SOURCE: "From Mystical Gaze to Pragmatic Game: Representations of Truth in Vorticist Art," in English Literary History, Vol. 56, No. 3, Fall, 1989, pp. 689-720.

[In the following essay, Rae examines the art and literature of the Vorticist movement.]

Ezra Pound's proudest contribution to the Vorticist journal Blast, and the only poem that he was ever to identify as "pure vorticism," was a "Dogmatic Statement on the Game and Play of Chess." The images in this poem, the brightly colored combatants in a fierce and immediate battle, are nouns transformed into verbs, chesspieces metaphorically identified with the Roman letters that trace their actions. These luminous pawn-Y's, bishop-X's, and knight-L's strike, cleave, and loop one another, breaking and reforming their pattern until an assault on a king renders one army victorious—and the black-and-white design of the empty chessboard, for a moment, definitive. The truce, however, is brief. Harnessed energy leaks, the captured escape, and the vanquished arise from their ashes to propose a "renewing of contest."

Pound subtitled his poem "Theme for a Series of Pictures," and this has led a number of critics to observe that its dynamic images and abrupt rhythms mirror many of those we encounter in Vorticist painting. More intriguing than this, however, is the possibility of reading the chess game as an allegory for the mental processes both of these arts seem to embody and encourage. In the imaginations of many of Pound's contemporaries, including T. E. Hulme and Ernest Fenollosa, the chess or checker game was frequently a metaphor for abstract reasoning. The chesspieces, by their nature representative types, performed a function similar to that of the words or concepts that in such reasoning are substituted for particulars. The rules of the chess game, in which certain counters are capable of certain moves, seemed analogous to the rigorous laws of logic. And the game's object—to reduce variety to simplicity, the different to the same—strikingly resembled the goal of any theoretician. The game of chess, in short, was an apt image for what William James, in a seminal article entitled "The Sentiment of Rationality" (1879), had called the "philosophic passion par excellence": the urge to resolve the muddy chaos of phenomena to the clean, geometric grid of abstract theory. In Pound's Vorticist chess game, however, this "theoretic need" does not reign unchecked, but seems to be repeatedly challenged and subverted. The pieces on the grid are not dead counters, enabling the abstract thinker to remain disengaged from the subject of his calculations, but pieces "living in form," their unique vitality an integral part of their identity. The patterns they make, moreover, are inherently unstable, like theories that form and dissolve even as they are made. The "renewing of contest" proposed at the end of the poem lends an ironic edge to Pound's subtitle: the resolution here is no "Dogmatic Statement," but a solution immediately again to be challenged. To borrow once again from James, the passion for abstraction depicted in Pound's poem is counterbalanced by its "sister passion," the "passion for distinguishing": the preference for "incoherence" over order, for the "concrete fulness" of things over any "absolute datum" that subsumes their differences. "A Game of Chess" is a poem about the almost simultaneous operation of two opposite tendencies of mind. As such, I shall argue, it is a model of what I shall call the "tensional" aesthetic of Vorticism.

Historians of the Vorticist movement have struggled to discern consistent and mutual strategies between its verbal and visual manifestations. More often than not, they have concluded that the poets and artists of Blast were unified only by the nominal leadership of Wyndham Lewis, and not by any rigorous common philosophy. But there are, indeed, common strategies in the literary branch of Vorticism that Pound called Imagisme and the visual art advertised by Lewis as distinctively Vorticist. Although it is often forgotten, Pound explicitly sought a "psychological or philosophical definition" of Imagiste poetry, hoping that Imagisme would be remembered as a movement about the "creation" of poetry as well as its "criticism."

The same is true of Lewis's specifications for Vorticist art, which seem to stipulate similar principles for the artist's creative process. From the accounts of creative activity that can be pieced together from Pound's and Lewis's early essays and manifestos, furthermore, it is clear that Vorticism belonged to the tradition of expressionist aesthetics, which had originated in the tracts of German Idealism and emerged most recently in the theoretical writings of Post-Impressionist painters such as Whistler and Kandinsky. Its primary aim, as such, was not the imitation of nature but "the search for sincere self-expression." Instead of pursuing mimetic representations, the Vorticist upheld a "musical conception of form," seeking to construct suitable "arrangements," whether in form and color or in language, to express his "complex consciousness." In seeking Vorticism's paradigmatic aesthetic, I proceed on the premise that any expressionist aesthetic entails necessary connections between what the theorist sees as the epistemological status of the insight his artist wishes to express, and the structure of the product he sees as appropriate to that task. There is, I shall propose, an inexorable connection between Pound's and Lewis's conceptions of the cognitive capacities of the artist, on the one hand, and the art their aesthetics produced, on the other—a connection which that dynamic chess game serves to exemplify.

A number of critics have suspected that Pound's attitude to mystical experience had a formative significance for his early aesthetic. When we examine his Imagisme as a theory of creative activity in the Idealist tradition, the precise import of his views on mysticism becomes clear. During the four or five years prior to Blast, T. E. Hulme had been advertising and defending a new attitude he detected among his contemporaries toward the Idealist, or in his terms "romantic," aesthetic. The "new classical" attitude, as Hulme called it, was suspicious of Idealist aestheticians who represented the artist as a passive medium for some transcendental or mystical truth. The "new classicist," he said, while preserving the intuitive and organic aspects of that aesthetic, was to get rid of all the "metaphysical baggage" that so often accompanied it. He was to eschew all suggestions about the artist's apprehension of entities like the "Soul," the "Infinite" and the "Idea," which in the writings of certain English Romantics and French Symbolists had functioned to aggrandize the artist's vocation. He was to police his own rhetoric, in short, for any tendency to wax excessively optimistic about the artist's cognitive capacities, to "fly away," rhetorically speaking, into the "circumambient gas." Both Pound and Lewis, as we shall see, regarded claims about the mystical nature of a poet's insight with precisely the "new classical" distrust that Hulme described. This led both of them to feel that the particular "arrangements" an artist chose to express his insight should not reflect such mystical assumptions. As a result, the products of the Vorticist aesthetic, from Pound's Imagiste poems to Lewis's paintings and Gaudier-Brzeska's sculptures, deliberately defied the formal principles that had characterized the transcendentalist aesthetics of Symbolism, Expressionism, and Cubism.

