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Baker Brownell
(12 Dec 1887 - 5 Apr 1965)
American philosopher who published various books, including The New Universe: A Biography of the Worlds in Which We Live (1926, 1933), 66.
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Science Quotes by Baker Brownell (6 quotes)
Art arises in those strange complexities of action that are called human beings. It is a kind of human behavior. As such it is not magic, except as human beings are magical. Nor is it concerned in absolutes, eternities, “forms,” beyond those that may reside in the context of the human being and be subject to his vicissitudes. Art is not an inner state of consciousness, whatever that may mean. Neither is it essentially a supreme form of communication. Art is human behavior, and its values are contained in human behavior.
— Baker Brownell
In Art Is Action: A Discussion of Nine Arts in a Modern World (1939), 1.
Art matures. It is the formal elaboration of activity, complete in its own pattern. It is a cosmos of its own.
— Baker Brownell
In Art Is Action: A Discussion of Nine Arts in a Modern World (1939), 29.
Dance … is life, or becomes it, in a way that other arts cannot attain. It is not in stone, or words or tones, but in our muscles. It is a formulation of their movements.
— Baker Brownell
In Art Is Action: A Discussion of Nine Arts in a Modern World (1939), 56.
Life is a pattern of energies. It is not easy to say more.
— Baker Brownell
In The New Universe: A Biography of the Worlds in Which We Live (1926), 66.
Modern music, headstrong, wayward, tragically confused as to what to say and how to say it, has mounted its horse, as the joke goes, and ridden off in all directions. If we require of an art that it be unified as a whole and expressed in a universal language known to all, if it must be a consistent symbolization of the era, then modern music is a disastrous failure. It has many voices, many symbolizations. It it known to one, unknown to another. But if an art may be as variable and polyvocal as the different individuals and emotional regions from which it comes in this heterogeneous modern world, then the diversity and contradiction of modern music may be acceptable.
— Baker Brownell
In Art Is Action: A Discussion of Nine Arts in a Modern World (1939), 81.
The dance is four-dimensional art in that it moves concretely in both space and time. For the onlooker, it is an art largely of visual space combined with time. But for the dancer, and this is more important, the dance is more a muscular than a visual space rhythm, a muscular time, a muscular movement and balance. Dancing is not animated sculpture, it is kinesthetic.
— Baker Brownell
In Art Is Action: A Discussion of Nine Arts in a Modern World (1939), 56.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
