By the same criterion we can also separate the art-desire from the love of games and sports. However passionate the sporting mania may be in individuals or nations, it can never be compared as a universal and primary impulse with the craving for æsthetic creation. Philosophers who bestow their whole attention only on the mature works which can be studied in the history of art, may indeed contend that even the art-impulse is given to some favoured few. But this view, which would reduce all art-life to the status of a great and marvellous exception, cannot possibly be upheld in a psychological æsthetic. It is, no doubt, the fact that the percentage of executive artists in modern nations is an almost negligible quantity. It is also probable that—contrary to a common notion—the poets, the painters, and the dramatists form a distinct class even among the lower tribes.[22] But in treating the art-impulse as a psychological phenomenon the inquiry cannot be restricted to the few individuals who publicly practise a certain art. As far as the artistic _powers_ are concerned, these undoubtedly stand apart from the rest of mankind. But we are not entitled to maintain that they are also distinguished by some peculiar psychical _impulse_. From the point of view of artistic perfection, there is all the world between the youthful verses of Goethe and the doggerel of a common schoolboy. But, psychologically, the schoolboy’s doggerel may be the result of as strong a craving for poetic expression as any of the world’s greatest poems.[23] Bad or good, known or unknown, every manifestation of artistic activity is equally illustrative for our purpose. We have to count with the immense number of dilettanti who produce in privacy and in secret, as well as with recognised artists. And even those unfortunate persons who have never been able to find for themselves any satisfactory mode of æsthetic expression may still be adduced in proof of the universality of the artistic desire. If the notion of art is conceived in its most general sense, every normal man, at some time of his life at least, is an artist—in aspiration, if not in capacity.