impulses in art do not issue in resolves, decisions, determinations
to act; or, if they do, the determinations refer to acts to be executed
in the future, in an experience distinct and remote from the
sthetic--the "Marseillaise" has doubtless produced such resolutions
in the minds of Frenchmen; and there is much art that is productive
in that way, providing the "birth in beauty" of which Plato wrote.
[Footnote: In the _Symposium_.] In art, impulses result in immediate
action only when action is itself the medium of expression, as in the
dance, where impulses to movement pass over into motion. Of course such
actions still remain aesthetic since they serve no practical end and are
valued for themselves.

If the question were raised, which is more fundamental in the aesthetic
experience, idea or emotion? the answer would have to be, emotion. For
there exists at least one great art where no explicit ideas are present,
music, whereas art without emotion does not exist. Take away the
emotional content from expression and you get either a mere play of
sensations, like fireworks, or else pseudo-science, like the modern
naturalistic play. However, the supreme importance of the idea in art
cannot be denied. Every complex work of art, save music, is an
expression of ideas as well as of feelings, and even in music there
exists the tendency for feeling to seek definition in ideas--do we not
say a musical idea? And do we not find the masters of so abstract an
art as ornament employing their materials to represent symbolic
conceptions? I wish to call the attention of the reader to certain
very general considerations touching the nature and function of ideas
in the aesthetic experience, leaving the study of the concrete problems
to the more special chapters.

First, the relation of the idea to the sense medium of the expression.