Great artists have often
preferred to treat groups of images, which had already been many times
used as material for works of art. The novelty of these new works has
been solely that of art or form, that is to say, of the new _accent_
which they have known how to give to the old material, of the new way in
which they have _felt_ and therefore _intuified_ it, thus creating _new
images_ upon the old ones. These remarks are all obvious and universally
recognized as true. But if mere imagination as such has been excluded
from art, it has not therefore been excluded from the theoretic spirit.
Hence the disinclination to admit that a pure intuition must of
necessity express a state of the soul, whereas it may also consist, as
they believe, of a pure image, without a content of feeling. If we form
an arbitrary image of any sort, _stans pede in uno_, say of a bullock's
head on a horse's body, would not this be an intuition, a pure
intuition, certainly quite without any content of reflexion? Would one
not attain to a work of art in this way, or at any rate to an artistic
motive? Certainly not. For the image given as an instance, and every
other image that may be produced by the imagination, not only is not a
pure intuition, but it is not a _theoretic_ product of any sort. It is a
product of _choice_, as was observed in the formula used by our
opponents; and choice is external to the world of thought and
contemplation.
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