When your President did me the honour to invite me to read a paper before you, I had no idea about what I could write. Then I was not a little embarrassed to receive a note demanding a title forthwith. Ransacking the garrets of my mind I hit upon the pleasingly non-committal word, Aesthetica. I make no apology for bestowing upon my paper at this late hour a different appellation. Indeed mine is a procedure which might profitably be followed by the parents of less ephemeral beings than a twenty-minute paper. Unnumbered are the bad traditions which we inherit from our ancestors, but none is more barbarous than the custom of naming children before their characters are formed. Thus are we pestered with the hangdog Felix and the hoyden Elaine. Aesthetica is then but the nickname of childhood, and to-night I would fain christen it anew. The President of the Heretics has consented to be godfather. I call my paper "The Aesthetic Value of Orthodoxy".]

In these latter days the worshippers of art are many and they are jealous of their god. Not only is beauty inexplicable, but even the attempt to understand her, doomed though it be to certain failure, is profanation. We must kneel and pray; no impudent eye shall peak 'twixt fingers at the altar. But we who have cut out the heart of Christ and timed its beating – shall we draw back before the sacrosanctity of art ? "Yea,

2

surely," saith the pious decadent. But the mind of man is
neither decadent nor pious.

If on the one hand we differ from that obscurantism
which looks upon blindness as essential to worship, on the other
we must guard against that fallacious understanding of criticism
which confuses it with creation. We can analyse the nature of
beauty, but this analysis will not help us one whit to make
beautiful things. As well ask the botanist, skilled to dissect
the flower, to make you a rose, as demand of the writer on
Aesthetics a poem. For the botanist dissects by means of the
abstract intellect, and the rose is the product of organic matter:
the aesthetician too makes his analysis by the same intellect,
and the poem is the product of the sensuous imagination. But
even among those who do not directly ask the philosophers for a
poem, there is a disposition to do so vicariously. That is to
say, they demand a recipe by following which they themselves can
cook up some idyllic fantasy. They resemble those engagingly
simple folk who in their financial speculations seek out and
follow the dictates of some improvident fortune-teller: they
do not reflect that if aesthetic theories were a help to the
creation of art, every speculating don would be a poet. Indeed
for the philosopher to try to teach artistic creation even by
the soundest and most illuminating of theories would be as ab-
surd as for one of us to try to teach Latin without the use

3

of that language. For the language of criticism and that of
poetry are not the same, and no amount of clever juggling with
the one can teach us the other.

It is characteristic of our age, with its sheeplike trust
in the dispensations of creative evolution, that artists and
critics alike should appeal for justification to posterity.
They spell the word with a capital; and their deity, with the
assurance of the parvenu, has arrogated to itself that manifold
worship which in old days was shared by the unnumbered gods and
heroes and saints. These faithful argue not without premises
and not illogically, but their reasoning, valid in itself, is
oftenest misapplied. Natural science furnishes them with an in-
definite number of instances which come together to form their
premise, namely, that in the past of life upon this earth there
has been a development, interrupted to be sure, but none the less
persevering and unconquered, from the simple toward the complex.
The conditions of life have, broadly speaking, not changed, or
at least no change is apparent. Therefore it is argued that this
development from the simple toward the complex will continue in
the future, and, more specifically, that posterity will be made up
of people more highly developed than we - in a word, our betters.
Among the appurtenances of this happier race will be a surer and
more enlightened artistic taste. Thus it is presumptuous for
us who only grope in the dark to judge; we can only plead across
the centuries, prayerfully, to those more competent.

4

We can accept the premises to this argument and indeed the conclusion that there is every likelihood man will one day evolve a more complex consciousness than he at present possesses, without, nevertheless, being bound to sympathise with the application of this theory to the judgment of particular works of art. For keeping in mind the inconceivable slowness of evolution and the relative modernity of all that art which we now possess, is there any ground for supposing that when an appreciably deeper consciousness has come into being it will find still cluttering with this earth any remnants of that art which we have known ? I think not. Shakespeare the poet and all his works will be unremembered, and only grubbers in the cold ashes of antiquity will have read of that earth-deity of the English whose warrior character is perpetuated in his name.

