Material

“ We shall call that the material of the art, on which the whole art, and all that ability which is derived from art, turns. Just as if we were to call diseases and wounds the material of medicine, because it is about them that all medical science is concerned. ”

“ It builds a garment cut to the pattern of an Idea, and trusts that Nature will model a material shape to fit it. There is a prophecy in every seam, and its pockets are full of inspiration.—Now hear the verses. ”

“ The subjects themselves embrace the whole arcana of the material universe, the mineral and vegetable products of the earth, their properties, manufacture, and varied convertibility to the service and uses of man. ”

“ This thin matter is just as material as lead or brass. And such systems are purely materialistic. But they illustrate the extraordinary difficulty that the ordinary mind experiences in attempting to rise from sensuous to non-sensuous thinking. They illustrate the ingrained materialism of man. ”

“ There are some who understand these descriptions literally, and who suppose that, being raised in material, though glorified bodies, the redeemed will inhabit a material heaven—either this earth transformed, or some other planet—and will be surrounded with glorious material objects, the most beautiful and precious of nature’s productions, fashioned like to art’s best accomplishments. ”

“ We advance step by step from the most solid to the most ethereal of material creations, and we examine a series of extraordinary effects produced by powers which we know not whether to regard as material or immaterial, so subtile are they. ”

“ We shall proceed, therefore, to act upon it, and choose for our work only such material as in some way indicates life, either directly, as in trees, animals, or figures, or by association, and as explanation thereof, as in drapery and other accessories—never choosing a subject like those known to painters as "still life," such as bowls, fiddles, weapons, etc., unless, as I have said, they are associated with the more important element. ”

“ They make use of material means in order to arrive at this end. They tell their story—the story of a day, an impression of a character, a recollection of a moment, or whatever, more or less clearly or well, as they are more or less capable of doing. ”

“ Many attempts have been made to determine the material elements of beauty, by Hogarth, Home, and others. All have more or less failed, from not observing that these elements are modified, varied, and complicated, as we advance from the most simple to the most complex class of natural beings, or of the arts which relate to these respectively. ”

“ Man's organism was material,—why should not his mind, his most intimate self, follow the same analogy, and be material too? Hence its materiality was assumed. The word, indeed, by which the thinking principle is designated in all languages bears evidence to the inveteracy of the superstition that the conception of mind might be formed by conceiving a material substance of extreme fineness and tenuity. ”

“ If we consider the impressions of sense as the mere materials of our experience, such materials may be accumulated in any quantity and in any order. But if we suppose that this matter has a certain form given it, in the act of being accepted by the mind, we can understand how it is that these materials are subject to inevitable rules;—how nothing can be perceived exempt from the relations which belong to such a form. ”

“ To him, in the vehement and impassioned heat of his conceptions, the material and the spiritual are fused and blent: if the spiritual attains the definite visibility of a crystal, what is material loses its earthiness and impurity. ”

“ In a higher organization, the material, or the elementary, need not be visible; the chemical color vanishes in the finer tints of the imaginative one. The material, however, has its peculiar effect, and may be included in an artistical composition. ”

“ Any work of art which represents, not a material object, but the mental conception of a material object, is, in the primary sense of the word ideal; that is to say, it represents an idea, and not a thing. ”

“ As men take a material substance—gold, silver, ivory, wood or stone—and use it as an image or symbol of the deity they worship, so we use words of a material sense to express, in some faint degree, the intellectual and moral ideas we desire to disclose. ”

“ In its entire independence of the material of sense it may be defined as the universal art. The material is the imagination, and as such conjoint with all the arts. It is, however, not the only art open to philosophical review on this ground. ”

“ At the close of our study of the materials and methods of fiction, it is advisable that we should consider in general the relation between form and content,—the respective value of methods and materials. Primarily, there are two groups of worthy fiction,—that which is great mainly on account of its content, and that which is great mainly on account of its form. ”

“ For instance, sometimes the concrete material because of its general inherent interest, or because of its special appeal to some instinct, attracts the attention of the child in such a way that the point which was to be illustrated is lost sight of. Witness work in nature study in the lower grades, and in chemistry in the high school. The concrete material may be so complex that again the essential point is lost in the mass of detail. ”

“ Indeed, when all is said, a writer can but indicate the logic that underlies the craft, or hint at the relation which subsists between the process, the material, and the finished ware: the distinction between good and bad in art eludes definition ”

“ Each plant has its parasite, and each created thing its lover and poet. Justice has already been done to steam, to iron, to wood, to coal, to loadstone, to iodine, to corn and cotton; but how few materials are yet used by our arts The mass of creatures and of qualities are still hid and expectant. ”

“ The remainder of the essay endeavors to meet the charge of materialism. The following is the conclusion:—"In itself it is of little moment whether we express the phaenomena of matter in terms of spirit; or the phaenomena of spirit in terms of matter: matter may be regarded as a form of thought, thought may be regarded as a property of matter—each statement has a certain relative truth. But with a view to the progress of science, the materialistic terminology is in every way to be preferred. ”

“ Directly in connection with the material body, but consisting of something distinctly different in kind, higher, finer, and interior to it, is the natural mind, but these two, the natural mind and the material body, work together as a unit. ”

