The World Soul.  Emerson.

He whom the World Soul “forbids to despair” cannot but hope; and he who hopes tries ever to imagine that “fairer world” yearning for birth beyond this interval of blood and tears.  Prophecy, to all but the anointed, is dangerous and uncertain, but even so, the author cannot forbear attempting to prevision the architecture likely to arise from the wrecks and sediment left by the war.  As a basis for this forecast it is necessary first of all briefly to classify the expression of the building impulse from what may be called the psychological point of view.

Broadly speaking, there are not five orders of architecture—­nor fifty—­but only two:  Arranged and Organic.  These correspond to the two terms of that “inevitable duality” which bisects life.  Talent and genius, reason and intuition, bromide and sulphite are some of the names we know them by.

Arranged architecture is reasoned and artificial; produced by talent, governed by taste.  Organic architecture, on the other hand, is the product of some obscure inner necessity for self-expression which is sub-conscious.  It is as though Nature herself, through some human organ of her activity, had addressed herself to the service of the sons and daughters of men.

Arranged architecture in its finest manifestations is the product of a pride, a knowledge, a competence, a confidence staggering to behold.  It seems to say of the works of Nature, “I’ll show you a trick worth two of that.”  For the subtlety of Nature’s geometry, and for her infinite variety and unexpectedness, Arranged architecture substitutes a Euclidian system of straight lines and (for the most part) circular curves, assembled and arranged according to a definite logic of its own.  It is created but not creative; it is imagined but not imaginative.  Organic architecture is both creative and imaginative.  It is non-Euclidian in the sense that it is higher-dimensional—­that is, it suggests extension in directions and into regions where the spirit finds itself at home, but of which the senses give no report to the brain.

[Illustration:  PLATE VIII.  IMAGINATIVE SKETCH BY HENRY P. KIRBY]

To make the whole thing clearer it may be said that Arranged and Organic architecture bear much the same relation to one another that a piano bears to a violin.  A piano is an instrument that does not give forth discords if one follows the rules.  A violin requires absolutely an ear—­an inner rectitude.  It has a way of betraying the man of talent and glorifying the genius, becoming one with his body and his soul.

Of course it stands to reason that there is not always a hard and fast differentiation between these two orders of architecture, but there is one sure way by which each may be recognized and known.  If the function appears to have created the form, and if everywhere the form follows the function, changing as that changes, the building is Organic; if on the contrary, “the house confines the spirit,” if the building presents not a face but however beautiful a mask, it is an example of Arranged architecture.