The work of William James provides a striking model for the strategies at work in a "new classical" aesthetic; indeed, it is curious that his affinity with them has gone largely unnoticed. It is possible to show that James's ideas would have been familiar to Hulme, Pound, and Lewis—if not directly, then through French exponents like Henri Bergson and Jules de Gaultier, or through recent emigres from Harvard like Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Henry James—but it is not my primary purpose to detail that influence here. My aim, rather, is to demonstrate that the issues at stake for a "new classical" artist with expressionist intentions were very much the same as those facing a psychologist-turned-philosopher in his attempt to determine viable ways of representing "truth." William James's career began, of course, in the field of empirical psychology, and concluded with the formulation and defense of the philosophy of pragmatism. One of his central accomplishments as a psychologist had been the examination and description of those experiences in which a person believes he has apprehended some absolute truth: experiences that had habitually and perhaps erroneously been called "mystical." When he later turned to philosophy, the problem that most intrigued him was how one should represent and wield such insights, when one could have no way of knowing that they were what they seemed. James's project as a philosopher, in other words, was to trace the same inexorable arch as the "new classical" theorists of art: to seek a suitable mode of expression for an insight whose final epistemological status remained uncertain. And the construct he defined in answer to this dilemma, the "pragmatic" truth, had the same tensional structure as the poems and paintings of Vorticism.

The nature of James's work in empirical psychology profoundly influenced his later pragmatic approach to the question of truth. The late nineteenth century saw the emergence of psychology as an empirical science, and James himself was one of its most eloquent and influential proponents. The introductions to The Principles of Psychology (1890) and Psychology: The Briefer Course (1892) legislate certain principles both for psychological research and for the language in which its results are to be expressed. James contends that the first responsibility of any natural science is a circumscription of its data: in the case of psychology, the field of investigation is to include all "Thoughts and feelings," all "transitory states of consciousness," and along with these the "Knowledge, by these states of consciousness, of other things." Like the physical, chemical, and biological sciences before it, furthermore, psychology is to observe certain restrictions in the way it discusses these data. It is to limit itself to the uncritical description of mental phenomena, to accounts of the conditions that undeniably occur in the mind. It is not within its province to engage in "metaphysical" speculation, to inquire into the primary causes or higher significance of the events it describes. This necessitates, James warns, the exorcism of a number of spooks that have traditionally haunted the study of mind. It precludes just what Hulme wished to see excised from discussions of art: all "attempts to explain our phenomenally given thoughts as products of deeper-lying entities," whether these entities "be named 'Soul,' 'Transcendental Ego,' 'Ideas,' or 'Elementary Units of Consciousness'." The mind may be the locus for many events so mysterious that one wishes to claim the participation of some external cosmic force, but the psychologist remains satisfied with describing these events as they happen, and shies away from any transcendentalist claims.

Clearly, this ban on speculation about the relationship of mental phenomena to higher reality is especially important when the psychologist considers the final datum James lists as within his province: the kind of experience in which we feel we possess the "Knowledge … of other things," when we find ourselves in the presence of what seems to be some objective and necessary truth. In the Briefer Course, James makes it clear that although the empirical psychologist must study experiences of knowing, he must leave it to "more developed parts of Philosophy to test their ulterior significance and truth." For James, describing states of knowing in terms that scrupulously respected these boundaries was to become something of a preoccupation. He concentrated on describing the "Sentiment" we may sometimes have of the "Rationality" of our ideas, the "strong feeling of ease, peace [and] rest" that may accompany them, the "feeling of [their] sufficiency"—the feeling, in other words, that these conceptions are true. But while he describes their seeming character, James refuses to declare himself either a nominalist or a realist, to characterize those apparently sufficient conceptions either as wrongly reified concepts or genuinely transcendental Ideas. A similar suspension of judgment marks James's many attempts to describe apprehensions of supernatural phenomena. He declares himself compelled to accept as "objective" fact the occasional appearance to human minds of apparitions that seem to come from a realm "beyond" them. But—witness his account of the experiences of one "Mrs. Piper"—he is careful not to speculate about their "materiality":

In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits. What the source of this knowledge may be I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no escape.

James's fascination with experiences of knowing culminates in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), where he catalogues a great variety of moments that he broadly calls "mystical": moments in which people, their wills in abeyance, seem to know certain absolute and ineffable truths. It is part of James's responsibility as a psychologist to note that these experiences are usually characterized by "convincingness," that they are "absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come," yet it is equally incumbent upon him to refrain from declaring whether such revelations are what they seem. In the final analysis, he says, the moment of enchantment might be a "gift of our organism" just as possibly as "a gift of God's grace."

James's application of the methods of empirical psychology to the problem of cognitive experience intrigued and inspired Edmund Husserl, and we may see in James an incipient phenomenology. Varieties, as James Edie has recently argued, is justly characterized as the first genuine attempt at a phenomenology of religion. James speaks the language of phenomenology in stipulating that religion means for him "the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." His concern for recording only what the mind undeniably experiences adumbrates phenomenology's exclusive interest in the realm of what Husserl calls the "consciousness of" or "appearance of" cognitions. We see in his approach, finally, a version of Husserl's own policy to "bracket," or suspend all judgments about, the status of transcendent objects of knowing. Just as James refuses to judge mystical experiences, so Husserl was to observe that in his phenomenological reduction "cognition is neither disavowed nor regarded as in every sense doubtful." But for both James and Husserl—as for Pound, whose reflections on mysticism we shall find uncannily similar to theirs—the simple refusal to comment on the truth-value of cognitions does not terminate their inquiries. It remains for both a pressing problem to determine how, in the light of these restricted judgments, a person should regard, represent, and wield these insights. Both recognize that a mere decision to remain equivocal offers no help for living. As Husserl warns, after outlining the terms of phenomenological reduction, "we must take new steps, enter onto new considerations, so that we may gain a firm foothold in the new land and not finally run aground on its shore. For this shore has its rocks, and over it lie clouds of obscurity which threaten us with stormy gales of skepticism."

