the child. His first uses of words as well as of things are touched
with emotion. Every descriptive name conveys to him his emotional
reaction to the object; disinterested knowledge does not exist for
him; every tool, a knife or a fork, means to him not only something
to be used, but the whole background of feelings which its use involves.
Our first perceptions of things contain as much of feeling and attitude
as of color and shape and sound and odor. Pure science and mere industry
are abstractions from the original integrity of perception and
expression; mutilations of their wholeness forced upon the mind through
the stress of living. To be able to see things without feeling them,
or to describe them without being moved by their image, is a disciplined
and derivative accomplishment. Only as the result of training and of
haste do the forms and colors of objects, once the stimuli to a
wondering and lingering attention, become mere cues to their recognition
and employment, or mere incitements to a cold and disinterested analysis
and description. Knowledge may therefore enter into beauty when, keeping
its liberality, it participates in an emotional experience; and every
other type of expression may become aesthetic if, retaining its native
spontaneity, it can acquire anew its old power to move the heart. To
be an artist means to be, like the child, free and sensitive in
envisaging the world.

Under these conditions, nature as well as art may be beautiful. In
themselves, things are never beautiful. This is not apparent to common
sense because it fails to think and analyze. But beauty may belong to
our _perceptions_ of things. For perception is itself a kind of
expression, a process of mind through which meanings are embodied in
sensations. Given are only sensations, but out of the mind come ideas
through which they are interpreted as objects. When, for example, I
perceive my friend, it may seem as if the man himself were a given