Philosophical Theories Or Ideas, As Points Of

The Base Of All Artistic Genius Is The Power Of Conceiving Humanity In A New, Striking, Rejoicing Way, Of Putting A Happy World Ofits Own Creation In Place Of The Meaner World Of Common Days, Of Generating Around Itself An Atmosphere With A Novel Power Of Refraction, Selecting, Transforming, Recombining The Images It Transmits, According To The Choice Of The Imaginative Intellect. In Exercising This Power, Painting And Poetry Have A Choice Of Subject Almost Unlimited.

Beauty, Like All Other Qualities Presented To Human Experience, Is Relative; And The Definition Of It Becomes Unmeaning And Useless In Proportion To Its Abstractness. To Define Beauty Not In The Most Abstract, But In The Most Concrete Terms Possible, Not To Find A Universal Formula For It, But The Formula Which Expresses Most Adequately This Or That Special Manifestation Of It, Is The Aim Of The True Student Of Aesthetics.

For Us Necessity Is Not As Of Old An Image Without Us, With Whom We Can Do Warfare; It Is A Magic Web Woven Through And Through Us, Like That Magnetic System Of Which Modern Science Speaks, Penetrating Us With A Network Subtler Than Our Subtlest Nerves, Yet Bearing In It The Central Forces Of The World.

What We Have To Do Is To Be Forever Curiously Testing New Opinions And Courting New Impressions.

Experience, Already Reduced To A Group Of Impressions, Is Ringed Round For Each One Of Us By That Thick Wall Of Personality Through Which No Real Voice Has Ever Pierced On Its Way To Us, Or From Us To That Which We Can Only Conjecture To Be Without.