A fallacy lurks in the too close judging of modern arts and institutions by their ancient history. Art as part of human progress has its revolutions. Once weak and a slave to ideas alien to itself, today, by recognition of the truth that it is entitled to its own intrinsic life, it is rapidly becoming muscular and self-sufficient. Those who continually regard modern art in the light of its history obstruct the progress of art, for in the course of art’s century-long process of coming to itself, a transmutation took place, the precise moment of which is difficult to seize, and the aspect engendered by this transmutation is so different from the ancient aspects of art that many nonplussed by it or dazzled, or blinded to ignorance of it, fail to grasp the fact of its quite complete newness. By this one would not be understood as saying that the history of art is illogical and contains bottomless and wide gulfs. The modern mind deeply cognizant of evolved art can trace relationship just as an anthropologist can trace the steps in the evolution of man; but we all admit in this latter department of human knowledge the looseness of judging modern man by the cave man. We concede modern man to be an entirely different being—a being in whom the struggle for animal existence is vastly complicated and modified as compared to his primitive ancestor, whose motives would be unseizable by that ancestor, and whose sensual, expressive, intellectual, moral and æsthetic forces have attained a volume which would overwhelm to the mereness of a wolf or a bear that progenitor. It is not for nothing that humanity has the vision of going beyond itself—the vision of the more-than-human. Somewhere in the history of animal life, spirit slipped in and we have a new species. Somewhere about the time of Cézanne, or a trifle earlier, from the old communal pictorial representations of sin, death, Christianity, the will-to-be-itself slipped into painting and today we are witnessing the evolution through several varieties of manifestation of a new species of art. We of today are not discussing in contemporary art the old art of the Renaissance—beautiful as that revelation was. We are not discussing art as the Greeks understood it nor as the Japanese of the past understood it, nor the Indians. We are discussing the new species, the birth of which we have almost ourselves witnessed. But now we need an Emmanuel Kant, who in a _Critique on Pure Art_ will investigate for us art’s necessary limits and authentic nature and free it for us from its inheritance of superstition.