ulness, do the proudest and seemingly freest
works of art come to exist; come to be _just what they are_, and even
come _to be at all_.

I should like to state very clearly, before analysing its reasons,
what seems to me (and I am proud to follow Ruskin in this as in so
many essential questions of art and life) the true formula of this
matter. Namely: that while beauty has always been desired and obtained
for its own sake, the works in which we have found beauty embodied,
and the arts which have achieved beauty's embodying, have always
started from impulses or needs, and have always aimed at purposes or
problems entirely independent of this embodiment of beauty.

III.

The desire for beauty stands to art as the desire for righteousness
stands to conduct. People do not feel and act from a desire to feel and
act righteously, but from a hundred different and differently-combined
motives; the desire for righteousness comes in to regulate this feeling
and acting, to subject it all to certain preferences and repugnances
which have become organic, if not in the human being, at least in human
society. Like the desire for righteousness, the desire for beauty is not
a spring of action, but a regulative function; it decides the _how_ of
visible existence; in accordance with deep-seated and barely guessed at
necessities of body and soul, of nerves and perceptions, of brain and
judgments; it says to all visible objects: since you needs must be, you
shall be in _this_ manner, and not in that other. The desire for beauty,
with its more potent negative, the aversion to ugliness, has, like the
sense of right and wrong, the force of a categorical imperative.

Such, to my thinking, is the aesthetic instinct. And I call _Art_
whatever kind of process, intellectual and technical, creates,
incidentally or purposely, visible or audible forms, and creates them
under the regulation of this aesthetic instinct. Art, therefore, is art
whenever any object or any action, or any arrangement, besides being
such as to serve a practical purpose or express an emotion or transfer
a thought, is such also as to afford the _sui generis_ satisfaction
which we denote by the adjective: beautiful.

But, asks the reader, if every human activity resulting in visible or
audible form is to be considered, at least potentially, as art; what
becomes of _art_ as distinguished from _craft_, or rather what is the
difference between what we all mean by art and what