Home The Nature and Objective of Aesthetics Art and the Artist The Art Work The General Nature of the Art Work Art and Fact The Art Work in the Making The Creative Mind Art and the Artist Art and the Layman The Experience of Beauty Beauty in Music Painting Poetry	THE ART WORK   How shall we begin our search? How can we best utilize our data? The answer is that, if we expect our conclusions to have any validity, our procedure must be as closely scientific as we can possibly make it. Now the word scientific sounds harsh and grating when used outside the sphere of the socalled material sciences. In the realm of art or religion or even ethics and morality it seems almost blasphemous. This attitude is due primarily to the unfortunate fact that traditionally we have steeped these human values in a pool of soft sentimentalism and emotionalisms from which they have not been completely rescued even in this scientific age. But the progress of the physical sciences for the last century and a half should teach us an object lesson. So soon as the inquiry into material phenomena became truly scientific, instead of being viewed supernaturally, we began to gain a control over our physical environment to an extent that has proved a permanent blessing to mankind. Today our physical household is in fairly good order, with a good promise of even better things to come in the near future. But we are still entertaining the delusion that the sole approach to human values is emotion and sentiment, with their inevitable bickerings, quarrels, and confusion. Yet art, morality, and religion are phenomena, experiences, facts, not essentially unlike those that reign in the objective world. Campigli There are aesthetic, moral, and religious facts as there are physical and chemical facts. And they can be investigated by scientific procedure. There is no pathway to system, order, and control excepting that of knowledge. And knowledge is impossible without scientific method. We can not arrive at truth by talk, no matter how heated, but by a calm, dispassionate, disinterested search for basic facts. This is all that is meant by scientific method, and no more. The scientist questions some observable phenomenon until it has told him what it is in its substance, as different from other phenomena, how it comes to be what it is, that is, what processes operate in it, and when it gets to be what it is, or the conditions that bring it about. This method can be readily applied to art. An art work is the tangible, observable manifestation of an experience. The experience is the cause of which the art work is the effect, and between the two there is a process, an activity. The art work is our laboratory subject, and we can inquire of it to tell us what sort of phenomenon it is, what processes are involved in its creation, and what impulse brought it into existence. And such will be our procedure. We shall first consider the what of the art work, namely, its general nature, next, its how, the processes involved in its creation, and when we have the answers to the what and how, we shall turn to an examination of the when, or the nature of the impulse or drive that brings it about.