, will bewilder you. We know the outward
appearance of an object, of which we say that we know it, but what is
it _in itself_? Of that we are as much in the dark as we are of the
mind that knows. We say, each of us--I know, but in philosophy we are
not clear whether there is a thing that knows. We know we are
conscious, but we know nothing but that bare fact. We do not know how
an object swims into our consciousness. We do not know in the
scientific meaning of knowledge, how we come to know any object. Our
abysmal ignorance is this, that, of the thing known, and of that which
knows, and of the process of knowing, we know nothing. Who can tell us
how the movement of matter in the brain causes what we call thought.
Is it a cause, or merely a concurrence? When we can know this much,
then art may have a philosophy in which we can all agree. But, what
signs are there of even the beginnings of agreement? Certainly art is
not known as we know a science--perhaps we do not wish it ever to be
so. And the process of art is as indescribable as the process of
knowing. The advance we have made in philosophy seems to be this, that
whereas one philosopher after another according to his temperament has
thought he knew and has supplied us with hypotheses, and with
successive clues to the mystery of Being, and with many systems of
thought, we know now that none of them were adequate to supply even
initial steps, and so, for the most part, we fall back on the
knowledge that comes to us from living, from being, from knowing
appearances, from action, and from feeling; on that position in short
which Schopenhauer thought so despicable in a human being, _i.e._,
Refuge in the common sense attitude, and practically the giving up of
philosophy. The outcome of all the brain work on philosophy, since the
time of the Greeks, is that despair has entered into our minds of ever
achieving any knowledge of the _Real_, beneath and beyond Phenomena,
of a knowledge which _commands_ assent. Can even a Hegel write a
convincing Philosophy of Art--which implies a philosophy of complex
knowing and feeling; the feeling or emotion, or sensation, which
vibrates in music and colour and poetry. Could Hegel himself answer
this objection: that poetry eludes all tests--that that which you can
thoroughly explain in any way is not poetry, as Swinburne has said? It
is the inexplicable, then, which lies at the essence of art and it is
this, which if there is to be a Philosop