To see a thing, to feel a thing, as a work of art, we must, then, become for the time unpractical, must be loosed from the fear and the flurry of actual living, must become spectators.  Why is this?  Why can we not live and look at once?  The fact that we cannot is clear.  If we watch a friend drowning we do not note the exquisite curve made by his body as he falls into the water, nor the play of the sunlight on the ripples as he disappears below the surface; we should be inhuman, aesthetic fiends if we did.  And again, why?  It would do our friend no harm that we should enjoy the curves and the sunlight, provided we also threw him a rope.  But the simple fact is that we cannot look at the curves and the sunlight because our whole being is centred on acting, on saving him; we cannot even, at the moment, fully feel our own terror and impending loss.  So again if we want to see and to feel the splendour and vigour of a lion, or even to watch the cumbrous grace of a bear, we prefer that a cage should intervene.  The cage cuts off the need for motor actions; it interposes the needful physical and moral distance, and we are free for contemplation.  Released from our own terrors, we see more and better, and we feel differently.  A man intent on action is like a horse in blinkers, he goes straight forward, seeing only the road ahead.

Our brain is, indeed, it would seem, in part, an elaborate arrangement for providing these blinkers.  If we saw and realized the whole of everything, we should want to do too many things.  The brain allows us not only to remember, but, which is quite as important, to forget and neglect; it is an organ of oblivion.  By neglecting most of the things we see and hear, we can focus just on those which are important for action; we can cease to be potential artists and become efficient practical human beings; but it is only by limiting our view, by a great renunciation as to the things we see and feel.  The artist does just the reverse.  He renounces doing in order to practise seeing.  He is by nature what Professor Bergson calls “distrait,” aloof, absent-minded, intent only, or mainly, on contemplation.  That is why the ordinary man often thinks the artist a fool, or, if he does not go so far as that, is made vaguely uncomfortable by him, never really understands him.  The artist’s focus, all his system of values, is different, his world is a world of images which are his realities.

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The distinction between art and ritual, which has so long haunted and puzzled us, now comes out quite clearly, and also in part the relation of each to actual life.  Ritual, we saw, was a re-presentation or a pre-presentation, a re-doing or pre-doing, a copy or imitation of life, but,—­and this is the important point,—­always with a practical end.  Art is also a representation of life and the emotions of life, but cut loose from immediate action.  Action may be and often is represented,