But if the esthetic value is independent of the imitative approach to reality and independent of the elimination of unpleasant elements or of the collection and addition of pleasant traits, what does the artist really select and combine in his creation?  How does he shape the world?  How does nature look when it has been remolded by the artistic temperament and imagination?  What is left of the real landscape when the engraver’s needle has sketched it?  What is left of the tragic events in real life when the lyric poet has reshaped them in a few rhymed stanzas?  Perhaps we may bring the characteristic features of the process most easily to recognition if we contrast them with another kind of reshaping process.  The same landscape which the artist sketches, the same historic event which the lyric poet interprets in his verses, may be grasped by the human mind in a wholly different way.  We need only think of the scientific work of the scholar.  He too may have the greatest interest in the landscape which the engraver has rendered:  the tree on the edge of the rock, torn by the storm, and at the foot of the cliff the sea with its whitecapped waves.  He too is absorbed by the tragic death of a Lincoln.  But what is the scholar’s attitude?  Is it his aim to reproduce the landscape or the historic event?  Certainly not.  The meaning of science and scholarship and of knowledge in general would be completely misunderstood if their aim were thought to be simply the repeating of the special facts in reality.  The scientist tries to explain the facts, and even his description is meant to serve his explanation.  He turns to that tree on the cliff with the interest of studying its anatomical structure.  He examines with a microscope the cells of those tissues in the branches and leaves in order that he may explain the growth of the tree and its development from the germ.  The storm which whips its branches is to him a physical process for which he seeks the causes, far removed.  The sea is to him a substance which he resolves in his laboratory into its chemical elements and which he explains by tracing the geological changes on the surface of the earth.

In short, the scientist is not interested in that particular object only, but in its connections with the total universe.  He explains the event by a reference to general laws which are effective everywhere.  Every single growth and movement is linked by him with the endless chain of causes and effects.  He surely reshapes the experience in connecting every single impression with the totality of events, in finding the general in the particular, in transforming the given facts into the scientific scheme of an atomistic universe.  It is not different from the historical event.  To the scholarly historian the death of Lincoln is meaningless if it is not seen in its relation to and connection with the whole history of the Civil War and if this again is not understood as the result of the total development of the United States.