And whatever rectangles Mr. Hambidge may discover in Greek works of art, he will not thereby have revealed the secret of Greek art. For rectangles are physical facts (when they are not mere abstractions), and art is not a physical fact, but a spiritual activity. It is in the mind of the artist, it is his vision, the expression of his intuition, and beauty is only another name for perfect expression. That, at any rate, is the famous “intuition-expression” theory of Benedetto Croce, which at present holds the field. It is a theory which, of course, presents many difficulties to the popular mind—what æsthetic theory does not?—but it covers the ground, as none other does, and comprehends all arts, painting, poetry, music, sculpture, and the rest, in one. Its main difficulty is its distinction between the æsthetic fact, the artist’s expression, and the physical fact, the externalization of the artist’s expression, the so-called “work” of art. Dr. Bosanquet has objected that this seems to leave out of account the influence on the artist’s expression of his material, his medium, but Croce, I think, has not overlooked that objection (“Estetica,” Ch. XIII., end), though many of us would be glad if he could devote some future paper in the _Critica_ to meeting it fairly and squarely. Anyhow, æsthetics is not a branch of physics, and the “secret” of art is not to be “revealed” by a whole Euclidful of rectangles. But it is, of course, an interesting fact that certain Greeks, and before them certain Egyptians, took certain rectangles as the basis of their designs—rectangles which are also related to the average proportions of the human body and to certain botanical types. If Mr. Hambidge—or his predecessors, of whom Sir Theodore Cook speaks—have established this they have certainly put their fingers on an engaging convention. Who would have thought that the “golden section” that very ugly-looking (√5 + 1)/2 could have had so much in it? The builder of the Great Pyramid of Ghizeh knew all about it in 4700 B.C. and the Greeks of the age of Pericles, and then Leonardo da Vinci toyed with it—“_que de choses dans un menuet!_” It is really rather cavalier of Croce to dismiss this golden section along with Michael Angelo’s serpentine lines of beauty as the astrology of Æsthetic. A POINT OF CROCE’S