This difference between play and art is sometimes pushed to the point of saying that art has its root in the social impulse, the wish to please.[224] This I think is simplifying too much. Art is no doubt a social phenomenon, as Guyau and others have shown. It has been well said that "an individual art—in the strictest sense—even if it were conceivable is nowhere discoverable".[225] That is to say the artist is constituted as such by a participation in the common consciousness, the life of his community, and his creative impulse is controlled and directed by a sense of common or objective values. Yet to say that art is born of the instinct to please or attract is to miss much of its significance. The ever-renewed contention of artists, ‘art for art’s sake,’ points to the fact that they, at least, recognise in their art-activity something spontaneous, something of the nature of self-expression, self-realisation, and akin to the child’s play. ----- Footnote 224: According to Mr H. Rutgers Marshall art-activity takes its rise in the instinct to attract others (_Pain, Pleasure, and Æsthetics_). Footnote 225: Grosse, _Anfänge der Kunst_, p. 48. ----- May we not say, then, that the impulse of the artist has its roots in the happy semi-conscious activity of the child at play, the all-engrossing effort to ‘utter,’ that is, give outer form and life to an inner idea, and that the play-impulse becomes the art-impulse (supposing it is strong enough to survive the play-years) when it is illumined by a growing participation in the social consciousness, and a sense of the common worth of things, when, in other words, it becomes conscious of itself as a power of shaping semblances which shall have value for other eyes or ears, and shall bring recognition and renown? Or, to put it somewhat differently, may we not say that art has its twin-rootlets in the two directions of childish activity which we have considered, _viz._, the desire to please so far as this expresses itself in dress, graceful action, and so forth, and the entrancing isolating impulse of play? However we express the relation, I feel sure that we must account for the origin of art by some reference to play. A study of the art of savages, more especially perhaps of the representations of fighting and hunting in their pantomime-dances, seems to show that art is continuous with play-activity.