which as a means of expression and communication is based entirely upon that system, cannot by any possibility present us with bare physical fact, with a nucleus of solid, ready-made reality--of ‘God’s work,’ in Mr. Ruskin’s sense of these terms. So that when we talk of art as representing nature, it is evident that we must be careful to distinguish exactly what we mean by such an expression. If we take it to mean that art does or can or ought to give us a copy of the given actual world as it exists apart from what Mr. Ruskin calls the meddling action of man’s intelligence, then it is obvious that we have fallen into a very serious error. Apart from the action of his intellect, an artist could not possibly make the external world an object of his thought; he could not, therefore, represent it on paper or canvas; and even if we suppose these difficulties overcome, and the copy of bare unadulterated reality fixed on the canvas, nobody could possibly recognise it or know that it was there. If this is so, I think it is clear that art cannot portray or represent or imitate or copy nature, at least in the sense in which nature is taken at the unreflective level of thought. What art portrays must be some part of the ideal construction present to the mind of the artist. Perhaps the simplest way of putting this is to say that the artist can operate only with ideas, and not with any directly given elements of reality; with idea, in short, in the sense of ‘meaning,’ ‘significance,’ or ‘logical content,’ and not with idea as physical fact or immediate experience. But as ideas in this sense--which we must be careful to remember includes emotion--are not gifted with the property of visibility, it seems on the whole better not to say that a work of art imitates or portrays them. Strictly speaking, a work of art is a symbol, and a symbol is not a copy or imitation of the meaning it stands for. The meaning of pictorial art is then always some connected circle of psychical states with their presentative and emotional contents. These contents may refer to the common physical world of ordinary experience, or they may refer to a dream-world that has no existence except as an element of human consciousness; and this reference is determined in each case by the nature of the contents themselves.