For it is evident, on a moment's introspection, that thought makes language for itself to live in, just as a snail makes its own shell or a soul makes its own body. Who has not felt the anguish of not being able to find a word to hit off his thought exactly?--which surely means that the thought was already there unclothed, awaiting its embodiment. As the soul disembodied is not man, so thought not clothed in language is not perfect human thought. Its essence is saved, but not its substantial, or at least its desirable, completeness. A man thinks more fully, more humanly, who thinks not with his mind alone, but with his imagination, his voice, his tongue, his pen, his pencil. If, therefore, solitary contemplative thought is a legitimate end in itself; if it is that _ludus_, or play of the soul, which is the highest occupation of man, a share in the same honour must be allowed to its accompanying embodiment; to the music which delights no ear but the performer's; to poetry, to painting, to sculpture done for the joy of doing, and without reference to the good of others communicating in that joy. And if the Divine Artist, whose lavish hand fills everything with goodness; who pours out the treasures of His love and wisdom in every corner of our universe; of whose greatness man knows not an appreciable fraction; who "does all things well" for the very love of doing and of doing well; who utters Himself for the sake of uttering, not only in His eternal, co-equal, all-expressive Word, but also in the broken, stammering accents of a myriad finite words or manifestations--if this Divine Artist teaches us anything, it is that man, singly or collectively, is divinest when he finds rest and joy in utterance for its own sake, in "telling the glory of God and showing forth His handiwork," or, as Catholic doctrine puts it, in praise; for praise is the utterance of love, and love is joy in the truth. As most of the useful arts perfect man's executive faculties, and thus are said to improve upon, while in a certain sense they imitate nature; so the fine arts extend and exalt man's faculty of expression, or self-utterance, regarded not precisely as useful and _propter aliud_; but as pleasurable and _propter se_. Even the most uncultivated savage finds pleasure in some discordant utterance of his subjective frame of mind; and it is really hard to find any tribe so degraded as to show no rudiment of fine art, no sign of reflex pleasure in expression, and of inventiveness in extending the resources nature has provided us with for that end.