separate or isolate the men, you couldn't make any law as to which of the men the dog was barking at.' 'Yes,' said he, smiling contemptuously, that would do, but a better instance is'. . . . and he went on talking about crystals and double refractory powers till the whole scene changed, and I found myself climbing up, as of yore, to get a nearer view of the beautiful glass lustres of the chandelier at home, and upsetting the ink, and being called by my mother a refractory child, for that's all I knew about 'crystals' and 'refractory powers.' CHAPTER II. WHAT IS ART? NEXT morning I arose, wondering at my dream, in which I had seen much more than I had heard from Mr. Practical, and accounting for the prodigy by supposing that all the scraps I had read at odd times in our domestic British Encyclopædia had been aroused from their sleep in my memory by my late efforts to think. 'If science,' resumed Mr. Practical, may be called universal knowledge derived from particular facts, art is the application of that universal knowledge to particular facts, and we may speak of the arts as we do of the sciences, meaning thereby branches of one great art and branches of one great science. By science I establish the law, for instance, that "all trees bud in the spring." Now supposing I were able to produce a tree, I should say to myself, "Let me see, a tree is to be produced; first of all it must bud in the spring, for unless it did so it would not be a perfect tree, and then it must be something else, and so on; and as a sculptor complies with orders in a contract, so must I obey laws in the production of this tree, and this is what we call the application of universal knowledge to particular facts. And this is why the laws of a science are also called conditions, because without complying with them we cannot produce a correct instance of a particular: e.g., from observation we enunciate the law, "all water has drowning properties." Now this is a condition upon which water's being water depends, for if a man pointed to some water and said, "This water has no drowning properties," we should say, "My good sir, this cannot be water, then, for it does not comply with the conditions required to constitute water." Now art is the application of universal laws in this way to particular facts, strictly speaking, in production, but also in criticism.' 'I don't quite understand,' said I. 'By production, I mean the process of making something, as a picture, statue, or house; by criticism the process of testing the genuineness, or right to its name, of something, as a star, tree, or man. In either case we apply universal knowledge to particular facts, and the process is called art.' Dyver, looking very subtle, here enquired whether science was the process of attaining to universal knowledge, or the knowledge so attained, for art seemed to be the process only, and Mr. Practical replied that it was difficult to say; he believed science was used for both, perhaps on the whole it was more often used for the knowledge attained, but it made very little difference to the broad distinction between science and art, and that was all he wanted to show. 6 To give you an illustration of what I mean by science and art, I shall make a rough sketch with my pencil,' he continued, scarcely a bit discomposed by the penetrating subtlety of his senior pupil. Here we have an aged admirer of scenery. Night after night he gazes on the sunset from his rocky seat. He observes certain points possessed in common by each sunset (to speak of sunsets as distinct particulars). The clouds may vary, but there are certain particular rays of light he sees every time he sees the sun set. He thinks to himself, "I observe these sunsets agree in certain features-they all have certain rays of light, &c. These common |