Some enemy to generalisation might shove a stick between the spokes of this treatment of the appeal to Lady Posterity. Her canonization antedates Darwin. True, but that only made her a saint, and it is of her apotheosis that I have been speaking. Even her sainthood is but a thing of yesterday: her assumption of blessedness was coincident with the French Revolution. If you look through the literature of earlier centuries than the last, you will find but few appeals to her, at least in this judicial capacity. The honour paid her in the half century which preceded the success of her evangelist, Darwin, is to be

5

explained on one ground and on one ground only. It is corollary
to that doctrine comprehensible by faith alone, which tells us
that a thousand empty heads make a full one.

Appeal to posterity in matters artistic and philosophical
displays a total absence of comprehension of what is the very
essence of these subjects. No one surely would be so perverse
as to assert that Time is orthodox: history drips heresies as
a leaky pipe water, and the individual himself is but an arrested
bubble. What man worthy of the name has but one soul? He must
have many, and each must have a religion of its own. As the
German poet says: "I'm Wiederspruch besteht der Mensch", "Man-
hood consists in contradiction." If Time itself be not orthodox,
by what standard is it to judge of orthodoxy? Surely there
is none, and to speak of Time and this thing together is a con-
fusion of incommensurate terms. Yet in seeking for one word to
express the very essence of art and of philosophy I find none
other so satisfying as orthodoxy.

Perhaps, to avoid misunderstanding, it would be well I
should define what I mean by the word orthodox. Etymologically,
of course, it signifies "of right opinion", but since no two men
agree upon what is "right", this helps us not at all. "According
or congruous with ... the creed of a church" is, among those
definitions given by Webster, the nearest to the sense I intend.
"According to its congruous with certain assumed truths" would be
better: indeed my meaning differs but little from that of the

6

word "consistent". I prefer "orthodox" merely because I do not
wish to express only what is rational, and "consistent" has so
often been used in this latter sense that it has come, if not
to denote, at least to connote "consistency in reasoning."

Orthodoxy is the fundamental principle of art and of philo-
sophy. This is most evident in the case of mathematics, a
manifestation of orthodoxy which is, I am told, popular in
Cambridge. There we assume as true certain axioms which our
reason is unable to doubt. Using them as cornerstones, we rear
above those "airy palaces" which we call mathematical demonstra-
tions. Our one rule of building is that nothing shall either
dislodge them or itself be unsupported. In a word, we must be
consistent, or, as I prefer to say, orthodox. An arabesque
occupies a position in the realm of art analogous to that of
mathematics in the realm of philosophy. It gives us the naked
skeleton of art. As Ruskin did in his comparison of Greek and
Gothic architecture, so here too we can show how the same lineal
concords are repeated again and again in diverse complexities.
These primary relations correspond to the axioms in mathematics;
only, because they come to our consciousness more obviously
through the perception of the senses, we call them beautiful
rather than true. And those edifices we erect above we call
works of art rather than demonstrations. Here again our rule
of construction is orthodoxy.

Perhaps it would not be out of place for me to try to show
how philosophy is related to mathematics and the plastic arts
to pure design. To the detached soul the figure "§" is not less

7

pregnant with meaning than the word "Death". For both these
symbols have their meaning and their value through the relation-
ships which they connote. And who shall say that this unassum-
ing "§" is less rich in associations than the solemn word, Death?
For the connotations of each are infinite. They speak in differ-
ent languages, but they say the same thing. The whole difference
between mathematics and philosophy is one of language, the con-
tent and the values are identical. The same identity underlies
the Arabesque and the drawing of the human form. Here too the
connotations, in the one of the pure curve, in the other of the
emotions expressed in the same work. Thus the shape of the ear,
are of both infinite. Here too whatever value they have is
dependent upon these connotations. And in a given work of art
their meaning or emotional significance depends upon the other
emotions expressed in the same work. Thus the shape of the ear
will have meaning in so far as we relate it to the expression
of the face, to the posture of the body, and so far as it is
integral to some line of the composition. In the same fashion
we might show the parallel between pure harmony and programme
music, and the triple parallel of poetry to mathematics, to pure
design, and to harmony.

