Now, so long as the scene which the artist evokes exists only for the sake of suggesting and limiting a certain range of emotion, the relation of this scene to fact is entirely irrelevant. The artist is not bearing witness to what he has seen, he is defining a definite complex of thought and emotion; and as an artist, his work is complete when he has worked out this definition. When he has done this his work is complete within itself, and all direct reference to a particular time and place in the world of fact is wiped out. What we have before us is a hypothetical connection of ideal and universal meanings. We are now in the region of the hypothetical judgment. The hypothetical form is adopted not because there is any uncertainty in the matter, but because the artist wishes to concentrate attention on the attributes themselves, and not on any particular embodiment of them. The subject is taken, not given, and taken not for its own sake but for the sake of that which is to follow from it,--in this case, the whole emotional complex which is to be called up. We might, if our space were not limited, attempt to work this out more in detail. We might exhibit others of Turner’s studies and designs as steps or stages in the process which aims at the complete analysis or definition of its content. But the main conception will, I hope, have been made evident. If the work of art as operative is nothing but a connection of content, it can rely upon no other driving force than that of systematic rationality. The assertions made in a work of art are made on the strength of rational grounds, and not on the strength of testimony. If the artist uses fact, he does not use it as fact, and the most outrageous fiction may be truer than fact within the four walls of his special construction. In interpreting pictures, as in following fiction, we are engaged in an act of comprehensive abstraction; the conjunction of objects or events is all within a judgment that we are dealing with abstractions used for a certain purpose. Colonel Newcome and Turner’s trees and mountains are as much abstractions and as unreal as the abstractions of the physical sciences, as matter, force, atoms, etc.,--as unreal, but also quite as real, and probably in the same way. They are provisional conceptions employed for certain purposes. And all the details and secondary judgments used in interpreting a picture must be recognised as _transformed_ by the system to which they belong.[37]