"No human emotion can be causeless, nor can so intense an emotion be causeless, irreducible and unrelated to the source of emotions (and of values) -- to the needs of a living entity's survival. Art does have a purpose and does serve a human need; only it is not a material need, but a need of man's consciousness. Art is inextricably tied to man's survival -- not to his physical survival, but to that on which his physical survival depends -- to the preservation and survival of his consciousness.
"The source of art lies in the fact that man's cognitive faculty is conceptual -- i.e., that man acquires knowledge and guides his actions, not by means of single, isolated percepts, but by means of abstractions.
"To understand the nature and function of art, one must understand the nature and function of concepts.
"A concept is a mental integration of two or more units which are isolated by a process of abstraction united by a specific definition. By organizing his perceptual material into concepts, and his concepts into wider and still wider concepts, man is able to grasp and retain, to identify and integrate an unlimited amount of knowledge, a knowledge extending beyond the immediate concretes of any given, immediate moment.
"In any given moment, concepts enable man to hold in the focus of his conscious awareness much more than his purely perceptual capacity would permit. The range of man's perceptual awareness -- the number of percepts he can deal with at any one time -- is limited. He may be able to visualize four or five units --as, for instance five trees. He cannot visualize a hundred trees or a distance of ten light-years. It is only his conceptual faculty that makes it possible for him to deal with knowledge of that kind.
"Man retains his concepts by means of language. With the exception of proper names, every word we use is a concept that stands for an unlimited number of concretes of a certain kind. A concept is like a mathematical series of specifically defined units, going off in both directions, open at both ends and including all units of that particular kind. For instance, the concept 'man' includes all men who live at present, who have ever lived or will ever live -- a number of men so great that one would not be able to perceive them all visually, let alone to study them or discover anything about them.
"Language is a code of visual-auditory symbols that serves the psycho-epistemological function of concerting abstractions into concretes or, more precisely, into the psycho-epistemological equivalent of concretes, into a manageable number of specific units.
"(Psycho-epistemology is the study of man's cognitive processes from the aspect of the interaction between the conscious mind and the automatic functions of the subconscious.)
"Consider the enormous conceptual integration involved in any statement, from the conversation of a child to the discourse of a scientist. Consider the long conceptual chain that starts from simple, ostensive definitions and rises to higher and still higher concepts, forming a hierarchical structure of knowledge so complex that no electric computer could approach it. It is by means of such chains that man has to acquire and retain his knowledge of reality.
"Yet this is the simpler part of his psycho-epistemological task. There is another part which is still more complex.
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