r as the musical composer
expresses the emotions of life the great symphonies have been full of
pathos and tragedy. True art has always been selection, but never
selection of the beautiful elements in outer reality.

But if the esthetic value is independent of the imitative approach to
reality and independent of the elimination of unpleasant elements or of
the collection and addition of pleasant traits, what does the artist
really select and combine in his creation? How does he shape the world?
How does nature look when it has been remolded by the artistic
temperament and imagination? What is left of the real landscape when the
engraver's needle has sketched it? What is left of the tragic events in
real life when the lyric poet has reshaped them in a few rhymed stanzas?
Perhaps we may bring the characteristic features of the process most
easily to recognition if we contrast them with another kind of reshaping
process. The same landscape which the artist sketches, the same historic
event which the lyric poet interprets in his verses, may be grasped by
the human mind in a wholly different way. We need only think of the
scientific work of the scholar. He too may have the greatest interest in
the landscape which the engraver has rendered: the tree on the edge of
the rock, torn by the storm, and at the foot of the cliff the sea with
its whitecapped waves. He too is absorbed by the tragic death of a
Lincoln. But what is the scholar's attitude? Is it his aim to reproduce
the landscape or the historic event? Certainly not. The meaning of
science and scholarship and of knowledge in general would be completely
misunderstood if their aim were thought to be simply the repeating of
the special facts in reality. The scientist tries to explain the facts,
and even his description is meant to serve his explanation. He turns to
that tree on the cliff with the interest of studying its anatomical
structure. He examines with a microscope the cells of those tissues in
the branches and leaves in order that he may explain the growth of the
tree and its development from the germ. The storm which whips its
branches is to him a physical process for which he seeks the causes, far
removed. The sea is to him a substance which he resolves in his
laboratory into its chemical elements and which he explains by tracing
the geological changes on the surface of the earth.

In short, the scientist is not interested in that particular object
only, but in it