which is to soul. For the true artist, or the seeker of truth in art, the natural fact is nothing but raw material. It is the error of realism to take the natural fact for the sufficient end of art. That was but the unintelligence of the child, in whom esthetic perception is yet unawakened, which lauded the genius of the two artists, one of whom painted grapes so that birds pecked at the picture and the other a curtain so that his rival asked him to draw the curtain and display his work. As the reaction from a false and cramping conventionalism,

"The musty laws lined out with wretched rule and compass vile," the movement to realism has its part of truth; but the whole truth, which alone is truth, is never found in mere reaction. The realistic spirit, such as found expression, for instance with the English Pre-Raphaelites in their humble veneration for nature and devotion to its faithful reproduction, is a blindness to the true meaning and purpose of art. If art is mere imitation of nature, what is the use of it? We have the original. But in truth to tie up art in nature is to strangle it in its cradle. Nature as nature has no place in art, for art is precisely the transcendence of nature; it is the transfiguration of the real into a revelation of the ideal. That is to find the truth of the fact. In the particular, the relative, the finite the artist must see the universal, the absolute, the infinite, and then his recreative imagination must reproduce that vision so that others shall share it. In so far as he succeeds in this--the representation of the spiritual in the material, he is an artist and his work a work of art.

Aristotle is sometimes quoted as an authority for realism on the strength of his saying that art in general is mimesis, a term which is translated imitation and taken to mean imitation of nature. Prof. Masson in a recent volume of essays refers to this dictum, constrasts it with passages from Bacon advocating idealism in art, and after lengthy consideration concludes that Bacon is right and Aristotle wrong. This conclusion, however, rests on a failure to understand Aristotle, who meant by mimesis not the imitation of sensuous fact, but the representation of rational truth. It has long been the communis error to regard Aristotle as the empiricist who opposed rather than the idealist who completed Plato, but in the matter of art his position

ought to be sufficiently clear. A single quotation from the Poetics will meet the imputation of a shallow realism: "Art is more philosophic and more earnest than History." This indeed will perhaps be going too far for Prof. Masson. What! one

may exclaim, is the record of fact to be assigned a lower place than the inventions of fancy? Do not art-critics from Lessing to Palgrave tell us that the end and aim of art is production of high and refined pleasure, and is this elegant amusement to be declared more serious and more important than the story of all human experience? But the Epicureanism which views art as a ministry to refined enjoyment is as radically mistaken as that which makes the end of virtue to consist in the happiness it brings the well-doer. What in a word is art? Again Aristotle will furnish us with a definition: "Art is the exercise of a creative faculty based upon reason." In this lies the explanation of the other saying that art is more philosophic and more earnest than history. A few words will make this clear.

The lowest form of mental activity is sensation, which in the lowest organisms does not amount to perception. Next comes this latter, the power of distinguishing between sensations. Higher than this is memory, which reproduces past impressions, and so is the condition of understanding which induces and deduces laws. Above all stands reason, the organ of principles, the vision of inward necessity, as understanding is the organ of laws, or the vision of outward necessity. Now history is the record of past events in their genetic sequence, and hence is based upon perception, memory and understanding; but if art is based on reason, it stands higher in the mental scale, and is plainly more philosophic and more earnest than history." The principles which underlie history are a secret for it. They belong to the philosophy of history, not to history proper. But art has intelligence of principles, and deals consciously with absolute truth.

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Art is creation based upon reason; here is a rebuke to that extravagant romanticism which finds anything artistic if it only have a place in reality. Not all that is real is material for art, but only that which contains a rational element. There are artists take for a specimen Baudelaire-who not only give us a Chinese copy of reality, in which the trivial is as fully and

carefully rendered as the important, but who turn from preference to the evil, the ugly, the repulsive as an unworked field of reality capable of yielding new and striking results. In this loss of all sense of discrimination and selection as to its subjectmatter, realism becomes a path no less fatal to art than the opposite path of idealism.