James's prescriptions for the representation of truth, of which the most mature formulations are in Pragmatism (1907), The Meaning of Truth (1909), and the posthumous Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), stop short of the extremely rigorous restrictions finally imposed by Husserl. But one point of resemblance is crucial: the stubborn unwillingness of both philosophers to "relapse," as Husserl puts it, into the "absurdities of skepticism." Pragmatism, as James argued strenuously in The Meaning of Truth, was not skepticism, however much its hostile critics might have considered it to be so. It was not skepticism because, as James had noted as early as "The Sentiment of Rationality" and Varieties, the psychological condition of skepticism was both undesirable and impossible to sustain. Indeed, Varieties and "Sentiment" recommend a stance of compromise that was to become a prototype for pragmatism: a stance that, while granting final approval to neither skeptical nor dogmatic impulses, was to allow for the operation of both.

James's route from psychology to pragmatism is determined, in part, by his fidelity to the principle of appealing to no higher authority than the stream of experience. It cannot be by their "roots" that we judge the reality of our gods, as he notes in Varieties, but only by their "fruits." When he considers how mystical insights are finally to be regarded, he compares the psychological effects of various options. Aware of that intrinsic "convincingness" of mystical insights that might propel the subject towards dogmatism, he holds that such insights have no authority in themselves that would "make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their relations uncritically." But just as he veers towards skepticism, James proposes another attitude to mystical experiences. When they are communicated positively, he says, they may have beneficial psychological effects; when they are regarded with hope, that is, they may "open out the possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith." Judging by effects, then, James concludes that the only sensible attitude towards the moment of mystical insight is one of optimism and openmindedness:

Mystical states indeed wield no authority due simply to their being mystical states. But the higher ones among them point in directions to which the religious sentiments even of nonmystical men incline. They tell of the supremacy of the ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety and of rest. They offer us hypotheses, hypotheses which we may voluntarily ignore, but which as thinkers we cannot possibly upset. The supernaturalism and optimism to which they would persuade us may, interpreted in one way or another, be after all the truest of insights into the meaning of this life.

In suggesting that we regard mystical insights as hypotheses, James charts a middle course between dogmatism and skepticism, appeasing our need to invest them with some authority, but not permitting blind faith. A hypothesis, after all, takes the form of a reassuring generalization, but by definition it is tested against the empirical world. James strengthens his argument for wielding insights in this way in "The Sentiment of Rationality," where he describes the contrary mental impulses—for authoritative abstractions and for empirical chaos—as equally irresistible. "When weary of the concrete clash and dust and pettiness," he observes, one will undoubtedly seek the comfort of the "immutable natures." But the second tendency ensures that he "will only be a visitor, not a dweller in [that] region." The discovery of any totalizing principle, the 'perfect object for belief" will inevitably bring on its heels an urgent need to doubt. "Our mind is so wedded to the process of seeing an other beside every item of its experience," he says, "that when the notion of an absolute datum is presented to it, it goes through its usual procedure and remains pointing at the void beyond, as if in that lay further matter for contemplation." The history of philosophy has shown, in sum, that neither a dogmatic rationalism, with its "barren union of all things," nor a skeptical empiricism, with its discomfiting "uncertainty," is sufficient to endure for any great length of time. The only policy that will prove psychologically satisfying for the majority of men will be one that reconciles the two tendencies, one that effects "a compromise between an abstract monotony and a concrete heterogeneity."

James's empirical researches into noetic experience, then, inform a representation of truth that, like Pound's chess game, is inherently tensional. In his mature description of the pragmatic attitude towards truth, it is a balance between attitudes both "dogmatical" and "skeptical," "rationalistic" and "empiricist," "religious" and "irreligious," ".romantic" and "scientific." The construct the pragmatist will call a "truth" is a simplification that is economical and aesthetically appealing, but that also stands up to an immediate testing in and against the "teeming and dramatic richness of the concrete world." If the truth fails to be corroborated by experience, James says, or to lead to beneficial action, it must be summarily dismantled and revised. Like that chess game that concludes in a "Dogmatic Statement," in other words, it is subject immediately to a "renewing of contest." By redefining truth in this way, James's pragmatism furthers Hulme's cause of taking all the hubristic "hocus-pocus" out of cognition. "Truth is no longer the transcendent mystery," James says, "in which so many philosophers have taken pleasure," but dwells on this side of the phenomenal barrier. The process of making and unmaking it is a coiling and uncoiling that never ends: "Truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth… and so on indefinitely."

Like James's rationale for pragmatism, Pound's route to a tensional aesthetic begins in an attempt to come to terms with mystical experience. As Pound's remarks on the creative experience of the Vorticist or Imagiste poet show, he imagines that experience to begin with a moment in which the artist seems to be visited by some truth from beyond himself. They suggest that he condones, in other words, the traditional representation of the poet as seer, which had most recently been articulated in the transcendentalist manifestos of French Symbolisme and in Yeats's theoretical tracts on the equivalency of art and magic. In a 1910 article on the psychology of the troubadours, published in a forum on psychic experience called The Quest, Pound makes an admission similar to the one James made in the face of his psychical researches. It is an "indisputable and very scientific fact," Pound says, that in the normal course of life one may suddenly feel "his immortality upon him," that one may be suddenly struck by a "vision unsought," a "vision gained without machination." These are the moments, in Pound's discourse, when the "gods" appear, and they are moments, like Mrs. Piper's, of absolute conviction. Persephone and Demeter, he says, Laurel and Artemis, "are intelligible, vital, essential… to those people to whom they occur"; they are 'for them real." It is a few years after noting the "delightful psychic experience" of the troubadours that Pound describes the Vorticist poet's moment of inspiration. The creative experience of the Imagiste, he says, will begin, like that of any Vorticist artist, with the sudden appearance, to his conscious mind, of his "primary pigment": a vision that will both inform what he articulates and the medium in which he speaks. In the case of the poet, in particular, this vision is the "IMAGE," and its qualities mark it as something descending from a higher, noumenal world. Like any mystical vision, the "Image" is an object of intuition, the gift of a moment in which action, will, and intellect are suspended. Like all those experiences James calls "mystical," too, the insight governed by the Image seems to be ineffable; unlike the "FORMED WORDS" that are the primary pigment for the writer of "LITERATURE," Pound says, the Image "is the word beyond formulated language." When one encounters it, moreover, one will feel elevated above the habitual constraints of time and of space, a fact that inspires Pound to compare it to a equation of analytic geometry—such as (x - a)² + (y - b)² = r²:

It is the circle. It is not a particular circle, it is any circle and all circles. It is nothing that is not a circle. It is the circle free of space and time limits. It is the universal, existing in perfection, in freedom from space and time.