If the essential values of philosophy and mathematics, of
the plastic arts and pure design, and of the other arts in an
analogous fashion, are the same, someone might not unnaturally
ask why mankind have so generally preferred the less abstract,
why they have honoured the philosopher and the painter, and
neglected the mathematician and the designer of intricate

8

patterns. The reason is, I think, speaking from the view-point
of the soul, accidental. ~~Pure consciousness~~ regarded as an autopilot
would get quite as large emotional returns from following the
steps of a mathematical demonstration as from reading the proof
of some philosophical thesis. But Fate has planted the soul,
for good or ill, in a world of matter, and to hold her own against
the ponderous animosity of Time, she must exercise her con-
sciousness not only in the abstract but also, and primarily, in
the concrete. In her eternal duel with matter she cannot choose
her arms, for it is as the guest of her antagonist that she must
fight, and the terms of combat are fixed by her host. Therefore
the philosopher, who works in a medium more akin to this world
than does the mathematician, has ever been the more honoured.
For not only is the practice of philosophic contemplation in-
directly more salutary to the soul, inasmuch as it habituates
our consciousness to act in cooperation with this world, but
also it benefits us in politics and in other necessary activities
even more than does mathematics, for, as Plato remarked, it is
only when philosophers become kings, or kings philosophers, that
this world will be run half-way decently.

There is still another and a more important reason for the superiority in human estimation of the philosopher, the poet, the painter, the sculptor, and the composer, to the mathematician, and to the maker of patterns, and the builder of harmonies. Any one of the arts,

9

even all of them together, play but a small part in the life of
the normal man. Thus his emotions are more usually roused by
the events of his own life than by any form of art or science,
and, by force of repetition, they acquire the habit of respond-
ing more readily and more deeply to the accidents of daily life
than to any abstract symbols. We perceive here the genesis of
imitation in art, a tendency so widespread and so fundamental
that even the keen mind of Plato was led into the fallacious
belief that the nature of all art is imitative. To more easily
rouse the emotions and to touch them more deeply, the artist
began to fashion his arabesque in the semblance of the form of
man. Thus the reasoner began to substitute ideas like that of
Death, which in their connotation are concrete, in the place of
abstract numbers. These more concrete arts are all of them
imitative, philosophy and programme-music no less than painting,
for philosophy imitates the life of our thought in so far as it
consists in generalisations, just as poetry imitates it in
particulars; and music imitates our emotions, the emotions of
the auditor being moved rather by sympathy with that form which
is present in the feelings given utterance in the notes, than
as is the case in pure harmony, by sympathy with a less concrete
manifestation of the same thought. But we must not be dazzled
by these concrete shapes and ideas into thinking that they
leapt into themselves are what makes art speak to us, what makes it
in regard to imitation in painting, poetry, etc.

10

intelligible. For here the principle of expression is still
the same: it is one of form, of consistency, in a word, of
orthodoxy. As on a clear night we can see and understand the
signalling of a man with two staffs just as well as when he
waves two torches, so we can understand the language of mathe-
matics as well as that of philosophy. Yet by one about his
business, the staffs might pass unnoted and their signalling
might thus to him be meaningless, while the flaming torches
would both draw his attention and drive their message home to
his deeper consciousness. Such is the raison d'être of imita-
tion. But to the emancipated intellect the bare staffs are not
less luminous. Imitation in art and science is a concession to
worldliness: in heaven the angels are only pure lines and talk
only pure numbers.

You will recall that before digressing into the nature of
the imitative arts, I was speaking of the analogy between mathe-
matics and the arabesque. Here we perceive the essential
identity of art and science, between which the distinction is
even less fundamental than that between pure design and imita-
tion. For the difference expressed by the words "pure design"
and "imitation", though people are inclined to forget how merely
external it is, yet they are correct in understanding it to run
through all aesthetic manifestations. But the difference ex-
pressed by the words "art" and "science" is popularly thought

11

to be different in kind from that between the various arts and
thus to form a vital division, while, upon looking more closely,
we see that the distinction is by no means so fundamental as at
first appeared, indeed that it is correlate to the differences
between the arts themselves. For the medium of one art in line,
of another, sound, of another, the word representing a particu-
lar, and the medium of one science is the word representing a
general concept, of another, algebraic symbols. He would be
rash who should affirm that the difference between that language
which speaks in words standing for general concepts and that
which speaks in words standing for particulars is in any way
more fundamental than the difference between that art which
speaks in lines and that which speaks in sounds.

