“is evidently inapplicable to some of the modes in which the word is familiarly employed. For example, it entirely conflicts with the common form of speech by which Nature is opposed to Art, and natural to artificial. For in the sense of the word Nature which has thus been defined, and which is the true scientific sense, Art is as much Nature as anything else; and everything which is artificial is natural—Art has no independent powers of its own: Art is but the employment of the powers of Nature for an end. Phenomena produced by human agency no less than those which, as far as we are concerned, are spontaneous, depend on the properties of the elementary forces, or of the elementary substances and their compounds. The united powers of the whole human race could not create a new property of matter in general, or of any one of its species. We can only take advantage for our purposes of the properties we find. A ship floats by the same laws of specific gravity and equilibrium as a tree uprooted by the wind and blown into the water. The corn which men raise for food grows and produces its grain by the same laws of vegetation by which the wild rose and the mountain strawberry bring forth their flowers and fruit. A house stands and holds together by the natural properties, the weight and cohesion of the materials which compose it. A steam engine works by the natural expansive force of steam, exerting a pressure upon one part of a system of arrangements, which pressure, by the mechanical properties of the lever, is transferred from that to another part, where it raises the weight or removes the obstacle brought into connexion with it. In these and all other artificial operations the office of man is, as has often been remarked, a very limited one; it consists of moving things into certain places. We move objects, and by doing this, bring some things into contact which were separate, or separate others which were in contact; and by this simple change of place, natural forces previously dormant are called into action, and produce the desired effect. Even the volition which designs, the intelligence which contrives, and the muscular force which executes these movements, are themselves powers of Nature.”
Another mode of thought, in some sort complementary to the last, is based on the analogy which the operations of forces external to a man bear to the operations of man himself. Study, forethought and exertion are assigned to Nature, and her operations are called operations of Art. This view was familiar to ancient systems of philosophy, and especially to that of the Stoics. According to the report of Cicero, Nature as conceived by Zeno was a fire, and at the same time a voluntary agent having the power or art of creating things with regularity and design (“naturam esse ignem artificiosum ad gignendum progredientem via”). To this fire not merely creative force and systematic action were ascribed, but actual personality. Nature was “non artificiosa solum, sed plane artifex.” “That which in the works of human art is done by hands, is done with much greater art by Nature, that is, by a fire which exercises an art and is the teacher of other arts.” This conception of Nature as an all-generating fire, and at the same time as a personal artist both teaching and including in her own activity all the human arts, on the one hand may be said, with Polixenes and J.S. Mill, to merge Art in Nature; but on the other hand it finds the essence of Nature in the resemblance of her operations to those of Art. “It is the proprium of art,” according to the same system, “to create and beget,” and the reasoning proceeds—Nature creates and begets, therefore Nature is an artist or Demiurgus. A kindred view is set forth by Sir Thomas Browne in the Religio Medici, when he declares that “all things are artificial; for Nature is the Art of God.”
But these modes of thought, according to which, on the one hand, the processes of Art are included among processes of Nature, or on the other the processes of Nature among the processes of Art, are exceptional. In ordinary use the two conceptions, each of them somewhat vague and inexact, are antithetical. Their antithesis was what Dr Johnson had chiefly in his mind when he defined Art as “the power of doing something which is not taught by Nature or by instinct.” But this definition is insufficient, because the abstract word Art, whether used of all arts at once or of one at a time, is a name not only for the power of doing something, but for the exercise of the power; and not only for the exercise of the power, but for the rules according to which it is exercised; and not only for the rules, but for the result. Painting, for instance, is an art, and the word connotes not only the power to paint, but the act of painting; and not only the act, but the laws for performing the act rightly; and not only all these, but the material consequences of the act or the thing painted. So of agriculture, navigation and the rest. Exception might also be taken to Dr Johnson’s definition on the ground that it excludes all actions of instinct from the genus Art, whereas usage has in more languages than one given the name of Art to several of those ingenuities in the lower animals which popular theory at the same time declares to be instinctive. Dante, for instance, speaks of boughs shaken by the wind, but not so violently as to make the birds forgo their Art—
| “Non però dal lor esser dritto sparte Tanto, che gl’ augelletti per le cime Lasciasser d’ operar ogni lor arte.” |
And Fontenelle, speaking in the language not of poetry but of science:—“Most animals—as, for instance, bees, spiders and beavers—have a kind of art peculiar to themselves; but each race of animals has no more than one art, and this one has had no first inventor among the race. Man, on the other hand, has an infinity of different arts which were not born with his race, and of which the glory is his own.” Dr Johnson might reply that those properties of variety and of originality or individual invention, which Fontenelle himself alleges in the ingenuities of man but not in those of the lower animals, are sufficient to make a generic difference, and to establish the impropriety of calling a honeycomb or a spider’s web a work of Art. It is not our purpose to trespass on ground so debateable as that of the nature of consciousness in the lower animals. Enough that when we use the term Art of any action, it is because we are thinking of properties in the action from which we infer, whether justly or not, that the agent voluntarily and designedly puts forth skill for known ends and by regular and uniform methods. If, then, we were called upon to frame a general definition of Art, giving the word its widest and most comprehensive meaning, it would run thus:—Every regulated operation or dexterity by which organized beings pursue ends which they know beforehand, together with the rules and the result of every such operation or dexterity.
