in general in the fine arts creative genius has found
ways of imaginatively attaining perfections not usually accorded
in the experiences of the senses, in the life of society,
or in the life of the mind.

The region called imagination has pleasures more airy and luminous
than those of sense, more massive and rapturous than those of
intelligence. The values inherent in imagination, in instant
intuition, in sense endowed with form, are called aesthetic values; they are
found mainly in nature and in living beings, but also in man's artificial
works, in images evoked by language, and in the realm of sound.[1]

[Footnote 1: Santayana: _Reason in Art_, p. 15.]

The painter imagines and seeks to realize hues and intensities
of color more satisfying and more suggestive than those
commonly experienced in nature, save in the occasional grace
of sunset on a mountain lake, or the miracle of moonlight
on the ocean. The artist takes his hints from nature, but
clothes the suggestions of sense with the values and motives
which exist only in his own mind and imagination. A Turner
sunset is, as Oscar Wilde points out, in a sense incomparably
superior to one provided by nature. It not only gives the
beautiful sensations to be had in a landscape suffused with
the sunset glow; it infuses into this experience the passionate
and penetrating insight of a genius. The artist, to an extent,
imitates nature. But, if that were all he did, he would be no
more than a photographer. He pictures nature, but gives it
"tint and melody and breath"; he gives it a value and significance
derived from his own imaginative vision. The musician
combines sounds more significant, ordered, and rhythmical
than those miscellaneous noises which, in ordinary
experience, beat indifferently or painfully upon our ears.
The poet selects words whose specific music, rhythmical
combinations, and lyrical context produce a something more
evocative, compelling, and euphonic than the casual and
raucous instrument of communication which constitutes
ordinary speech.

Not only do poets give imaginative and ideal extensions to
sense experience; they do as much with and for social life.
In the dreaming of Utopias, in the building of the Perfect
City, men have found compensations for the imperfect cities
which have been their experiences on earth. They build
themselves in imagination a world where all injustices are
erased, where beauty is perennial, where truth, courage,
kin