughly explain in any way is not poetry, as Swinburne has said? It is the inexplicable, then, which lies at the essence of art and it is this, which if there is to be a Philosophy of Art must be its object. The Inexplicable must be the object for the thinker with his orderly sequences, his logical search for causes and results. It is not that artistic feeling is too subtle as a subject; it is that we cannot get hold of it at all. It is where? Here, in our emotion, our feeling, our imagination; it flies from us and it comes again.

We do not ask for a philosophy of artistic creations (whatever they may be, in music, painting, or poetry), for a Philosophy of Art must be a philosophy of the artistic faculty that creates, and that admires and understands and is absorbed in the creations. Philosophy of Art is the philosophy of the creative—receptive qualities. We feel these qualities, but we are not able to explain them, we cannot even help another to feel them. The capacity comes from within. In ourselves is a nameless response to Beauty. All art is an expression of the artist thrown out towards a reproduction of some intuitive Idea within, and what artist has ever satisfied his inward aspiration? Why tell us that harmonies of art may be traced down to the simplest lines, and, that at the root, lies an aim of edification? Simplify the lines, as we will, let the basis of edification lie at the root of all beauty, still the initial question remains unanswered. Why do certain lines in a poem, curves of beauty in a statue, colour in a picture, produce in us the feelings of beauty and delight? Why does edification, if it is such, produce in me, the sense of a nameless beauty?

There is that in us which we call the sense or Idea of beauty, and we recognise it in works of art. What causes it in us? It is a sentiment, but it is more than a sentiment. It is indissolubly connected with expression, but it is more than expression. It raises all kinds of associations, but it is more than associations. It thrills the nerves, it stimulates the intellect, but it is more than a thrill, and other than the intellect; it is treatment, but who can give laws for it? The answer which explained the sense of beauty that we feel in works of art would go straight to the revelation of the essence of beauty. All that æsthetic teachers tell us is, that certain lines and colours and arrangements are harmonious, and the philosopher fails in telling us why they are harmonious. Does Hegel? Even if we are told there is an Idea in us which is also an Idea in Nature, and, therefore, we can understand the Idea, because We are It, does that throw light on what the Idea really is? We are the human side of nature, and have the same human difficulty as before in interpreting the Idea. Yet there is one philosopher, as many readers must have felt, who has brought us nearer to the interpretation of the artistic attitude, than any other, and this is Schopenhauer on what we may call his mystical side in his book of "Will and Idea." Perhaps most philosophers have erred in too rigid an exclusion of feeling and imagination. It is impossible to help feeling that his philosophy is largely moulded and created by his feeling for art—and by his oriental mysticism. He can be curiously prosaic at the same time, and this is another proof of the infinite complexity of the mind:—he can be inartistic and unpoetic so that he almost staggers us, as in his unillumining remarks on Landscape Art. Vegetation, according to Schopenhauer's theory, is on a lower grade of Will Objectification or Manifestation, than men and animals are, and landscape painting is, therefore, altogether on a different plane. Through his theories he loses the power of seeing that art is concerned with treatment, with conception and expression, that beauty depends not on the object, but on the treatment of the object.

But if we turn to his mystical theory of the Unconscious, we do get a beautiful description of the absorption, that is, of the essence of the artistic nature. He shows how the artist loses his own personality in the object of contemplation, so completely that he identifies himself mentally with it. Schopenhauer describes the artistic mind when it is affected by the beautiful and the sublime. By losing all sense of individuality and personality the artist is so possessed by his object of thought and vision that he is absorbed in it and feels the Idea, which it represents. This theory put into ordinary language, is that the artist has in him the sense of a great Idea, such as Beauty, and in his power of vision into objects of beauty he lives in the sense of Beauty, which they represent. They represent to him the Idea of Beauty itself. He lives in the Idea, is isolated in it, absorbed in it, and by the privilege of genius can keep the sense of the inner world of beauty and can produce beautiful works of art.

With joy and innocence, his whole soul absorbed in the beautiful forms which he creates, he represents the ideas within him, and he loses the sense of life and consciousness and Will, which, according to Schopenhauer, is to be freed from constant demands, and strivings. He is no longer bound to the wheel of desire—he has no personal interests—no subjectivity.

He is a "pure will-less, time-less subject of knowledge" of "pure knowing," which means complete absorption. He excites and suggests in others the knowledge of the Ideas, which, beautiful objects represent. Thus, through the works of Genius, others may reach an exalted frame of mind, for, indeed, if we had not some artistic capacity for seeing and feeling the Ideas which works of art represent, we should be incapable of feeling or enjoying them. Perhaps, to make this abstract thought clearer, it would be well to endeavour to find some examples which will illustrate Schopenhauer's meaning. And Shakespeare offers us incomparable examples. In his great tragedies—such as Othello, for instance—we feel the knowledge or Idea of Life, in all its varied human manifestations. Life,