An obvious confirmation of this theory is also the empirical observation often made, that the men who lose themselves in desires are rather poets than men of action, dreamers rather than actors; and in respect to this, that poets who seem to have the soul overflowing with energetic plans, magnanimous loves, and fierce hatreds are the most incapable in the field of action, and the worst of captains in practical struggles; because those plans, those loves and hates, are not will, but desires, and desires already weakened as such, because they are no longer in process of volitional synthetization, but have become the objects of contemplation and of dream. He who reads the biographies of artists, or has dealings with artists in daily life, almost always has the impression that their gusts of passion are nothing but poetry _about to break forth,_ as a green bud that opens and breaks the brown sheath. And if this process be painful, that is because every travail of birth is painful. One sees, indeed, how everything generally ends _par des chansons._ A fine poem and the sufferer is calm again. [Sidenote: _Actions and myths._] This also explains why individual actions and practical collective movements are accompanied with hopes, beliefs, and _myths._ These have no logical or historical truth, but it is on the other hand impossible to criticize them, because they are not error, but fantastic projection of the state of soul of individuals and groups of individuals in action, and testify to the existence of desires ready to transform themselves into will and action. Utopias are poetry, they are not practical acts; but beneath that poetry there is always the reality of a desire that is a factor of future history. Hence it also happens that poets are thought of as _seers,_ when the utopia of to-day becomes the reality of the morrow. The Utopian and semi-poetic Address of the Italian patriots to the Directory of June 18, 1799,[1] the not less Utopian Proclamation of Rimini of 1815, the song of Manzoni, in which rang out the fateful verse, We shall not be free if we are not one, will become, for the Italians of 1860, effective action and _historical event._ [Sidenote: _Art as the pure representation of becoming and the artistic form of thought._]