From: oispeggy@ubvmsc.cc.buffalo.edu (Peggy Brown)
Newsgroups: alt.magick
Subject: Re: Ritual Magick Experiences - John Ruskin Essay
Summary: long...Science vs. Magick
Keywords: Ruskin, Science, Art
Date: 16 Apr 92 15:14:00 GMT
Organization: University at Buffalo
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41

In article <1992Apr15.220827.21687@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>, ba@mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu (B.A. Davis-Howe) writes...
>mascdb@gdr.bath.ac.uk (C D Burdorf) writes:

> [stuff deleted]

Often modern people limit their perceptions to the bounds of science.  (It was 
not always like this.)  These limits are being expanded, as science moves into
the mystical dimension.  Regardless, why let science limit perceptions in the 
first place?  

CD and others figuring out the relationship between science and magick, take 
this essay, change "art" to "magick," and kick it around...

Still a skeptic,

- Peggy -

******************************************************************************
From: The Stones of Venice

                Art and the Limits of Knowledge [excerpts from]
                           by John Ruskin

Science and art are commonly distinguished by the nature of their actions; 
the one as knowing, the other as changing, producing, or creating.  But there 
is a still more important distinction in the nature of the things they deal 
with.  Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves; and 
art exclusively with things as they affect the human sense and human soul.  
Her work is to portray the appearances of things, and to deepen the natural 
impressions which they produce upon living creatures.  The work of science is 
to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.  
Both, observe, are equally concerned with truth; the one with truth of 
aspect, the other with truth of essence.  Art does not represent things 
falsely, but truly as they appear to mankind.  Science studies the relations 
of things to each other: but art studies only their relations to man: and it 
requires of everything which is submitted to it imperatively this, and only 
this, --what that thing is to the human eyes and human heart, what it has to 
say to men, and what it can become to them: a field of question just as much 
vaster than that of science, as the soul is larger than the material 
creation....

..this, then, being the kind of truth with which art is exclusively 
concerned, how is such truth as this to be ascertained and accumulated?  
Evidently, and only by perception and feeling.  Never either by reasoning or 
report.  Nothing must come between Nature and the artist's sight; nothing 
between God and the artist's sould.  Neither calculations nor hearsay, --be it 
the most subtle of calculations, or the wisest of sayings, --may be allowed to 
come between the universe, and the witness which art bears to its visible 
nature.  The whole value of that witness depends on its being eye-witness; 
the whole genuineness, acceptableness, and dominion of it depend on the 
personal assurance of the man who utters it.  All its victory depends on the 
veracity of the one preceding word, "Vidi."

..Nay, but, the reader perhaps pleads with me, one of the great uses of 
knowledge is to open the eyes; to make things perceivable which never would 
have been seen, unless first they had been known.

Not so.  This could only be said or believed by those who do not know what 
the perceptive faculty of a great artist is, in comparison with that of other 
men.  There is no great painter, no great workman in any art, but he sees more 
with the glance of a moment than he can learn by the labour of a thousand 
hours.

..But for one visible truth to which knowledge thus opens the eyes, it seals 
them to a thousand: that is to say, if the knowlege occur to the mind so as 
to occupy its powers of contemplation at the moment when the sight-work is to 
be done, the mind retires inward, fixes itself upon the known fact, and 
forgets the passing visible ones; and a momemt of such forgetfulness loses 
more to the painter than a days's thoughts can gain.  This is no new or 
strange assertion.  Every person accustomed to careful reflection of any kind 
knows that its natural operation is to close his eyes to the external world.  
While he is thinking deeply, he neither sees nor feels, even though naturally 
he may possess strong powers of sight and emotion. 

What then, it will be indignantly asked, is an utterly ignorant and 
unthinking man likely to make the best artist?  No, not so neither.  
Knowledge is good for him so long as he can keep it utterly, servilely, 
subordinate to his on divine work, and trample it under his feet, and out of 
his way, the moment it is likely to entangle him.

And in this respect, observe, there is an enormous difference between 
knowledge and education.  An artist need not be a learned man; in all 
probability it will be a disadvantage to him to become so; but he ought, if 
possible, always to be an educated man: that is, one who has understanding of 
his own uses and duties in the world, and therefore of the general nature of 
the things done and existing in the world; and who has so trained himself, or 
been trained, as to turn to the best and most courteous account whatever 
faculties or knowledge he has.  The mind of an educated man is greater than 
the knowledge it possesses; it is like the value of heaven, encompassing the 
earth which lives and flourished beneath it: but the mind of an uneducated 
and learned man is like a caoutchouc band, with an everlasting spirit of 
contraction in it, fastening together papers which it cannot open, and keeps 
others from opening.

Half our artists are ruined for want of education, and by the possession of 
knowledge; the best that I have known have been educated, and illiterate.  
The ideal of an artist, however, is not that he should be illiterate, but 
well read in the best books, and thoroughly high bred, both in heart and in 
bearing.  In a word, he should be fit for the best society, AND SHOULD KEEP 
OUT OF IT.

Now it is perhaps the most exquisite absurdity of the whole Renaissance 
system, that while it has encumbered the artist with every species of knowledge 
that is of no use to him, this one precious and necessary knowledge it has 
utterly lost.  There is not, I believe, at this momemt, a single question 
which could be put respecting pigments and methods, on which the body of 
living artists would agree in their answers.  The lives of artists are 
passed in fruitless experiments; fruitless, because undirected by experience 
and uncommunicated in their results.
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