research to determine at which precise stage of development æsthetic attention becomes so emancipated as to entitle us to speak of a pure and free art-life. But it does not seem that such inquiries can ever lead to any positive result. The more one studies art, especially primitive art, from a comparative and historical point of view, the more one is compelled to admit the impossibility of deciding where the non-æsthetic motives end and the æsthetic motives begin. The only result we can reach is the somewhat indefinite one that it is as impossible to explain away the artistic purpose as it is to detect its presence in a pure state in any concrete work of art. For art-philosophy as a distinct science even this non-committal conclusion is of vital importance. It gives us a right to regard all the forms and developments of art as witnesses to an activity which tends to become more and more independent of the immediate utilities of life. This tendency, on the other hand, not only affords us a point of unity from which to start upon a research into the general philosophy of art; it also presents to us one of the greatest problems of the same science. How it is that mankind has come to devote energy and zeal to an activity which may be almost entirely devoid of a utilitarian purpose is indeed the riddle, sociological as well as psychological, which would seem in the first place to claim the attention of the philosopher. To the writer of this book, at any rate, it appeared that a discussion, and an attempt at solution, of this seeming paradox was a task sufficiently important and interesting to form of itself the subject of a special investigation.