which a heated imagination paints upon the background of the mind come
out more vivid and better controlled, when put with care upon a canvas.

Even ordinary expression, of course, arrests and clarifies experience,
enabling us to commune with ourselves; but since its purpose is usually
beyond itself, this result is hasty and partial, limited to what is
needful for the practical end in view. In art alone is this value
complete. For there, life is intentionally held in the medium of
expression, put out into color and line and sound for the clear sight
and contemplation of men. The aim is just to create life upon which
we may turn back and reflect.

This effect of artistic expression upon experience has usually been
called "intuition." Because of its connotation of mysterious knowledge,
intuition is not a wholly satisfactory word, yet is probably as good
as any for the purpose of denoting what artists and philosophers of
art have had in mind and what we have been trying to describe. Other
terms might also serve--vision, sympathetic insight (sympathetic,
because it includes the value of experience; insight, because it
involves possessing experience as a whole and ordered, and as an object
for reflection). Intuition is opposed, on the one hand, to crude
unreflecting experience that never observes itself as a whole or attains
to clearness and self-possession; and, on the other hand, to science,
which gives the elements and relations of an experience, the classes
to which it belongs, but loses its uniqueness and its values. Science
elaborates concepts of things, gives us knowledge about things; art
presents us with the experience of things purified for contemplation.
Scientific truth is the fidelity of a description to the external
objects of experience; artistic truth is sympathetic vision--the
organization into clearness of experience itself.