I have said that art deals with absolute truth; a word as to its mode of doing so. The absolute presents itself to man under three aspects, correspondent to his three-fold constitution; it is to reason the true, to imagination the beautiful, to will the good. But as human spirit is one in its triune constitution, so the absolute is one in its three-fold relation. Philosophy, art, and religion are but the same thing under different aspects,man's elevation to the absolute, in which, being himself spirit and partaker in the absolute, he comes fully to himself. The natural man beholdeth not the things of the spirit, neither can he know them because they are spiritually discerned. The spirit, that is, is the idealist proper. As merely natural, man's life is a delusion and a disorder. Philosophy, art, and religion have this one common aim, to lift man above the facts of his natural existence to the truth of his spiritual life. Philosophy lifts him from the blindness of sense and the antinomies of understanding to the clear vision of truth. Art lifts him from devotion to the worldly and the vain, to luxury and fashion, to adoration of that beautiful which is "the splendor of the true.” Religion lifts him from the sway of selfish passions to the infinite peace of communion with the divine. Each in its sev eral way leads him toward the full self-consciousness in which he knows, feels, and lives as a being that shares the divine

nature.

It is then a low and false view of art which would make it servant to an idle dilletantism. Art is an entirely earnest thing. It is to make us pure and strong and free; it is sacrilege to make it pander to our weakness, our vanity, or our vice. There is not much genuine art in the world, but there is more than can be mastered in a life-time. It is these great works of genius that have made the thistle-bearing earth more habitable and the gift of life more welcome to us. And great work was only done by men who greatly thought and wrought. These

knew their art for one among the potent agencies of spiritual culture.

"For Beauty, Good, and Knowledge are three sisters

That dote upon each other, friends to man,

Living together under the same roof,

And never can be sundered without tears."

Art is the necessary complement to philosophy and religion, and a necessary co-worker to their common end. It is related to one of the three equal parts of man's nature, as they to the other parts. It is one equal strand of the triple cord of vision, love, and obedience which make up the spiritual life. And that spiritual life is our organic union with the Absolute. Truth, beauty, and goodness are no abstractions; they live in the character of the Living God. The beauty that dwells in outward nature, the beauty wrought by human hands is but the faint reflection of the glory of the Majesty Divine. The Madonnas of a Raphael, and the Symphonies of a Beethoven are but broken lights and far off echoes of His ineffable harmonies and the loveliness unpicturable. Thus all art is a hymn of praise. Its aim is to lead the soul through avenues of sense and outward things, refined and spiritualized, to where it shall catch some glimpse of the beauty of the Highest, of that Light which being compared with light is found before it,-more beautiful than the sun and above all the orders of the stars. And this the heathen Greek well knew. The speaker in the old dialogue exclaims: "That life only is the true life which is passed in communion with Beauty. But if a man had eyes to see the true Beauty, I mean the Divine Beauty, pure, clear, and unalloyed, no longer dressed by human fancy or clouded by human coloring, how splendid the destiny of that mortal to whom, thither looking and holding converse with Beauty in its own infinite majesty, it should be given to become immortal and the friend of God."

ARTICLE IV.-SCIENCE IN THE PENTATEUCH.

WE have often met with the assertion, very confidently made, that the writer of the Pentateuch, however well versed in the academics of his own time, was wholly ignorant of the true sciences so well established now. More definitely: It is often stated, as if a matter beyond doubt, that Moses, the Hebrew prince, knew nothing of true astronomy, nothing of geology, nothing of analytic chemistry. We think that this opinion is emphatically expressed alike by eminent students of the Hebrew Scriptures and by adepts in natural science. We do not call it in question. On the contrary, we accept it. We shake hands over it. We wish to stand on the same ground with those who hold it. We wish to have it distinctly understood, as we start upon a short meditative excursion, that it shall be mutually held as if an opinion demonstrated.

Upon this premise we state our purpose. We propose under its light quietly to examine a few statements which we have culled from the many remarkable ones which distinguish the books of which Moses is the reputed author. We say "reputed," because, by some literary men whom we respect, he is thought to have been a compiler, to some extent, of the writings of others. We cheerfully concede this point because, as will be seen, it can only give to most of our citations the prestige of a greater antiquity, and therefore will not detract from any possible force which there may be in our course of thought.

Our first selection is this writer's description of a day: "There was evening and there was morning-one day." This description is emphatically the writer's own. It is peculiar to this one page of his writings. We have not met with it elsewhere, or heard of it as from any other source; and we firmly believe that its like has never been found on any other page of human literature.* Its salient peculiarity, we need hardly say

* In Dan. vii, 14, 26, the two words (p) "evening" and "morning" appear in the same order. In the first case our version renders the two by "days," and the Septuagint inserts pépal. But in neither case does the Hebrew word D' appear, nor do the two stand as descriptive of "day."