ABSTRACT
artists and poets, and all poetic and artistic minds, are inclined to hold that art is the highest and purest, and indeed the only form of true and intimate knowledge of reality. This idea also found its way into some philosophic systems of the romantic age, especially that of Schelling in his first period, and is suggested by thinkers who, like Bergson, were more or less under his influence. I will not here repeat the easy refutation of this as a theory; I prefer to take it in its more spontaneous form, as it occurs in practitioners and amateurs of art, that is to say, as a way of thinking whose conclusion is erroneous but which must have some good grounds to justify its origin and its continual recurrence. What these grounds are we must now enquire.