Described in these quasi-Platonic terms, the Image seems to govern an experience like the one Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and their successors attribute to the Symboliste poet, an experience that began, as Swedenborg, Schopenhauer, and Hegel had inspired them to claim, with a glimpse into the "monde d'[I]dées." The Symbolistes had frequently invoked the transcendental Idea to account for a process of articulation that was intuitive and exploratory, and that made the poet's mind a locus for truths from beyond himself. Saying that artistic process begins with the apprehension of the Idea enabled them to explain the series of unanticipated utterances flowing from the artist's pen as the idea's endlessly generated particulars: the Idea that "floats before [the artist's] mind," as Schopenhauer phrased it, "resembles a living organism, developing itself and possessed of the power of reproduction, which brings forth what was not put into it." In equating the Image with the equations of analytical geometry, Pound seems to have a comparable purpose in mind, for these are the equations with which, as he recognizes, we are "able actually to create." The Image, like the Symbolistes' Idea, and unlike the "dead concepts" that initiate the art of allegory, is something that generates in the poet innumerable unforetold particulars: something that guides the poet through a process in which he will continue to discover new ideas, new variations on his original insight. Like the eternal Idea, Pound says, the image is a "VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing."

But if Pound's admissions about the appearance of the gods suggest that he affirms the traditional notions about the divinity of inspiration, if his claims about the poet's apprehension of the Image resemble Symboliste claims about art's mystical origins, other aspects of these accounts absolve them of such transcendentalism. As the language of these passages reveals, Pound observes the same limits, in describing those experiences, as those legislated by James for empirical psychology. In his accounts of the noetic experience common to mystic and poet, that is, Pound clearly acknowledges such experience as "scientific fact," but he scrupulously restricts his inquiry to the world as given in consciousness; he does not speculate about the first causes of experiences, about whether or not they are what they seem. In the article on "Psychology and Troubadours," Pound's subject is "delightful psychic experience"; the mythical gods are "explications of mood": the exalted moments occur when an individual "feels his immortality upon him." In his catechisms of 1918 and 1921, similarly, a god amounts to "an eternal state of mind"; its status is no different from the "taste of a lemon, or the fragrance of violets, or the aroma of dung-hills, or the feel of a stone or of tree-bark, or any other direct perception." And when Pound describes the feeling of transcendence occasioned by the apprehension of the Image, it is no accident that he makes a claim only about the individual's "sense of" that condition, for the Image, however much it might resemble the inspiring Idea of the Symbolistes, is in fact an entity firmly situated in that experiential realm approved by empirical psychology.

It has become a commonplace of Pound criticism that his account of the Image, in particular his suggestion that the Image manifests the workings of a subconscious phenomenon called the "complex," owes something to the Freudian psychoanalyst Bernard Hart. What has not been appreciated, however, is the more significant affinity between the Image and a number of like entities described by contemporary empirical-associationist psychologists like Ribot, Paulhan, and Bergson, which had also made their way into the accounts of creative activity formulated by Hulme. In his 1915 essay "Affirmations: As for Imagisme," Pound describes the Image as a "cluster" of percepts and ideas that has been "fused" in the mind by the energetic force of "emotion": an entity that, once given, demands "adequate expression," and inspires an organic process of making. Represented thus, it strongly resembles a construct described by Ribot in his influential Essai sur l'imagination créatrice (1900), borrowed by Bergson in a 1902 article "L'Effort intellectuel," and emerging most famously as part of the account of the act of artistic creation that serves as an illustrative analogy for natural creation in Bergson's L'Evolution créatrice (1907). This "conception ideale" or "schéma", a cluster of memory-images and ideas associated in the mind because of their "ressemblance a base émotionnelle," enables Ribot and Bergson to describe a process of creation that is organic: both speak of it as a "unite" that presents itself unsought to the consciousness of the artist, and that changes character when translated into the "détails" of words or matter. But crucially for both of them, it does so without necessitating any reference to that metaphysical concept of "un archetype fixe (survivance non deguis&e des Id&es platoniciennes), illuminant l'inventeur qui le reproduit comme il peut [fixed archetype (an undisguised survival of the Platonic Ideas), illuminating the inventor, who reproduces it as best he can]"; it enables them to describe the intuitive and organic experience described by Schopenhauer without demanding a claim about the poet's contact with a realm beyond time, beyond the phenomenal flux that Bergson called "la dure."

Ribot's and Bergson's versions of the intuitive and organic process of creation, a process they knew best as described in the treatises of French Symbolisme, make them Promethean demystifiers of creative genius, or more properly, Jamesian equivocators about the status of the passive, intuitive, ineffable, and noetic experience that is creative inspiration. For Ribot, who identifies the creative experience of the Symboliste poets and "l'imagination mystique," that equivocation comes in the form of a refusal to speculate about whether the unconscious mind that furnishes the constituents of the developing "unite" is ultimately material or spiritual. For Bergson, who was also to give the name of "image" to the first, inspiring presence in a poet's mind, the affinity with James comes in the form of a refusal to commit himself on the matter of the subjectivity or objectivity of inspiration; in the course of an empathetic correspondence with James, he declares his belief that "il y a l'experience pure, qui n'est ni subjective ni objective [there is pure experience, which is neither subjective nor objective]," and that "j'emploie le mot image pour designer une realite de ce genre [I employ the word image to designate a reality of this sort]."

When Pound feels compelled to comment on the origin of the ineffable Image, he shows just the same kind of hesitation to commit himself. Thinking, very likely, of Yeats's claim that the symbols that present themselves to a poet's consciousness originate in a universal memory, Pound acknowledges at the outset that the cluster of image, emotion, and idea that is the Image may have the effect of suggesting that its constituent image has "an age-old traditional meaning," and further concedes that "this may serve as proof to the professional student of symbology that we have stood in the deathless light, or that we have walked in some particular arbour of his traditional paradisio." But immediately upon suggesting this, he refuses to commit himself further, stressing that such speculation "is not our affair." Pound recognizes, in other words, that the Image may indeed be the vehicle of a "Divine Essence" that Yeats would have it be, but he feels uneasy, as if he has strayed into forbidden territory, when he strays beyond phenomena to first causes. As he was to note in his "Axiomata" about the status of those "gods" that on occasion appear so vital and convincing—in terms that might have been taken directly out of James's records on psychical research—these are equally likely to be either physiological and illusory, or spiritual and genuine, just as possibly "a mirage of the senses" as a genuine "affect from the theos." His view of mystical experience corroborates James's view that our judgments about it must be based not on its "roots," but on its "fruits":

The consciousness may be aware of the effects of the unknown and of the non-knowable on the consciousness, but this does not affect the proposition that our consciousness is utterly ignorant of the nature of the intimate essence. For instance: a man may be hit by a bullet and not know its composition, not the course of its having been fired, nor its direction, nor that it is a bullet. He may die almost instantly, knowing only the sensation of shock. Thus consciousness may perfectly well register certain results, as sensation, without comprehending their nature.… He may even die of a long-considered disease without comprehending its bacillus … Concerning the ultimate nature of the bacillus … no knowledge exists; but the consciousness may learn to deal with superficial effects of the bacillus, as with the directing of bullets.