Here it will be well to consider very briefly the natural history of the name which has been given to this very comprehensive conception by the principal branches of civilized mankind. Our own word Art the English language has taken, as all the Romance languages of modern Europe have taken theirs, directly from the Latin. The Latin ars, according to the prevailing opinion of philologists, proceeds from a root AR, of which the primitive signification was to put or fit things together, and which is to be found in a large family of Greek words. The Greek τέχνη, the name both for arts in the particular and art in the abstract, is by its root related both to τέκ-των and τέκ-νον, and thus contains the allied ideas of making and begetting. The proprium of art in the logic of the Stoics, “to create and beget,” was strictly in accordance with this etymology. The Teutonic Kunst is formed from können, and können is developed from a primitive Ich kann. In kann philology is inclined to recognize a preterite form of a lost verb, of which we find the traces in Kin-d, a child; and the form Ich kann thus meaning originally “I begot,” contains the germ of the two several developments,—können, “to be master,” “to be able,” and kennen, “to know.” We thus see that the chief Indo-European languages have with one consent extended a name for the most elementary exercise of a constructive or productive power, till that name has covered the whole range of the skilled and deliberate operations of sentient beings.
In proportion as men left out of sight the idea of creation, of constructing or producing, “artificiosum esse ad gignendum,” which is the primitive half of this extended notion, and attended only to the idea of skill, of proceeding by regular and disciplined methods, “progredi via,” which is the superadded half, the whole notion Art, and the name for it, might become subject to a process of thought which, if analysed, would be like this:—What is done by regular and disciplined methods is Art; facts are observed and classified, and a systematic view of the order of the universe obtained, by regular and disciplined methods; the observing and classifying of facts, and obtaining a systematic view of the order of the universe, is therefore Art. To a partial extent this did unconsciously take place. Science, of which the essence is only in knowledge and theory, came to be spoken of as Art, of which the essence is all in practice and production. Cicero, notwithstanding his citation of the Stoical dictum that practice and production were of the essence of Art, elsewhere divides Art into two kinds—one by which things are only contemplated in the mind, another by which something is produced and done. (“Quumque artium aliud eiusmodi sit, ut tantummodo rem cernat; aliud, ut moliatur aliquid et faciat.”—Acad. ii. 7.) Of the former kind his instance is geometry; of the latter the art of playing on the lyre. Now geometry, understanding by geometry an acquisition of the mind, that is, a collected body of observations and deductions concerning the properties of space and magnitude, is a science and not an art; although there is an art of the geometer, which is the skill by which he solves any given problem in his science, and the rules of that skill, and his exertion in putting it forth. And so every science has its instrumental art or practical discipline; and in as far as the word Art is used only of the practical discipline or dexterity of the geometer, the astronomer, the logician, the grammarian, or other person whose business it is to collect and classify facts for contemplation, in so far the usage is just. The same justification may be extended to another usage, whereby in Latin, and some of its derivative languages, the name Art came to be transferred in a concrete sense to the body of rules, the written code or manual, which lays down the discipline and regulates the dexterity; as ars grammatica, ars logica, ars rhetorica and the rest. But when the word is stretched so as to mean the sciences, as theoretical acquisitions of the mind, that meaning is illegitimate. Whether or not Cicero, in the passage above quoted, had in his mind the science of geometry as a collected body of observations and deductions, it is certain that the Ciceronian phrase of the liberal arts, the ingenuous arts, both in Latin and its derivatives or translations in modern speech, has been used currently to denote the sciences themselves, and not merely the disciplines instrumental to them. The trivium and the quadrivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric—geometry, astronomy, music and arithmetic) have been habitually called arts, when some of them have been named in that sense in which they mean not arts but sciences, “only contemplating things in the mind.” Hence the nomenclature, history and practical organization, especially in Britain, of one great division of university studies: the division of “arts,” with its “faculty,” its examinations, and its degrees.
In the German language the words for Art and Science have in general been loosely interchanged. The etymology of the word for Art secured a long continuance for this ambiguity. Kunst was employed indiscriminately in both the senses of the primitive Ich kann, to signify what I know, or Science, and what I can do, or Art. It was not till the end of the 17th century that a separate word for Science, the modern Wissenschaft, came into use. On the other hand, the Greek word τέχνη, with its distinct suggestion of the root signification to make or get, acted probably as a safeguard against this tendency. The distinction between τέχνη, Art or practice, and ἐπιστήμη, knowledge or Science, is observed, though not systematically, in Greek philosophy. But for our present purpose, that of making clear the true relation between the one conception and the other, further quotation is rendered superfluous by the discussion the subject has received at the hands of the modern writer already quoted. Between Art, of which we practise the rules, and Science, of which we entertain the doctrines, J.S. Mill establishes the difference in the simplest shape, by pointing out that one grammatical mood is proper for the conclusions of Science, and another for those of Art. Science enunciates her conclusions in the indicative mood, whereas “the imperative is the characteristic of Art, as distinguished from Science.” And as Art utters her conclusions in her own form, so she supplies the substance of her own major premise.
“Every art has one first principle, or general major premise, not borrowed from science, that which enunciates the object aimed at, and affirms it to be a desirable object. The builder’s art assumes that it is desirable to have buildings; architecture (as one of the fine arts) that it is desirable to have them beautiful and imposing. The hygienic and medical arts assume, the one that the preservation of health, the other that the cure of disease, are fitting and desirable ends. These are not propositions of science. Propositions of science assert a matter of fact—an existence, a co-existence, a succession, or a resemblance. The propositions now spoken of do not assert that anything is, but enjoin or recommend that something should be. They are a class by themselves. A proposition of which the predicate is expressed by the words ought or should be is generically different from one which is expressed by is or will be.”
And the logical relation of Art and Science, in other words, the manner of framing the intermediate member between the general major premise of Art and its imperative conclusion, is thus defined:—