Mr. Nahm has addressed us on the subject of human freedom in the fashioning of a work of art. It is a noble theme: there is no philosophical inquiry which can more lavishly enhance the nature of man as an imagining creature. This book should, I think, be regarded as the most competent description we yet possess of the character of freedom in art. That it tends unswervingly, through the range of its scholarship, to become legislative upon this question of (...) freedom is an inevitable circumstance. Mr. Nahm is Aristotelian: he insists upon the pre-eminence of the categories and the logic of aesthetic measurement and he sees the process of art as making. The freedom which he would claim for the artist is freedom of choice, freedom through the act of the individual will to put into a work of art the stuff of a deliberated intention. It follows that a second freedom is for Mr. Nahm equally desirable: the release of the critic into a potential realm of mastery as he perceives and studies the work of art. The critic is thus freed to a pure intelligibility. His choice of postulate assures his advantage. (shrink)