“ Each one of its attributes is an implication of all the others. Our concepts of material objects, on the contrary, are never exhaustive, for their complement of attributes varies with our experience concerning them. ”

“ But how tenderly he always speaks of materials! What a limitless reverence he has for the subtle reciprocity and correspondence between the human senses and what—so thrillingly, so dangerously, sometimes!—they apprehend. ”

“ These consist, generally, of materials furnished to us by nature, endowed with many most remarkable properties fitting them for our purposes; if one of them is a production of art, yet its adaptation to the use of mankind,—the qualities which render it available to us,—must be referred to the same source as those derived immediately from nature. ”

“ When, however, we come to an actual survey of the material, certain appearances present themselves which lead us to expect that, possibly, a large part of our gain will accrue from the observation of the differences which characterise different parts of the material within itself. ”

“ For as we divided natural philosophy in general into the inquiry of causes and productions of effects, so that part which concerneth the inquiry of causes we do subdivide according to the received and sound division of causes. The one part, which is physic, inquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; and the other, which is metaphysic, handleth the formal and final causes. ”

“ That knowledge of the natural things used by man as materials, and employed for his wants, which I have acquired with so much difficulty, has been incalculably serviceable in explaining to me the proceedings of artists and artisans. ”

“ If these conditions are just when they allude only to buildings in the abstract, how much more when referring to them as materials of composition, materials of infinite power, to adorn or destroy the loveliness of the earth. ”

“ Let us see next what the characteristics of the Ideas are. In the first place, they are substances. Substance is a technical term in philosophy, but its philosophical meaning is merely a more consistent development of its {187} popular meaning. In common talk, we generally apply the word substance to material things such as iron, brass, wood, or water. And we say that these substances possess qualities. For example, hardness and shininess are qualities of the substance iron. The qualities cannot exist apart from the substances. ”

“ Art must be considered as the selection of natural phenomena by individual minds capable of assimilating and reproducing them in certain forms and with certain materials [Pg 3] adapted to the national taste, needs, and power of appreciation. If man cannot originate materials, he can invent combinations;—and this is Art. ”

“ Now, for the perfecting of all these operations, from the tedious and bungling process to the rapid and elegant; for the change of an almost infinite variety of crude and worthless materials into useful and beautiful fabrics, mind has been the agent. ”

“ Expression is literally the pressing out into palpable form that which is already within us, and composition, in the same way, is the composing or putting together of materials already existing—the form and method of the composition depend mainly on the form and quality of the materials. ”

“ Much, if not most, of the philosophy of the work appeared open to objection; but the materials were there, for my own thoughts to work upon: and the author had given to those materials that first degree of elaboration, which so greatly facilitates and abridges the subsequent labour. ”

“ But, in the first place, those most close to the tradition of materialism maintain that the most significant appearances, the primary qualities, are those which compose a purely quantitative and corporeal world. ”

“ It is undeniably true that materialistic, or so-called 'scientific,' conceptions of the universe have so far gratified the purely intellectual interests more than the mere sentimental conceptions have. ”

“ AGAINST ORIGINALITY.— When art dresses itself in the most worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art. ”

“ Otherwise it would be undertaking something that lies outside its proper subject-matter. For as wood is the material of the carpenter, bronze that of the statuary, just so each man's own life is the subject-matter of the art of living.—Well, what about my brother's life?—That again is the subject-matter of his own art of living, but with respect to your art of living it comes under the category of externals, like a farm, like health, like good repute. ”

“ Can all that Optics teach, unfold
Thy form to please me so,
As when I dreamt of gems and gold
Hid in thy radiant bow?
When Science from Creation’s face
Enchantment’s veil withdraws,
What lovely visions yield their place
To cold material laws! ”

“ And about me in space, invisible to me, scattered in the wake of the earth upon its journey, there must be an innumerable multitude of souls, stripped like myself of the material, stripped like myself of the passions of the individual and the generous emotions of the gregarious brute, naked intelligences, things of new-born wonder and thought, marvelling at the strange release that had suddenly come on them! ”

“ The definition we have just given should make it evident that we must no more ask whether the soul and the body are one, than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed upon it are one, or generally inquire whether the material and that of which it is the material are one; ”

“ In other words, though nature's materials lend themselves slowly and discouragingly to our translation of them into ethical forms, but more readily into æsthetic forms; to translation into scientific forms they lend themselves with relative ease and completeness. ”

“ Despite the imperfections that necessarily attach to their works, despite their lack of external correctness, their limitations to few and generally crude materials, and their conventionalism, there clings to their work a charm such as belongs to the works neither of the most brilliant nor of the pronouncedly naturalistic periods. ”

“ We can apply the materials afforded us by experience with less difficulty and more in a mass in making out the picture of our future pleasures and pains, without frittering them away or destroying their original sharpnesses: in a word, we can imagine them more plainly, and must therefore be more interested in them. ”

“ But the proper and direct train of argument in favour of materialism is, that every phenomenon from which the notion of a soul is deduced, is resolveable into some affection of the brain, perceived. That all thought, reflection, choice, judgment, memory, the passions and affections, &c. ”

“ Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas:—How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the MATERIALS of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; ”