experience, so to speak, at which social ideals impinge upon and
influence and mold pure nature. Art is the form in which play,
representing biological forces, is carried to a higher stage, and made
a factor in conscious evolution. The aesthetic experience is a
practical attitude in another way. It is by our aesthetic
appreciation, more than we commonly understand, that we judge life as
a totality, that we estimate the fitness of its parts to belong to the
whole, and that indeed we guide life when we judge it not according to
principles which so often are seen to be inadequate, but when we try
to bring to bear our utmost of powers of appreciation and to find
ultimate values.

Such a recognition of the relation of art or the aesthetic to life we
see often expressed in the literature of the day. It is a sign of the
times--of an effort to attain higher powers, to take more
comprehensive views of life, and to gain deeper insight into it. It is
a phase of the seriousness of purpose which the war has aroused in us.
Dide speaks of a deep but obscure need that drives all human beings to
put themselves in harmony with the universal, and says that this is
the end and purpose of the aesthetic tendencies. This phase of the
place of the aesthetic is seen and expressed in various ways. Some
think of it as a significant change in the attitude of life which is
to bring about an era of peace. Clutton-Brook, an English writer, says
that unless we attain to some kind of beauty and art, we shall have no
lasting peace. We shall never have freedom from war until we have a
peace that is worth living. Some see in the humanistic spirit an
essentially aesthetic principle. The fairness and justice of the
French, the spirit of the English that expresses itself in their ideal
of sportsmanship, some attribute to the aesthetic spirit.

All this is in keeping with our new experiences of life in all its
dynamic expressions. It becomes easier for us to see the truth about
the nature of the aesthetic and of all other powers of consciousness,
since consciousness has revealed itself to us as itself so great a
power. The aesthetic experience may no longer appear to be only a joy,
something subjective, but, indeed, as a practical force in the world.
The aesthetic is a feeling of power, but it is also an experience in
which mental power is generated, and it must be employed to such an
end. The aesthetic mood is a mood of happiness, but it is also a mood
of