Such a process of adjusting nature to the requirements of emotional transmission need not always lead to any definite and concrete work of art. It may also, as an unrealised tendency, accompany our intuition. And it is only by virtue of this creative element that the feeling for nature may be placed on a level with artistic production. If we are to explain, with Richard Wagner, the æsthetic attention of the layman as the result of a natural poetic gift (“Natürliche Dichtungsgabe”), we cannot possibly—as he does—base the artistic value of this attention on the fact that it is “concentrating” and “isolating.”[160] For so is necessarily every emotional way of looking at things. Artistic treatment of nature, on the other hand, whether abortive or carried to completion, always involves an endeavour to make the concentrated and isolated view acceptable to others. As we cannot explain the creation of concrete works of art without reference to a craving for social expression, so we cannot distinguish the artistic from the non-artistic intuition without assuming a tendency—unconscious and unintentional it may be, but none the less powerful—to socialise the emotional content, which is connected with a given intuition. The potential poet or painter, whose embryo work is bound to remain for ever a fact only of his own experience, is seldom apt to realise the purpose of his endeavour; he is not aware that he is composing a poem or a picture for himself as spectator or audience. Instinctively, however, he pursues in the adjusting of his intuition an end which is essentially similar to that of the actually creating artist. In both these cases of creation the impelling motive is, we believe, an emotional one. And in both cases the creative activity aims at making an emotional mood independent of the accidental and individual conditions under which it originally appeared. Instead of an intuition, the emotional content of which is concentrated in a conventional symbol, comprehensible only to the initiated, or in arbitrary centres of association, significant only for those by whom they have been selected, the artistic imagination tries to construct an intuition which, if embodied in external form, would by its own force impress itself, with all its accompanying emotional elements, upon any spectator. It tends, in short, whether consciously or unconsciously, to perpetuate and to transmit a complex of feeling.