Though emphasising as much as possible the unity of art, we are compelled to admit that the feelings which are conveyed in its higher and lower forms may be essentially different. While meeting in the “lower” art of our own and earlier times with an expression of the most general emotions and instincts which, by the very vehemence of their pathos, may awaken the aversion of the refined critic, we partake, in the higher art-forms, of feelings that can be derived only from a dispassionate contemplation of nature. This difference between higher and lower manifestations, though especially marked in painting, can be observed in all forms of art. We have no wish to deny the necessity of discriminating between these “æsthetic feelings” of the higher art-forms and the elementary affections, which form the content of the sentimental, or, as the German philosophers would say, pathological art. The moods of æsthetic contemplation are, on the contrary, of so great significance that we can easily understand why they have been made the basis of so many systems of art-philosophy. From the point of view of the present work, which does not pretend to lay down a detailed criterion of perfection in art, but which only aims at explaining the most general social and psychological aspects of art-activity, it is necessary to adhere to the element which is common to all art, higher as well as lower, primitive or barbaric as well as civilised. And we can only, in passing, indicate the direction in which we believe an explanation is to be sought for the development of æsthetic attention and refined art-sense—those great problems which could be properly treated only in a separate work. It has been pointed out by several authors on æsthetic, and even emphasised to excess, that a certain independence of the struggle for life is a condition for the appearance of a higher art. It is indeed a current fallacy that art must be the growth of culture and prosperity. But it is nevertheless incontestable, that the peculiar art-sense, the artistic intuition _par excellence_, can be developed only in nations and individuals who—be it by success in the struggle for life, by advantageous circumstances, or simply by a natural lightheartedness of their own—have grown superior to care for life’s necessities. This factor, however, is only a negative condition. By itself mere independence of wants could never have taught any one to derive an ever deeper and stronger pleasure from a thing which stands in no immediate relation to the primary emotions or the primary desires of the beholder or the artist. The æsthetic education of mankind, its growth in artistic refinement, could not have been accomplished without the influence of more positive factors.