Pound's own policy for describing the mental experience of the Vorticist poet, then, is very much in keeping with the guidelines that James shared with Husserl. His sympathy with the goals of phenomenological reduction may well have been what lay behind his formulation of the first and most famous of Imagiste tenets, the resolution to engage in the "Direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective." The Vorticist's inspiration, in his account, is to remain a cognitive experience where the object of cognition is bracketed. It is to be subject to what Husserl called the "principle of all principles": "'Intuition,' in primordial form … is simply to be accepted as it gives itself out to be, though only within the limits in which it then presents itself."

But of what significance is this policy in shaping Pound's prescriptions for Vorticist style? Pound insists that the poet himself observe identical restrictions when expressing his insights to others as Pound has observed when describing them generally. The "serious artist," in his view, is "scientific" in that he is content to confine his expressive efforts to the accurate record of his "state of consciousness." He presents "the image of his desire, of his hate, of his indifference, as precisely that, as precisely the image of his own desire, hate or indifference.…" And when it comes to articulating the insight that accompanies the appearance of the Image, even if that insight has all the authority of a mystical revelation, it is his duty simply to "render" it as he has "perceived or conceived it." Pound asks the poet, in other words, to represent his inspiration not as the authoritative insight it has seemed, but simply as the consciousness of an insight that it has undeniably been. "As Dante writes of the sunlight coming through the clouds from a hidden source and illuminating part of a field," so the Vorticist poet is to be on the watch for "new vibrations sensible to faculties as yet ill understood … neither affirming them to be 'astral' or 'spiritual' nor denying the formula of theosophy."

Like James, Pound makes it clear that the feeling of revelation that inspires the Vorticist poet does not authorize him to express his insight as dogma. The poet, he stresses, must "never consider anything as dogma." "That which the philosopher presents as truth," the Imagiste must somehow present "as that which appears as truth to a certain sort of mind under certain conditions." But if he forbids the poet from presenting his insights as gifts from the realm of the absolute, if he denies him the right to a pitch of rhetoric that, in Hulmean terms, flies unchecked into the "circumambient gas," Pound does not condemn him to an incapacitating skepticism. He is just as resistant as are James and Husserl to the prospect of a world in which truths can never be thought anything other than idiosyncratic. It was an acquiescence to such limitations—as we shall see more clearly when we consider Lewis's prescriptions for the artist—that had defined the "flaccid" or "spreading" arts of Impressionism and Futurism, and Pound is concerned that Vorticist poetry be more hopeful, more "energized" than these arts. "Imagism," he emphasizes, "is not Impressionism." The difference between Impressionist and Imagiste poetry, in his view, will be a deliberate gesture in the latter towards generalization, towards the making of abstract concepts or theories that might just possibly be true in a world wider than his own:

You may think of man as that toward which perception moves. You may think of him as the TOY of circumstance, as the plastic substance RECEIVING impressions.

OR you may think of him as DIRECTING a certain fluid force against circumstance, as CONCEIVING instead of merely observing and reflecting.

Pound shares James's belief that any man who has experienced a seemingly religious insight has a duty to express it in a tone that is suitably optimistic. Neither representing what he has apprehended as "propaganda of something called the one truth," nor offering "his ignorance [of such truth] as a positive thing," he must chart James's middle course, and offer it "as a sort of working hypothesis." As James imagines the psychologist's findings to be a "provisional body of propositions" about states of mind and their cognitions, which "more developed parts of Philosophy" might one day discover correspond with an absolute truth, so Pound envisions the poet offering up his insights "as the enduring data of philosophy," as propositions that may contribute to that other, deductive quest for metaphysical certainties. Just as James imagines his pragmatic truths being asserted and put to work in the world, so Pound suggests that the poet's insights ought to be recorded in such a way that they may be grasped and tested against experience. The analytical equations, passed on to the reader, become instruments for living. And Pound, like James, refuses to deny the possibility that the insights to which they lead might be "superior points of view, windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world":

Is the formula nothing, or is it cabala and the sign of unintelligible magic? The engineer, understanding and translating to the many, builds for the uninitiated bridges and devices. He speaks their language. For the initiated the signs are a door into eternity and into the boundless either.

There is reason to expect, then, that when Pound comes to discuss the nature of the expressive "arrangement" suitable for the Imagiste poet, he will specify an arrangement that is tensional in the same sense as the pragmatic truth. It will be something that aims to satisfy the skeptical, empiricist, irreligious and scientific tendency in its reader, by keeping his eye focused on the phenomenal world. It will leave some opening, however, for that philosophic, dogmatical, religious and romantic part of the consciousness that refuses to concede that the quest for timeless truths is futile. Pound comments that anyone who regards insights as absolute will succumb to a state of "paralysis" or mental "atrophy." He would hardly recommend, therefore, a poetic structure that encouraged such a regard in its reader. Only a construct that encourages the ongoing construction and dismantling of truths—not one that poses as the vehicle of some essential truth—will comply with the restrictions on human inquiry that Pound shares with James. It is in its achievement of such tensionality that the "Image" (which Pound uses in a second sense to designate the poetic arrangement) differs profoundly from the "Symbol."

