We do not ask for a philosophy of artistic creations (whatever they may be, in music, painting, or poetry), for a Philosophy of Art must be a philosophy of the artistic faculty that creates, and that admires and understands and is absorbed in the creations.  Philosophy of Art is the philosophy of the creative—­receptive qualities.  We feel these qualities, but we are not able to explain them, we cannot even help another to feel them.  The capacity comes from within.  In ourselves is a nameless response to Beauty.  All art is an expression of the artist thrown out towards a reproduction of some intuitive Idea within, and what artist has ever satisfied his inward aspiration?  Why tell us that harmonies of art may be traced down to the simplest lines, and, that at the root, lies an aim of edification?  Simplify the lines, as we will, let the basis of edification lie at the root of all beauty, still the initial question remains unanswered.  Why do certain lines in a poem, curves of beauty in a statue, colour in a picture, produce in us the feelings of beauty and delight?  Why does edification, if it is such, produce in me, the sense of a nameless beauty?

There is that in us which we call the sense or Idea of beauty, and we recognise it in works of art.  What causes it in us?  It is a sentiment, but it is more than a sentiment.  It is indissolubly connected with expression, but it is more than expression.  It raises all kinds of associations, but it is more than associations.  It thrills the nerves, it stimulates the intellect, but it is more than a thrill, and other than the intellect; it is treatment, but who can give laws for it?  The answer which explained the sense of beauty that we feel in works of art would go straight to the revelation of the essence of beauty.  All that aesthetic teachers tell us is, that certain lines and colours and arrangements are harmonious, and the philosopher fails in telling us why they are harmonious.  Does Hegel?  Even if we are told there is an Idea in us which is also an Idea in Nature, and, therefore, we can understand the Idea, because We are It, does that throw light on what the Idea really is?  We are the human side of nature, and have the same human difficulty as before in interpreting the Idea.  Yet there is one philosopher, as many readers must have felt, who has brought us nearer to the interpretation of the artistic attitude, than any other, and this is Schopenhauer on what we may call his mystical side in his book of “Will and Idea.”  Perhaps most philosophers have erred in too rigid an exclusion of feeling and imagination.  It is impossible to help feeling that his philosophy is largely moulded and created by his feeling for art—­and by his oriental mysticism.  He can be curiously prosaic at the same time, and this is another proof of the infinite complexity of the mind:—­he can be inartistic and unpoetic so that he almost staggers us, as in his unillumining remarks on Landscape Art.  Vegetation, according to Schopenhauer’s theory, is on a lower grade of Will Objectification or Manifestation, than men and animals are, and landscape painting is, therefore, altogether on a different plane.  Through his theories he loses the power of seeing that art is concerned with treatment, with conception and expression, that beauty depends not on the object, but on the treatment of the object.