The Expressionists, meanwhile, held to Van Gogh's and Gauguin's idea that the picture must represent some emotion, but they denied Gauguin's corollary that some form derived from nature was necessary to transpose this emotion into its pictorial equivalent. Consequently they eliminated form and strove to paint abstract emotion. Finally, the Vorticists combined Futurism and Expressionism into a single whole and painted the abstraction of an abstraction--the emotion of dynamic energy, thus declaring painting to be an absolute-thing-in-itself, an art utterly innocent of any illustrative purpose whatsoever. The motives of all these confused art movements, perplexing and apparently in-congruous, were identical. They were all actuated by a mania for scientific discovery, a desire to analyze phenomena until the reality behind phenomena could be found. The physicists, chemists, philosophers had proven that the world of appearances was not the real world--that everything that existed was merely a question of ions and electrons, of radiant or non-radiant energy, or perhaps of elasticity and inelasticity. These young art revolutionaries, who gave themselves so many queer labels, were not, as many supposed, either insincere or insane. They were merely smitten with the desire to make painting--and not only painting, but even other arts as well--a branch of abstract science. The world of phenomena had been proved to be an illusion, making some abstract concept. Therefore they strove to paint, not what seemed to them unreal, but their absolute conceptions. This new metaphysic, this new attempt at absolute realism, this final development of scholastic art-dogma, as narrow and soul-destroying in its way as the rules for painting religious ikons, evolved and practiced for centuries by the Byzantine monks of Mount Athos, was rapidly conquering the whole field of aft when the past war broke out. Nor has the war altogether suppressed its manifestations.