Excerpt from Form and Colour<br><br>This dualism has always, I say, existed in life, and since art is an expression of life, and is governed and controlled by life's emotions and ideas, we can but expect that so marked a distinction in life Will reflect itself in a corresponding distinction in art. That expectation is verified. The true main elements in art are form and colour. Of these form, in its essence, is a process of definition which lends itself spontaneously to the Opera tions of intellect-while colour, in its essence and divorced from form, is the natural medium in which sensuous and emotional, as distinct from rational, impulses express themselves. Thus the essential division of the human mind into intellectual and emotional is mirrored in art's similar division into form and colour.<br><br>In this way have these two vehicles been used in the past. Form has dominated art whenever and wherever the intellectual faculty was dominant in life colour has dominated art whenever and wherever the emotional faculty has dominated life. Thus, by the traces they have left in art, the two great currents of ideas which have illumined the mind and spirit of man may be traced in their ebb and flow and in their interaction upon each other.<br><br>Moreover, it appears that not only is the mind of man divided into intellectual and spiritual faculties, and not only is art divided into the corresponding elements of form and colour, but the actual universe itself has come to share in this arrangement and be subject to a similar division. Every spiritual impulse which has quickened the soul of man has come out of the East just as every practical invention or intellectual conception has come out of the West. Mysticism is as commonplace an affair in Eastern life as science is in Western. Form, therefore, is the art idiom of the West, colour the art idiom of the East.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.