We fight first against a political valuation of art, that imagines poetry, pictures and music as auxiliaries in the reconstruction or conservation of the state, and judges them by their efficiency as political pamphlets. We fight secondly against an educational valuation of art, that judges works of art by the accuracy of the facts they happen to embody, the accuracy of the pictures they paint of this or that form of life, the clearness with which they illustrate generalisations. We fight thirdly against the valuation of art by its technical skill, by the beauty that is a universal condition of its being. These things cannot afford a scale of comparison for works of art, but only a guarantee that they are worthy of judgment. We should not fight against this valuation if it showed itself in practice capable of so useful an office. It is, however, not sufficiently selective, but allows itself to be tricked by things built in imitation of perfect building, things whose form is not identical with their content, things which manifest more skill than vitality. This, our old ally, since it made our battle possible, is now our subtlest enemy. Our battle is far from being easy, for we fight not to kill but to make captive, and it is easier and safer to fight to kill. We fight not to destroy those valuations, but to destroy their pre-eminence. Recognising (1) that a work of art has a political, comparable to its moral, influence, (2) that it always embodies knowledge, (3) that it is nothing if it does not wake in us the feeling that we are near the achievement of the beautiful, we wish to deny none of these facts, but to prevent any one of them from being taken as the foundation of a criterion of art. We wish to set over them a criterion of art that shall include them all. Above technique, above opinion, above information, we set life, of the special kind that is here described, whose conscious vitality is to unconscious vitality what living is to existence. What, then, do we ask ourselves after experiencing a work of art.