Oberlin College
Published: 2017-10-29
Total Pages: 36
Get eBook
Excerpt from The Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Vol. 24: January, 1928 Norton says in one of his essays The imagination is the source of the poetic faculty, and every work of the fine arts is the work of the poet, the maker, the creator It is the source not only of'the poetic faculty, but of the sentiments by which man is ennobled and civilized. It quickens and enlarges his sympathies; it interprets the teachings of experience, and it shapes the fleeting and delusive show of things into permanent forms of beauty accommodated to the ideals of the mind, the attainment and enjoyment of which is the true end of life. It is through the study and knowledge of the works of fine arts, quite apart from the empirical practice of any of them, that the imagination, the supreme faculty of human nature, is mainly to be cultivated. He feels that nowhere are such study and such knowledge more needed than in America, for nowhere are the practical concerns of life more engrossing and the love of beauty less diffused. This was a lamentable fact; for he believed, it is in the expression of its ideals, by means of the arts which render those ideals in the forms of beauty, that the position of a people in the advance of civilization is ulti mately determined. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com 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.