in assumptions.  At any Philosophical Society, if you ask for the explanation of simple Consciousness, the avalanche of answers, each differing from the other, will bewilder you.  We know the outward appearance of an object, of which we say that we know it, but what is it in itself?  Of that we are as much in the dark as we are of the mind that knows.  We say, each of us—­I know, but in philosophy we are not clear whether there is a thing that knows.  We know we are conscious, but we know nothing but that bare fact.  We do not know how an object swims into our consciousness.  We do not know in the scientific meaning of knowledge, how we come to know any object.  Our abysmal ignorance is this, that, of the thing known, and of that which knows, and of the process of knowing, we know nothing.  Who can tell us how the movement of matter in the brain causes what we call thought.  Is it a cause, or merely a concurrence?  When we can know this much, then art may have a philosophy in which we can all agree.  But, what signs are there of even the beginnings of agreement?  Certainly art is not known as we know a science—­perhaps we do not wish it ever to be so.  And the process of art is as indescribable as the process of knowing.  The advance we have made in philosophy seems to be this, that whereas one philosopher after another according to his temperament has thought he knew and has supplied us with hypotheses, and with successive clues to the mystery of Being, and with many systems of thought, we know now that none of them were adequate to supply even initial steps, and so, for the most part, we fall back on the knowledge that comes to us from living, from being, from knowing appearances, from action, and from feeling; on that position in short which Schopenhauer thought so despicable in a human being, i.e., Refuge in the common sense attitude, and practically the giving up of philosophy.  The outcome of all the brain work on philosophy, since the time of the Greeks, is that despair has entered into our minds of ever achieving any knowledge of the Real, beneath and beyond Phenomena, of a knowledge which commands assent.  Can even a Hegel write a convincing Philosophy of Art—­which implies a philosophy of complex knowing and feeling; the feeling or emotion, or sensation, which vibrates in music and colour and poetry.  Could Hegel himself answer this objection:  that poetry eludes all tests—­that that which you can thoroughly explain in any way is not poetry, as Swinburne has said?  It is the inexplicable, then, which lies at the essence of art and it is this, which if there is to be a Philosophy of Art must be its object.  The Inexplicable must be the object for the thinker with his orderly sequences, his logical search for causes and results.  It is not that artistic feeling is too subtle as a subject; it is that we cannot get hold of it at all.  It is where?  Here, in our emotion, our feeling, our imagination; it flies from us and it comes again.