reconciliation; for we know from psychology that the instrument for the readjustment of contradictory tendencies is the image.

Keeping to the problem of conduct as the central problem of life, let us ask by what imagery some of it is carried on. To the Greeks the problem of conduct was one of balance. Every virtue, Aristotle conceived, is a mean between two extremes. Justice, which is probably the most comprehensive of the virtues, comes back very strikingly, I think, to the imagery of symmetry and balance. Moral regularity we often think of under the guise of some sensuously thinkable order or regularity. The problem of practical morality is the problem of seeing virtue under an attractive image. We can, of course, prove the social necessity of virtue, and can grasp ethical values as reasoned conclusions, but I do not think we can act virtuously until we see some beauty in it. This is not saying that we are an immoral lot, but only that beauty is an essential aspect of the ethical ideal. It is that which is immediately felt and which gives the stimulative power to the ideal.

The relationship of art to life we may finally express in terms of imagination and experience. The material of imagination comes from experience, that is, the image in its reproductive phase copies experience. But the constructive image is no longer a copy, but a creation, and then it is experience which follows or copies from imagination. So it is with art and life; each takes its turn as leader of the other, and life could no more spare art in the wide sense of that term than art could spare life.

INDEX