Pound defines the Image as an "interpretive" or "absolute" metaphor. In distinguishing it thus from what he calls "ornamental" metaphor, he echoes the efforts of champions of the Symbol, from Baudelaire to Yeats, to define a poetic ideal in contradistinction to allegory: an art that will imply a necessary rather than arbitrary relation between itself and what it signifies, and that will somehow reflect in that way the organic rather than mechanical process by which it has come into being. Pound stresses, too, that whatever message the Image conveys, it will do so by "presentation" rather than "description," and so supports the Symboliste hostility toward discursiveness. Although these similarities have led a number of critics since Frank Kermode's Romantic Image to regard the Image and the Symbol as essentially identical, it is here, in fact, that the similarities end. The constructs that go by the name of Symbol are, to be sure, of many kinds. These structures share, however, the conceived function of revelation: they are conduits of "les splendeurs situees derriere le tombeau [the splendors situated beyond the veil]," pieces of a "pli de sombre dentelle qui retient l'infini [fold of dark lace, which curbs the infinite]," transparent lamps that glow with a "spiritual flame." The Symboliste work of art, in the words of Andre Gide, "est un cristal—paradis partiel ou l'Idee refleurit en sa purété superieure.… ou les paroles se font transparentes et révélatrices [is a crystal—a partial paradise where the Idea flowers again in its supreme purity… where words become transparent and revelatory]."

Pound imagines the Image, however, as functioning quite differently, in accordance with the more provisional sort of truth he is willing to ascribe to it. If the Symboliste puts the reader in the position of a mystic, for whom the natural world dissolves to reveal some absolute truth, the Imagiste seeks to restrict his reader's gaze to the stream of the phenomenal, and to bring him instead to the point of departure in the construction of a truth that is manmade and provisional. If a Symbol like Yeats's Rose functions simply to suggest things that may be identified with it, the Image is a construct that implies an identity between two concrete images, each of which it identifies explicitly. Pound illustrates with his own "In a Station of the Metro":

The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals, on a wet, black bough.

In this arrangement, as in the precise interpretive metaphor Pound locates in Guido Cavalcanti, "the phrases correspond to definite sensations undergone." The interpretive experience it invites is not one of casting "beyond" the images to search for a metaphor's suppressed tenors, but rather one of pondering the significance of the implied identity between two already clearly identified things.

James observes that the recognition of analogy is the first, delightful step in the effort of the "theoretical need" to simplify the world. In the essay that Pound described as containing "the fundamentals of all aesthetics," Fenollosa notes that the recognition of the "homologies, sympathies, and identities" in nature initiates the construction of all linguistic structures and systems of thought. The beauty of a poetry that works by engaging the reader at that moment when the process of abstraction has just begun, as Pound understood, is that it reminds him that the category he is beginning to see is one that is being created rather than discovered. The ideal condition of English poetry, writes Fenollosa, would be the condition exemplified by the Chinese ideogram: a sign in which the move towards abstraction is arrested at a stage where the particulars remain visible. Bearing "its metaphor on its face," having its "etymology … constantly visible," the poem that achieves this will not attempt to hide the fact that it is the product of an attempt to conquer difference, but will bear the evidence of its efforts—like a "blood-stained" battleflag. In doing so, it will not only enable its reader to enjoy recognizing an analogy between concrete things, but will also invite him to critique his impulse to identify those things, to subsume them under a common category. The Metro poem, for example, in implying an identity between the ghost-like faces that emerge in the dark of a subway station and the pink-white petals crowded on a branch in the spring rain, directs the reader towards a generalization about the mutual beauty and fragility of person and blossom. Presently, however, our satisfaction in that thought is disrupted by the uncomfortable equation of the tree-branch and the transit station from which faces and petals seem to spring. Contemplating that identification, we are compelled to object that the affinity between these long, black, thin, backdrops is more than countered by their difference. The faces bear no organic relation to their setting as do the petals to the bough. They do not spring from it, but it from them. The subway station is something the men behind these faces have constructed, something they have built in order to take shelter from that rain the petals accept with complete passivity. And with the refined insight brought by this recognition of difference, we are compelled to seek a new, more exact analogy.

Such an analogy, of course, will elicit its own objections, will be mentally dismantled in favor of one that seems still more fitting, and so the process will continue, perhaps indefinitely. The Image, or interpretive metaphor, in the terms of Paul Ricoeur, represents that "stage in the production of genres where generic kinship has not reached the level of conceptual peace and rest," but engenders instead a very definite state of "tension," as "the movement towards the genus is arrested by the resistance of the difference." By discouraging any propensity on the part of his reader to elevate his insights to the status of absolute truths, by substituting for the vaguely suggestive and talismanic Symbol a tensional, manifestly provisional, postulate of identity, in which, as Fenollosa willed it, "the creative process [remains] visible and at work," the Vorticist poet trips off instead a sidelong quest for temporary insights, momentary satisfactions, incipient categories that dissolve almost as soon as they are conceived. The mind of his reader is to be no still center, gazing into mystical truth, but a whirling Vortex, in which hopeful, centripetal gestures toward truth are as soon undone by a centrifugal motion. The sympathetic reading of the image, Pound's own secularized "symbol," is in his careful words "not necessarily a belief in a permanent world, but it is a belief in that direction."

The affinity between the pragmatic truth and the poetic image extends also to the type of painting and sculpture that Wyndham Lewis called Vorticist. Lewis's clearest prescriptions for Vorticist art are in "A Review of Contemporary Art," in Blast II, which stipulates the principles that the Vorticist ought to emulate and to eschew. Addressing the aesthetics of Expressionism, Cubism, Impressionism, and Futurism in turn, Lewis steers a course remarkably similar to those of James and Pound. Like many artists and art-theorists in his time, Lewis identifies the quest for abstraction in visual art with a search for mystical truth. And the most extreme manifestations of this quest arouse in him the same discomfort Hulme, James, and Pound feel at the unchecked flight of the "theoretic need." In the spirit of the "new classicism," Lewis objects strongly to paintings that pose as conduits for the supernatural. Particularly culpable, in his view, is the Expressionist painting of Kandinsky, whom he describes, fairly or unfairly, as "the only PURELY abstract painter in Europe." Kandinsky, of course, had written frequently and eloquently of the artist's capacity for unmediated vision, and had represented his own painting as a medium of revelation. In his Uber das Geistige in der Kunst (1911), translated and excerpted in the first issue of Blast, he makes an appeal for an art that will capture the "eternal truth" of the spirit world being explored by Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society. Lewis, predictably, objects to what he sees as Kandinsky's attempt to render spiritual truths at the expense of all references to the empirical world, and calls for the exorcism of the supernatural from aesthetics:

Kandinsky, docile to the intuitive fluctuations of his soul, and anxious to render his hand and mind elastic and receptive, follows this unreal entity into its cloud-world, out of the material and solid universe.

