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If art and philosophy are thus near akin, art and science are in their beginning, though not in their final development, contrasted.  Science, it seems, begins with the desire for practical utility.  Science, as Professor Bergson has told us, has for its initial aim the making of tools for life.  Man tries to find out the laws of Nature, that is, how natural things behave, in order primarily that he may get the better of them, rule over them, shape them to his ends.  That is why science is at first so near akin to magic—­the cry of both is: 

    “I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.”

But, though the feet of science are thus firmly planted on the solid ground of practical action, her head, too, sometimes touches the highest heavens.  The real man of science, like the philosopher, soon comes to seek truth and knowledge for their own sake.  In art, in science, in philosophy, there come eventually the same detachment from personal desire and practical reaction; and to artist, man of science, and philosopher alike, through this detachment there comes at times the same peace that passeth all understanding.

Attempts have been often made to claim for art the utility, the tool-making property, that characterizes the beginnings of science.  Nothing is beautiful, it is sometimes said, that is not useful; the beauty of a jug or a table depends, we are often told, on its perfect adaptation to its use.  There is here some confusion of thought and some obvious, but possibly unconscious, special pleading.  Much of art, specially decorative art, arises out of utilities, but its aim and its criterion is not utility.  Art may be structural, commemorative, magical, what-not, may grow up out of all manner of practical needs, but it is not till it is cut loose from these practical needs that Art is herself and comes to her own.  This does not mean that the jugs or tables are to be bad jugs or tables, still less does it mean that the jugs or tables should be covered with senseless machine-made ornament; but the utility of the jug or table is a good in itself independent of, though often associated with, its merit as art.

No one has, I think, ever called Art “the handmaid of Science.”  There is, indeed, no need to establish a hierarchy.  Yet in a sense the converse is true and Science is the handmaid of Art.  Art is only practicable as we have seen, when it is possible safely to cut off motor-reactions.  By the long discipline of ritual man accustomed himself to slacken his hold on action, and be content with a shadowy counterfeit practice.  Then last, when through knowledge he was relieved from the need of immediate reaction to imminent realities, he loosed hold for a moment altogether, and was free to look, and art was born.  He can never quit his hold for long; but it would seem that, as science advances and life gets easier and easier, safer and safer, he may loose his hold for longer spaces.  Man