Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1911 (Heft 36))

fix in drawn or painted outlines and planes the truly statuesque element of the
human figure, to discover its plastic attitudes and gestures that, however com-
plicated and dissonant, have been eternally the same, is surely a more vital
vocation than to make an accurate copy of some professional model and to
pass it for a Job or Danaea.
All great art expressions are extractions, typifications, symbolizations of
general laws and apparitions, composite expressions of such concentration and
breadth that they reflect unconsciously our noblest emotions about man and
his relation to the world. It is this vagueness of thought endeavoring to sound
the foundation of all things, this want of definition, hinting at ideas that cannot
be precisely expressed, that give to art its ultimate and finest significance.
Sadakichi Hartmann.

AN EXTRACT FROM BERGSON*
“Instinct is sympathy. If this sympathy could extend its object and also
reflect upon itself, it would give us the key to vital operations—just as in-
telligence, developed and disciplined, guides us into matter. For—we cannot
too often repeat it—intelligence and instinct areturned in opposite directions,
the former towards inert matter, the latter towards life. Intelligence, by means
of science, which is its work, will deliver up to us more and more completely
the secret of physical operations; of life it brings us, and moreover only claims
to bring us, a translation in terms of inertia. It goes all round life, taking
from outside the greatest possible number of views of it, drawing it into itself
instead of entering into it. But it is to the very inwardness of life that in-
tuition leads us—by intuition I mean instinct that has become disinterested,
self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it in-
definitely.
That an effort of this kind is not impossible, is proved by the existence
in man of an aesthetic faculty along with normal perception. Our eye per-
ceives the features of the living being, merely as assembled, not as mutually
organized. The intention of life, the simple movement that runs through the
lines, that binds them together and gives them significance, escapes it. This
intention is just what the artist tries to regain, in placing himself back within
the object by a kind of sympathy, in breaking down, by an effort of intuition,
the barrier that space puts up between him and his model. It is true that this
aesthetic intuition, like external perception, only attains the individual. But
we can conceive an inquiry turned in the same direction as art, which would
take life in general for its object, just as physical science, in following to the
end the direction pointed out by external perception, prolongs the individual
facts into general laws. No doubt this philosophy will never obtain a knowl-
edge of its object comparable to that which science has of its own. Intelligence
remains the luminous nucleus around which instinct, even enlarged and
purified into intuition, forms only a vague nebulosity. But, in default of
knowledge properly so called, reserved to pure intelligence, intuition may
*“ Creative Evolution,” by Henri Bergson.

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