As if Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony were not his own intuition and his own intuition the
Ninth Symphony. Thus, just as he who is deceived as to his material
wealth is confuted by arithmetic, which states its exact amount, so is
he confuted who nourishes delusions as to the wealth of his own thoughts
and images. He is brought back to reality, when he is obliged to cross
the Bridge of Asses of expression. We say to the former, count; to the
latter, speak, here is a pencil, draw, express yourself.
We have each of us, as a matter of fact, a little of the poet, of the
sculptor, of the musician, of the painter, of the prose writer: but how
little, as compared with those who are so called, precisely because of
the lofty degree in which they possess the most universal dispositions
and energies of human nature! How little does a painter possess of the
intuitions of a poet! How little does one painter possess those of
another painter! Nevertheless, that little is all our actual patrimony
of intuitions or representations. Beyond these are only impressions,
sensations, feelings, impulses, emotions, or whatever else one may term
what is outside the spirit, not assimilated by man, postulated for the
convenience of exposition, but effectively inexistent, if existence be
also a spiritual fact.
[Sidenote] _Identity of intuition and expression._
We may then add this to the verbal variants descriptive of intuition,
noted at the beginning: intuitive knowledge is expressive knowledge,
independent and autonomous in respect to intellectual function;
indifferent to discriminations, posterior and empirical, to reality and
to unreality, to formations and perceptions of space and time, even when
posterior: intuition or representation is distinguished as form from
what is felt and suffered, from the flux or wave of sensation, or from
psychic material; and this form this taking possession of, is
expression.
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