But when Dr. Bosanquet goes on to make his inferences, I suggest that he infers too much. “Thus,” he says, “all embodiment in special kinds of physical objects by help of special media and special processes is wholly foreign to the nature of art and beauty.... There is nothing to be learned from the practical means by help of which intuitions of beauty receive permanence and communicability.” “Wholly foreign” and “nothing to be learned” are, I think, too strong. Though the practical means are distinct from art, they are part of the artist’s experience. The artist is not working _in vacuo_. He is a certain man, with a certain nature and experience, at a certain moment of time. His joy, say, in handling and modelling clay (I take this example from an old lecture of Dr. Bosanquet’s) will be one of the factors in his experience. In that sense it will not be “wholly foreign” to his art, and he will have “learned” something from it. It is not itself the art-impulse, the expressive activity, but it is, what Croce calls it, a _point d’appui_ for a new one. For let us hear what Croce himself says on this point (“Estetica,” Ch. XIII.). “To the explanation of physical beauty as a mere aid for the reproduction of internal beauty, or expression, it might be objected, that the artist creates his expressions in the act of painting or carving, writing or composing; and that therefore physical beauty, instead of following, sometimes precedes æsthetic beauty. This would be a very superficial way of understanding the procedure of the artist, who, in reality, makes no stroke of the brush without having first seen it in his imagination; and, if he has not yet seen it, will make it, not to externalize his expression (which at that moment does not exist), but as it were on trial and to have a mere _point d’appui_ for further meditation and internal concentration. The physical _point d’appui_ is not physical beauty, instrument of reproduction, but a means that might be called _pedagogic_, like retiring to solitude or the many other expedients, often queer enough, adopted by artists and men of science and varying according to their various idiosyncrasies.” Can we not put it more generally and say that the artist’s historic situation is changing at every moment and his experience with his medium is part of that situation (just as is the date of his birth, his country, or the state of his digestion), or in other words, one of the influences that make him what he is and not some one else? But to admit that, it seems to me, is not at all to deny the independence of his spiritual activity in expression any more than the freedom of the will is denied by the admission that will must always be exercised in a definite historical situation.