th noting.

It is worth noting because it indicates a vague feeling that art has a
real value, that art is not a mere luxury, nor even a rarefied form of
pleasure. No one feels they _ought_ to take pleasure in beautiful scents
or in the touch of velvet; they either do or they don't. The first
point, then, that must be made clear is that art is of real value to
life in a perfectly clear biological sense; it invigorates, enhances,
promotes actual, spiritual, and through it physical life.

This from our historical account we should at the outset expect, because
we have seen art, by way of ritual, arose out of life. And yet the
statement is a sort of paradox, for we have seen also that art differs
from ritual just in this, that in art, whether of the spectator or the
creator, the "motor reactions," _i.e._ practical life, the life of
doing, is for the time checked. This is of the essence of the artist's
vision, that he sees things detached and therefore more vividly, more
completely, and in a different light. This is of the essence of the
artist's emotion, that it is purified from personal desire.

But, though the artist's vision and emotion alike are modified,
purified, they are not devitalized. Far from that, by detachment from
action they are focussed and intensified. Life is enhanced, only it is a
different kind of life, it is the life of the image-world, of the
_imag_ination; it is the spiritual and human life, as differentiated
from the life we share with animals. It is a life we all, as human
beings, possess in some, but very varying, degrees; and the natural man
will always view the spiritual man askance, because he is not
"practical." But the life of imagination, cut off from practical
reaction as it is, becomes in turn a motor-force causing new emotions,
and so pervading the general life, and thus ultimately becoming
"practical." No one function is completely cut off from another. The
main function of art is probably to intensify and purify emotion, but it
is substantially certain that, if we did not feel, we could not think
and should not act. Still it remains true that, in artistic
contemplation and in the realms of the artist's imagination not only are
practical motor-reactions cut off, but intelligence is suffused in, and
to some extent subordinated to, emotion.

* * * * *

One function, then, of art is to feed and nurture the imagination and
the spirit, and thereby enhance a