He allows the Bach-like will that resides in each good artist to be made war on by the slovenly and wandering Spirit. He allows the rigid chambers of his Brain to become a mystic house haunted by an automatic and puerile Spook, that leaves a delicate trail like a snail.

The Blavatskyish soul in another Spook that needs laying, if it gets a vogue, just as Michael Angelo does.

If, as James says, "the absence of definite sensible images" is the "sine qua non of a contemplation of the divine higher truths," we might interpret Lewis's anxiety in the face of Kandinsky's painting as dismay at its failure to acknowledge its own arbitrariness. Like Pound a few months earlier, he seems to detect in Kandinsky's effort to be "passive and medium-like" an unwillingness to concede a role to his own "Will and consciousness": an effort to represent as eternal truth what Kandinsky's own idiosyncratic mind has played a role in designing.

Lewis experiences a similar discomfort in confronting the theoretic tendency in the increasingly abstract art of Cubism. The Cubist painters aim, in the analytical phase of their art, to refine away from objects all the accidental details of light and perspective that grant due recognition to the arbitrary vantage point of the painter. In the words of a champion Cubist art like Maurice Raynal, who compared the Cubist achievement to that of Mallarmé, the Cubist painting will, when this goal is completely realized, "offer a guarantee of certainty in itself; that is to say of absolutely pure truth … and so make the Beautiful … into a 'sensible manifestation of the Idea.'" But as James might have predicted, when faced with the "absolute datum" of a Cubist painting, once there is virtually no "otherness" left to annoy his philosophic need, Lewis is gripped by a longing for the very particulars that have been sacrificed. Just as he laments the way Kandinsky's "ethereal, lyrical and cloud-like" paintings forego the power and definition of representative forms, he regrets that the Cubist quest for absolute truth results in paintings that are "static and representative, not swarming, exploding, or burgeoning with life.…" It is unfortunate, he says, when "the Plastic is impoverished for the Idea," for then "we get out of direct contact with these intuitive waves of power, that only play on the rich surfaces where life is crowded and abundant." With an equivocation reminiscent of Pound and James, Lewis concludes that although the artist may "believe in the existence of the supernatural," and think he has access to it, he should regard it "as redundant," as "nothing to do" with the "life" that is properly the object of art. He encourages the Vorticist artist, that is, as Hulme and Pound had encouraged their poets and James and Husserl their philosophers, to refrain from dedicating himself to recovering transcendental reality and to rest content with recording phenomenal experience. In 1939, protesting Herbert Read s representation of all modern abstract art as a kind of "spiritual refuge" from phenomenal chaos, Lewis objected that Vorticism had not been "a clinging to a lifebelt, or to a spur, or something satisfactory and solid, in the midst of a raging perpetual flux.…" "Its artists," he continued, in language reminiscent of Hulme, did not "'fly'" unchecked into the reassuring transcendency of "geometric expression."

But if Lewis discourages the Vorticist painter from rendering what he conceives as transcendental realities, he does not condemn him to an uncomprehended phenomenal chaos. If he recoils from the dogmatism of Kandinsky's Expressionism or Picasso's Cubism, he does not wholeheartedly embrace the skepticism implicit in Impressionism and Futurism. The Impressionists had worked from the premise that the highest from of truth accessible to an individual mind is, in Jules Laforgue's words, the "response of a unique sensibility to a moment." Their ideology was relativist, pluralist, and democratic; they confined the individual eye to its idiosyneratic impression, and respected all honestly rendered impressions equally. As Laforgue summarized it,

Each man is, according to his moment in time, his racial milieu and social situation, his moment of individual evolution, a kind of keyboard on which the exterior world plays in a certain way. My own keyboard is perpetually changing, and there is no other like it. All keyboards are legitimate.

The Impressionist was obliged to preserve every accident, every irregularity, in the fleeting picture present to his eye. For Monet and Renoir, to reduce any part of the shimmering panorama of sense-data to the skeletal lines of some mental concept would have been too coercive an interpretation. But for Lewis, such programmatic passivity, however much it satisfies painting's obligation to life, is not an acceptable alternative to pure abstraction. If the Cubist speaks too categorically, Lewis laments, the Impressionist and his Futurist successors are so tentative as not to speak at all, their "democratic [states] of mind" nothing but "cowardice or muddleheadedness." In their dedication to the "inherently unselective registering of impressions," they are engaged in an "absurd and gloomy waste of time." They forfeit the possibility of discerning and articulating any meaning in the phenomenal chaos, and remain completely "subjugated" to Nature. In other words, Lewis corroborates James's findings and balks at an art that denies all abstraction. His "theoretic need" makes him object that the involuntary, or "mechanically reactive" craftsmen of Impressionism and Futurism "do not sufficiently dominate the contents of their pictures." Just as Pound refuses to allow the Vorticist to remain a "Toy of Circumstance," Lewis insists that the Vorticist artist must both attend closely to life, and seek its sense, or pattern:

You must be able to organize the cups, saucers and people, or their abstract plastic equivalent, as naturally as Nature, only with the added personal logic of Art, that gives the grouping significance.

The Vorticist is not the Slave of Commotion, but it's [sic] Master.

Lewis's Vorticist, then, will neither penetrate the phenomenal veil, nor revel contentedly in its teeming chaos. "The finest Art," Lewis maintains, "is not pure Abstraction, nor is it unorganized life." And the constructs that preserve this balance are, once again, inherently tensional, compromising between abstract monotony and concrete heterogeneity. Lewis repeatedly stresses that Vorticist paintings and sculptures grant free rein to neither the philosophic tendency nor its opposite, but allow each to be checked by the operation of the other. "We must constantly strive to ENRICH abstraction," he says, "till it is almost plain life, or rather to get deeply enough immersed in material life to experience the shaping power amongst its vibrations." Like the poem that invites us to analogize between two images, a process countered by the phenomenal particulars preserved by the images themselves, the Vorticist painting or sculpture "must catch the clearness and the logic in the midst of contradictions: not settle down and snooze on an acquired, easily possessed and mastered, satisfying shape." The arrangements of Vorticist painters and sculptors, in other words, must not express their insights as divine revelations, but as human constructions, not as absolute truths, but as provisional gestures, subject to dissolution at the very instant of conception. "Finite and god-like lines," Lewis says, "are not for us, but, rather, a powerful but remote suggestion of finality, or an elementary organization of a dark insect swarming, like the passing of a cloud's shadow or the path of a wind."

