"Though Art, using the term with the above understood limitation, and reserving Literature, is able to give prompt, large actualisations of the Ego at an easy low level of untransformed, or very little transformed sensory experience, yet, apart from the provisional uses we have spoken of,—viz., filling up otherwise empty spaces in life, restfully alternating attention, &c.,—none of these egoistic-actualisations can be estimated as of much intrinsic value. They only occupy the intervals between man's better living. Not only cannot Art give the very highest complexities of sentiency, substituting the egoistic-actualisations which are rendered by Conduct, but at the times it is having sway, it must preclude these by a preoccupation of the sensory apparatus peripherally. The nervous system has to work the other way—from the interior—in all heightenings of character. As compared with Conduct, Art has small subtlety, little intricacy of inter-appeal to the consciousness, but only masses some simpler forms of sentiency; it necessarily offers no reality answering to that of personal relationships stirred by practical doing. It is owing to this deficiency that many men seeking after what is termed spirituality are prompted so greatly to dispense with Art; though, let us hasten to add, if they neglect it wholly they do so at the risk of becoming narrow from the sheer lack of the larger habituations of the nervous-apparatus which it gives—these being always needed at some points."
Very likely, a reader of the above extracts who may happen to have also seen some of the critiques I earlier hinted at, speaking of the volume as written in an involved, confused, "Latinised" or "Grecised" style, will be a little perplexed at not finding the reading more difficult. Two of Mr. Cyples's largely-used technical phrases—i.e., "egoistic-actualisation" and "efferent-activity"—are brought into play; but for the rest, I myself believe that I see in the passages I have given traces of a practised, ready pen. The fact is, that the critics who have spoken in this way of the style of the author, have confused the deliberate and studied adoption of a set technology, used in perfect, and I may add relentless consistency, with a lack of ability to write simple composition. The above citations are from the plainest portion of the book, but the plainness there is owing merely to the absence of the new technical terms which are used so copiously elsewhere; and in any part of the book, the skill in composition, allowing for the nature of the topics dealt with, reappears whenever the use of the terminology is suspended.
I can conceive that the author had a misgiving that some of his reviewers would make the blunder of not knowing a technology when they saw it, and that he nearly wholly dispensed with it in the writing of this chapter, as providing himself with a trap wherein to catch them. If he did so, he has succeeded, for they have fallen right into it. At the same time, convicting your critics of not knowing their own business by first laying in their way a temptation to rail at your volume is not the height of wisdom in an author, and I think Mr. Cyples would have done much better to have made his book easier reading throughout. But he may, if he will, fairly retort that there is certainly some defect of skill in philosophical criticism among us at this moment when it makes no distinction between an author's purposed and careful use of a technical vocabulary, and mere ineptitude in
