of some liberal
theologians to use the churches chiefly as instruments for
giving social effectiveness to the religious impulse and at the
same time for making social betterment a spiritual enterprise.

CHAPTER XIII

ART AND THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

ART _VERSUS_ NATURE. In the Career of Reason man has gradually
learned to control the world in which he lives in the interests
of his own welfare as he imaginatively contemplated it.
Deliberate control has been made necessary because of the
fact that man is born into a world which was not made for
him, but in which he must, if anywhere, grow; in a world which
was not designed to fulfill his desires, but where alone his
desires can find fulfillment. Art may thus, in the broadest
sense, be set over against Nature. It is the activity by which
man realizes ideals. He may realize them practically, as when
he builds a house which he has first imagined, or reaps a
harvest in anticipation of which he has first sown the seeds. He
may realize them imaginatively, as when in color, form, or
sound he creates some desiderated beauty out of the crude
miscellaneous materials of experience. Art, in the broad
sense of control or direction of Nature, arises in the double
fact of man's instinctive activities and desires and the
inadequacy of the environment as it stands to afford them
satisfaction. Because nature is not considerate of his needs, man
must himself take forethought, and devise means by which
the forces and the materials of Nature may be exploited to his
own good. And the realization of this forethought is made
possible through the fact that natural conditions do lend
themselves to modification. Nature, though indifferent to man's
welfare, is yet partly congruous with it. While the wind
blows careless of the good or ill it does to him, yet man may
learn by means of windmills or sailboats to turn the wind to
his own interest. Though the river may flow on forever,
oblivious to the men that come and go along its shores, yet
the passing generations may transform this undeliberate
flowing into the power that yields them clothing, machinery,
and transportation. All civilization is, as Mill says, an
exhibition of Art or Contrivance; it is illustrated by

the junction by bridges of shores which Nature had made separate,
the draining of Nature's marshes, the excavation of her wells, the
dragging to light of what she has buried at immense depths in the
earth; the turning away