The subject of a work of art corresponds to the thesis to
be proved in a mathematical or philosophical problem. Thus we
might say that Rupert Brooke, when he sat down to the composi-
tion of [a poem familiar to you all] had before him this thesis:
"Grantchester is beautiful". That is what he instinctively felt
to be the case, just as the mediaeval scholastic had faith that
God is triune. The problem for both these men was to express
in its entirety the truth which they divined. One worked in the
medium of sensuous images, the other in that of abstractions,
but they worked along parallel lines and with like ends in view,
People who do not understand poetry sometimes ask what a given
poem proves; in this case to say it proves that "Grantchester
is beautiful" would of course be fatuous. This would be to
concur in their misunderstanding of poetry. For the value of a

12

work of art is inherent in the matter; the subject is merely
a summing up, for purposes of convenience, of this content. So
it is also with truth: the thesis proved is but a useful
compendium of that demonstration in which is present whatever
value the truth has. When the poet first felt the beauty of
his village and the philosopher the trinity of his God, neither
of them had any more than a vague and troubling sentiment. Only
when they embodied this sentiment through the technique of
their respective arts (for, as I said, philosophy is but another
art, one that exists in the non-sensuous) did beauty and truth
come into being; and when we say that "Grantchester is beauti-
ful", that "God is triune", beauty and truth are dead and only
their unsubstantial ghosts do we embrace. The Anglo-Saxon poet
tells us that human life is but the flight of a bird across a
lighted hall, that like the bird we are quickly gone into that
darkness whence we came. So it is with truth and beauty. For
the lighted hall is the demonstration the poem: before
they enter it they are but the beating of wings in the darkness,
and when they have had their course athwart the light, they are
again but the sound of wings.

All men of taste perceive this as regards the sensuous
arts; but the mathematician and the philosopher are, para-
doxically enough, recalcitrant to reason. They will acknow-
ledge that truth in its completeness exists only in the demon-
stration; yet for them the proved thesis, quite apart from the

13

demonstration, has some subtle and indefinable value. It is a
magical something which they rate above all else mundane; and
its pursuit they feel to be the highest aim in life. This is
the hypostasis of the true. I fear that its pedigree, like that
of other hypostases, is not of the best, indeed I trace it back
to very plebeian origin. In the case of poetry, the statement
that "Grantchester is beautiful" can be of little practical
value, and all subjects of art are of this kind, for art is
sensuous and can present only the particular, and it is by the
faculty of generalisation that we apprehend those laws of nature
which help us to direct the world. In the case of philosophy, the
statement that "God is triune" might also be said, though, I
think, somewhat dubiously, to be about particulars, and of little
practical value. Yet, however that may be, it is quite evident
that philosophy can equally well prove a thesis about generali-
sations, and about those which, like the fabulous goose, will
lay many a golden egg. And, of course, mathematics can be ap-
plied equally well to what is particular and what is not. The
trouble with philosophers is that they are unconsciously dazzled
by the golden eggs and forget that the goose is, after all, but
a farmyard fowl with an eccentricity in her laying. They make
of the goose an end in itself, when really such fortuitous value
as it has is but that of a means. But the demonstration and
the poem alone have direct human value: the golden eggs are only

14

a means toward the end of spiritual satisfaction, and the goose
is but a means to the eggs.

So far I have spoken only of mathematics, and of philosophy
in so far as it too is an affair of purely logical relations.
What of the physical sciences? Have they any kinship to art?
And what of that other aspect of philosophy in which we seek
an objectively true interpretation of the phenomenal world, of
causal relations? A philosophy can be likened to a painting;
primarily, as I have already shown, the values of both of them
are dependent upon form, consistency, orthodoxy. And both are
imitating the one acting upon our consciousness by the employ-
ment of ideas which have their roots in concrete experience, the
other by the use of sensuous images which also have their roots
in the same concrete experience. The reason, as we saw, for
choosing this symbolism which imitates our worldly life, is
that thus the attention of consciousness is arrested and the
formal movement driven home. But if in painting we so represent
the concrete objects depicted that to the man seeing the picture
our images do not appear to him as realities of his everyday
life, by just so much do we sacrifice the force of the imitative
symbolism, which we have chosen as our language. And by so
much less is the form and emotional content of our picture im-
pressed upon his consciousness. So it is with philosophy. If
our ideas do not correspond to those in our readers' memory

