This plane in the shape of a crouching lion is the model of a good organic decoration. The construction is not injured; it does no damage to the under-surface of the plane, that it is the smooth-lying belly of the lion with drawn claws; it does not prejudice the working capacity of the iron, that it is let into a mouth of a slightly waving lip shape; it does not make it difficult to work, that the handle is shaped like a round lion’s head. A sense is communicated to the tool which it did not originally possess; it does not shave and smoothe, but lives, tears, devours, and finds its joy therein. Organic decoration is thus an infusing of soul into that which possessed no soul; and not only this, but also in a higher and nobler way, a submerging of oneself in the soul that the artist has inspired into that which was soulless. He must live in the being which his anthropomorphising association of ideas has excogitated. “What should I feel, how should I act, what movements should I make, what expression should I have, if I were this object, but thinking, willing, feeling—in short, living and conscious? How should I, for instance, as a plane which was really a beast of prey, dispose myself, if I had the board—my victim—under me, and began devouring it?” The organically decorative artist is, therefore, really the dramatiser of the inanimate, for he creates beings, bestows on them character, and makes them act according to the latter and the situation, and, if not speak, nevertheless imitate. If an artist has, from some especially vivid intuition and active association of ideas, found and embodied an anthropomorphic likeness which is very strikingly clear, imitation seizes it and repeats it with slight individual changes, which are, now and then, spirited and happy, but, for the most part, make the original picture dull, nay, through stupidity or misunderstanding may degrade it to nonsense. Such is exactly the case with the material picture as with the word-picture. At first it is the new and peculiar discovery of a poetic mind, then it is repeated well or ill so often that it ends with being a characterless commonplace. Every cultivated language is made up of such commonplaces, and, in like manner, style is made up of repetitions and tones, which are the plastic equivalent of rhetorical phrases. The psychic sources of style—in contradistinction to those or freely devised organic decoration, which style only repeats and vulgarises—originate in very mean domains of mind. They are thoughtlessness, or, to put it more clearly and briefly, stupidity and mental inertia in their special forms as imitativeness and detestation of novelty.