The common mortal, he says, that manufacture of nature, which she produces by the thousand every day, is not capable of observation that is wholly disinterested in every sense. He can turn his attention to things only so far as they have some relation to his will, however indirect it may be. This is why he is so soon done with everything, with works of art, objects of natural beauty, and everywhere with all that is truly significant in the various scenes of life. He does not linger in the pursuit of beauty, but seeks only to gain his own way in life. On the consideration of the significance of life as a whole, he wastes no time. The artist, on the other hand, strives to understand the inner nature of everything. His faculty of vision is to him the sum which reveals the world. In spite of his contempt for the majority of men, Schopenhauer has to admit that the faculty of perceiving the Idea, the inner reality, must exist in nearly all men, in a smaller and different degree, otherwise they would be just as incapable of enjoying works of art as of producing them. They would have no susceptibility to beauty, nor to sublimity. All men, therefore, who are capable of æsthetic pleasure at all, must be capable to some extent of knowing the Idea in things, and in responding to the call of beauty, of transcending their personality for the moment. Æsthetic pleasure is the same whether it is evoked by a work of art or by the contemplation of nature, for {57} the Idea remains unchanged and the same. The work of art is only a means of making permanent the vision in which this pleasure consists. The artist does not add "the gleam, the light that never was on sea or land," but his vision is more finely attuned to the reality than that of ordinary men. He makes permanent in the various media of art "the consecration and the poet's dream." His work acts as a communicating spark from mind to mind. In one of Carlyle's most suggestive passages, he insists on the spiritual and symbolic nature of the work of art, in words that echo curiously the thought of Schopenhauer. "In all true works of art," he says, "thou wilt discern eternity looking through time, the godlike rendered visible ... a hierarch therefore, and pontiff of the world will we call him, the poet and inspired maker, who Prometheus-like can shape new symbols, and bring new fire from heaven to fix it there."