15

by so far does our symbolism remain inexpressive. An example
of this shortcoming in painting would be incorrect drawing of
a body, caused by defective knowledge of anatomy. If the on-
looker should perceive this error, then by so much would the
man represented cease to be a human reality and expressive of
emotion. In philosophy an incorrect idea, that is, one caused
by a wrong analysis of experience, would in similar fashion
cease to fit in with our experience, and the demonstration of
which this idea formed a part would by just so much cease to
be emotionally expressive. If, however, the onlooker is himself
ignorant of that law of anatomy which the drawing violates, then
the figure remains human and for him the value of the picture
is as great as though it were true to external reality. Thus
also, if the reader does not perceive that the idea does not
fit experience, all goes well, and the demonstration is for him
satisfying. Whether either painting or philosophy be true to
objective fact is of purely secondary importance; what matters
is that they should be expressive to the man who studies them.
If a group of children learn French from an English teacher with
a bad accent, they may none the less be able to communicate in
that language quite perfectly with one another; it is only some-
one that has been to Paris who finds their talk unintelligible.
The Paris of philosophy is the laboratory of correct analysis of
fact.

From the view-point of the soul facts are of value just in

16

so far as they can be made to interpret orthodoxy. Thus on occasion something may be discovered which renders inadequate a picture or a theology. We cannot merely alter our drawing or our explanation of the fact, for this would destroy the whole design of the picture, the whole rational order of the theology. And instead of one part of our picture being struck dumb by this discovery, that part would indeed be given once again a voice, but one that would cry a discordant note. Instead of one part of our theology being struck dead, that part would spring once again to life, but only to be a rebel in the state, striving to annul the whole spirit of her laws. The Catholic Church was well aware of all this. Galileo by his discovery had already killed a part of her theology, but for her to acknowledge that he was right, and thus to incorporate his new idea in her theology would mean worse than a death among her theological citizens - it would be to admit a rebel to the citadel. For good or for ill, the Church at last admitted him, for he had many friends, but others have followed him in the same gate and to-day Christendom is but anarchy. And because Galileo and his followers have analysed so well, many a soul that but for them might have walked with Christ is this night wandering about the wastes of Hell.

The physical sciences are comparable to those arts which beautify the external world. The landscape-gardener so disposes

17

his trees and shrubs that the scene becomes intelligible,
emotionally expressive; he lops off heretical branches. So the
botanist arranges not the trees and shrubs themselves, but their
natures as understood by the abstract intellect. These he dis-
poses in classes and sub-classes and whatever seems to contra-
dict the laws which for him interpret his data and make it
rational, he tries by further investigation to prove non-existent.
If he does not succeed, and the fact appears ultimate, then he
must change his whole interpretation. So the landscape-gardener,
if there is a ledge of rocks where his scheme requires a lawn,
will attempt to blast it away, but if this be impossible, then
he must change his scheme. Thus does a heresy conquer and by
its victory become a member of a new orthodoxy.

All this strikes me as difficult to prove. I merely offer
it to you as one interpretation of the nature of the arts and
sciences; perhaps there are better ones; perhaps you prefer none
at all. I have but tried to sketch out my way of looking at
these things; you will take or leave it according as it seems to
you more or less satisfactory than that total absence of commen-
surability between the respective values of truth and beauty
which is, I think, the state of things generally accepted. But
for me a new tenet in a religion is in value precisely equi-
valent to a new step in a dance. If it be not heretical, let
us welcome it gladly, for thus do we gain a new instrument with

18

which to rouse our consciousness. The promulgation of the doc-
trine of the Immaculate Conception was to Mediaeval Christianity
what the introduction of the tango was to modern dancing. They
were both orthodox and therefore to be accepted. But some of us
have dreamt of other orthodoxies, and, like Galileo and Isidora
Duncan, to the established order we are heretics, but to that
order which has not yet assumed the flesh we are orthodox.