s connections with the total universe. He explains the
event by a reference to general laws which are effective everywhere.
Every single growth and movement is linked by him with the endless chain
of causes and effects. He surely reshapes the experience in connecting
every single impression with the totality of events, in finding the
general in the particular, in transforming the given facts into the
scientific scheme of an atomistic universe. It is not different from the
historical event. To the scholarly historian the death of Lincoln is
meaningless if it is not seen in its relation to and connection with the
whole history of the Civil War and if this again is not understood as
the result of the total development of the United States. And who can
understand the growth of the United States, unless the whole of modern
history is seen as a background and unless the ideas of state philosophy
which have built up the American democracy are grasped in their
connection with the whole story of European political thought in
preceding centuries? The scholar may turn to natural or to social
events, to waves or trees or men: every process and action in the world
gains interest for him only by being connected with other things and
events. Every point which he marks is the nodal point for numberless
relations. To grasp a fact in the sense of scholarly knowledge means to
see it in all its connections, and the work of the scholar is not simply
to hold the fact as he becomes aware of it but to trace the connections
and to supplement them by his thought until a completed system of
interrelated facts in science or in history is established.

Now we are better prepared to recognize the characteristic function of
the artist. He is doing exactly the opposite of what the scholar is
aiming at. Both are changing and remolding the given thing or event in
the interest of their ideal aims. But the ideal aim of beauty and art is
in complete contrast to the ideal aim of scholarly knowledge. The
scholar, we see, establishes connections by which the special thing
loses all character of separateness. He binds it to all the remainder of
the physical and social universe. The artist, on the contrary, cuts off
every possible connection. He puts his landscape into a frame so that
every possible link with the surrounding world is severed. He places
his statue on a pedestal so that it cannot possibly step into the room
around it. He makes his persons speak in