through the dark world with his lantern turned on the things he wants; the man of genius sees the world by the light of the sun. In modern times Bergson adopted that view of Schopenhauer’s, with a terminology of his own, and all he said under this head may be regarded as a charming fantasia on the Schopenhauerian theme: “Genius is the most complete objectivity.” Most of us, it seems to Bergson, never see reality at all; we only see the labels we have fixed on things to mark for us their usefulness.[130] A veil is interposed between us and the reality of things. The artist, the man of genius, raises this veil and reveals Nature to us. He is naturally endowed with a detachment from life, and so possesses as it were a virginal freshness in seeing, hearing, or thinking. That is “intuition,” an instinct that has become disinterested. “Art has no other object but to remove the practically useful symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, so as to bring us face to face with reality itself.”[131] Art would thus be fulfilling its function the more completely the further it removed us from ordinary life, or, more strictly, from any personal interest in life. That was also Remy de Gourmont’s opinion, though I do not know how far he directly derived it from Schopenhauer. “If we give to art a moral aim,” he wrote, “it ceases to exist, for it ceases to be useless. Art is incompatible with a moral or religious aim. It is unintelligible to the crowd because the crowd is not disinterested and knows only the principle of utility.” But the difficulty of making definite affirmation in this field, the perpetual need to allow for _nuances_ which often on the surface involve contradictions, is seen when we find that so great an artist as Einstein—for so we may here fairly call him—and one so little of a formal æsthetician, agrees with Schopenhauer. “I agree with Schopenhauer,” he said to Moszkowski, “that one of the most powerful motives that attract people to science and art is the longing to escape from everyday life, with its painful coarseness and unconsoling barrenness, and to break the fetters of their own ever-changing desires. Man seeks to form a simplified synoptical view of the world conformable to his own nature, to overcome the world by replacing it with his picture. The painter, the poet, the philosopher, the scientist, each does this in his own way. He transfers the centre of his emotional life to this picture, to find a surer haven of peace than the sphere of his turbulent personal experience offers.” That is a sound statement of the facts, yet it is absurd to call such an achievement “useless.”