Lewis's vision of a tensional art, so closely akin to Pound's, is borne out in the sculptures and paintings produced by members of the Vorticist circle, which included Lewis himself, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Frederick Etchells, David Bomberg, and Edward Wadsworth. Most of the works reproduced in the issues of Blast, or exhibited under the Vorticist banner, maintain the tense balance he advocates between the urge to abstraction and the impulse to recognize the fleeting particulars of the phenomenal flux. If the geometric forms of Malevich or Mondrian most closely emulate the condition of the eternal Idea, and if the blurred figures-in-motion of Italian Futurism in some sense carry the contrary ideal of the Impressionists to its logical conclusion, the work of the Vorticist brings these extremes into tense coexistence. Lewis represents his ideal at one point in Blast as that of a "LIVING plastic geometry," or, later, as the "burying [of] EUCLID deep in the living flesh," and this ideal is operative in a number of Vorticist works, most particularly Gaudier-Brzeska's magnificent sculpture, "Red Stone Dancer" (1913). In this figure, as Pound was to note in his book on the sculptor, the "mathematical bareness" of a triangle and circle, embedded in the face and breast, is "fully incarnate, made flesh, full of vitality and of energy" by the motion of limbs flowing in and out of them. If the viewer's eye gravitates to one of the unsullied abstractions, as if to what James called an "absolute datum," the sculpture invites it almost simultaneously to point beyond or on either side of them, to see the "other" of the dancer's motion-in-time. The whole body of the dancer, furthermore, whirling energetically into curves that then inspire to the purity and universality of the straight line, threatens to surrender, but never fully concedes, its idiosyncracies to an entirely uniform abstraction. Its head and upper body thus approximate the shape of a "spherical triangle"—what Pound called the "central life-form" in the work of Lewis as well as Gaudier-Brzeska.

The Vorticist corpus contains many such figures, aspiring to transcend their vitality and become universal: Lewis's paintings "Centauress" (1912) and "Enemy of the Stars" (1913), along with William Roberts's "Religion" (1913-14), not only embody but seem to narrate such an aspiration, and Bomberg's "Mud Bath" (1914) seems by its title to allude explicitly to the cindery world from which its highly abstract yet still just recognizably human figures spring. There are several works, too, in which landscapes hover midway between the abstract and the representative, the necessary and the accidental, the eternal and the temporal. In Etchell's "Dieppe" (1913), for example, the shape of houses, chimneys, and bridges, though refined of many of their accidental characteristics, retain the energy of a busy port by appearing to whirl about the picture's center. The palpable tension captured here, between the tendencies to move out of and into life, is mirrored in Etchell's later and less figurative "Progression" (1914-15), where the forces of abstraction and chaos battle it out in a degenerating grid. In that painting, as in other Vorticist works such as Bomberg's "Jiu-Jitsu" (1913), where the phenomenal flux is not longer represented by recognizable figurative allusions, the stasis of the squares is characteristically disrupted by the instability of irregular triangles or rhomboids and trapezoids. Another intriguing example of the warring impulses at work is Wadsworth's "Slack Bottom" (1914), where the illusion is of a chessboard whose perfect regularity will not hold, but sags at its center. The latter is reminiscent of the vision of theory-making found in Hulme's notebooks and essays: a world where abstract theories resemble chessboards, perched precariously atop the "cinder-heap" of the phenomenal world, momentarily ordering it, but then quickly collapsing back into it, waiting to be manufactured anew. "Slack Bottom" bring us back, too, to Pound's poetic chessboard, with its reminder that no abstract resolution is final, that every black-and-white solution reasoning may bring is subject immediately to a new, and once again colorful, battle.

The expressive arrangements of the Vorticist poet and artist, then, are similar both in genesis and constitution to the representations of truth James envisions for pragmatism. They reflect the conviction of their "new classical" theorists that it is hubristic to claim the capacity to grasp transcendental truths. They are also informed, however, by the recognition that moments in which such a condition seems to be accomplished are an undeniable part of our experience, and that it would be foolish to deny ourselves the hope that they inspire. James and Pound, in particular, are caught between their discomfort with dogmatism and their inability to adopt an attitude of thoroughgoing skepticism toward intuitions that seem, to them, to be more affirmed than denied by the stream of experience. To be chronically distrustful of our quasi-mystical moments, as James points out to a friend who has challenged him to give up his faith, and as Pound would no doubt have replied to anyone who wished to deny the poet his passion to articulate the Image, would be to assert "a dogmatic disbelief in any extant consciousness higher than that of the… human mind, and this in the teeth of the extraordinary vivacity of man's psychological commerce with something ideal that feels as if it were also actual." The pragmatic truth, the poetic Image, and the Vorticist painting, accordingly, are energetic assertions that, while not claiming to be windows on eternity, do not extinguish all hope of celestial fire either. They respond to our religious needs, our philosophic passions, by providing hypotheses, intriguing analogues, hints of a universal geometry. At the same time, however, they very deliberately preserve the context in which these insights arise, assaulting our peripheral vision with reminders of the phenomenal life that would be sacrificed to the pattern. The truths they posit seem inherently unstable, liable to revert to chaos at every moment, as our passion for distinguishing reasserts itself and focuses on the details that resist assimilation. By holding each of the two tendencies in check, these constructs fulfill their intended function of expressing not the simple fact of truth attained, but the complex feeling of attaining it, not the dead relic of a truth said-and-done, but the electricity of the consciousness of a truth coming-into-being. The truths of pragmatism and the poems and paintings of Vorticism actively pursue the condition Heidegger, the immediate heir of Husserl's phenomenology, was to envision for art: they are designed to be the fields for the "fighting of the battle in which the unconcealedness of beings … or truth, is won," the loci for truth's "becoming and happening." And in offering their audiences simultaneously both the light of unconcealedness and the dark of concealment, both the theoretical objects to inspire belief and the phenomenal evidence to elicit doubt, they invite them to take their place at the table where the chess game of truth-making is played. Their challenge is perpetual, and, if James's understanding of our restless psychic life is right, it is irresistible.