I think I made some attempt to deal with "art" as I was talking. I
contrasted it with "artifice," and my phrase "Artist with a big A" was
another hint to you that the word must be handled cautiously. You know
that in ordinary conversation we say that bees have "the art" or "an
art" of making hexagonal cells of wax, that wasps have an art of making
a sort of paper for their nests, that there is an art of logic, an art
of cookery, an art in making a gravel path. Now in each of these
instances the word really speaks of the adaptation of means to ends. In
the case of the bees and wasps there is a slightly different _nuance_ of
meaning, because they make their cells and their paper just as a bird
builds its nest, through the influence of forces which to us are occult,
which we conveniently sum up under the word instinct. In the arts of
cookery and pathmaking there is a conscious employment of certain means
towards the securing of certain ends; and it is at least possible that
the swallow, gathering its materials and shaping them, has at the moment
nothing but a blind impulse, similar to that of hunger--we all know when
we are hungry and we all know what to do in such a case, but we do not
all know the physiology of the stomach and the gastric juices, and
perhaps not one of us knows the whole secret of inanition and
nutrition. We simply eat because we want to eat, not because we wish to
supply ourselves with a certain quantity of peptones; and so perhaps the
swallow gathers her nest and shapes it, without the consciousness of the
eggs and the little birds that are to follow. But I need not remind you
that there are plenty of well authenticated instances of animals who
have consciously used means to secure ends, and thus "art" in its common
significance is not even an exclusively human faculty. When, for
example, the bees find themselves in danger of being left queenless,
they administer what has been called "royal food" to a common grub, and
that which would have been a worker becomes a queen; and in this case
the bees are as much "artists" as the cook who puts a particular
ingredient into a dish with the view of obtaining a particular flavour.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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