The philosophy which he has invented is an attempt to prove that no philosophy is necessary. Carried to its conclusion, this theory eventuates in the belief that painting must become an arrangement of forms and colors which have no human connotation whatsoever for the artist or the spectator. These arrangements represent nothing in the real world. They signify nothing. They are an esthetic artifice in the same sense that the more esoteric geometries are logical artifices. This much can at least be said of them: they are a consistent effort to practice the arts in a world where there is no human tradition upon which the representative arts can draw. This absolute estheticism is not, however, art without philosophy. Some sort of philosophy is implied in all human activity. The artist who says that it is delightful above all other things to realize the pure form of objects, regardless of whether this object is a saint, a lovely woman, or a dish of fruit, has made a very important [p106] statement about life. He has said that the ordinary meanings which men attach to objects are of no consequence, that their order of moral values is ultimately a delusion, that all facts are equally good and equally bad, and that to contemplate anything, it does not matter what, under the aspect of its esthetic form, is to realize all that the artist can give. This, too, is a philosophy and a very radical philosophy at that. It is in fact just the philosophy which men were bound to construct for themselves in an age when the traditional theory of the purpose of life had lost its meaning for them. For they are saying that experience has no meaning beyond that which each man can find in the intense realization of each passing moment. He must fail, they would feel, if he attempts to connect these passing moments into a coherent story of his whole experience, let alone the whole experience of the human race. For experience has no underlying significance, man himself has no station in the universe, and the universe has no plan which is more than a drift of circumstances, illuminated here and there by flashes of self-consciousness. _(f) The Burden of Originality_