ÆSTHETIC

THE

ÆSTHETIC

IS DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR

TO THE MEMORY OF HIS PARENTS

PASQUALE AND LUISA SIPARI

AND OF HIS SISTER

MARIA

[Pg vii]

EXTRACT FROM INTRODUCTION xix

NOTE BY THE TRANSLATOR xxv

AUTHOR'S PREFACE xxvii

I

THEORY OF ÆSTHETIC

I 1

INTUITION AND EXPRESSION

Intuitive knowledge—Its independence with respect to intellectual knowledge—Intuition and perception—Intuition and the concepts of space and time—Intuition and sensation—Intuition and association—Intuition and representation—Intuition and expression—Illusion as to their difference—Identity of intuition and expression

II 12

INTUITION AND ART

Corollaries and explanations—Identity of art and intuitive knowledge—No specific difference—No difference of intensity—The difference is extensive and empirical—Artistic genius—Content and form in Æsthetic—Criticism of the imitation of nature and of the artistic illusion—Criticism of art conceived as a fact of feeling, not a theoretical fact—Æsthetic appearance, and feeling—Criticism of the theory of æsthetic senses—Unity and indivisibility of the work of art—Art as liberator

III 22

ART AND PHILOSOPHY

Inseparability of intellectual from intuitive knowledge—Criticism of the negations of this thesis—Art and science—Content and form:[Pg viii] another meaning—Prose and poetry—The relation of first and second degree—Non-existence of other forms of cognition—Historicity—Its identity with and difference from art—Historical criticism—Historical scepticism—Philosophy as perfect science. The so-called natural sciences, and their limits—The phenomenon and the noumenon

IV 32

HISTORICISM AND INTELLECTUALISM IN ÆSTHETIC

Criticism of the probable and of naturalism—Criticism of ideas in art, of theses in art, and of the typical—Criticism of the symbol and of the allegory—Criticism of the theory of artistic and literary kinds—Errors derived from this theory in judgements on art—Empirical sense of the divisions of kinds

V 39

ANALOGOUS ERRORS IN THE THEORY OF HISTORY AND IN LOGIC

Criticism of the philosophy of History—Æsthetic intrusions into Logic—Logic in its essence—Distinction between logical and non-logical judgements—Syllogistic—Logical falsehood and æsthetic truth—Reformed logic—Note to the fourth Italian edition

VI 47

THE THEORETIC ACTIVITY AND THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY

The will—The will as an ulterior stage in respect to knowledge—Objections and explanations—Criticism of practical judgements or judgements of value—Exclusion of the practical from the æsthetic—Criticism of the theory of the end of art and of the choice of content—Practical innocence of art—Independence of art—Criticism of the saying: the style is the man—Criticism of the concept of sincerity in art

VII 55

ANALOGY BETWEEN THE THEORETIC AND THE PRACTICAL

The two forms of the practical activity—The economically useful—Distinction between the useful and the technical—Distinction of[Pg ix] the useful from the egoistic—Economic will and moral will—Pure economicity—The economic side of morality—The merely economical and the error of the morally indifferent—Criticism of utilitarianism and the reform of Ethics and of Economics—Phenomenon and noumenon in practical activity

VIII 61

EXCLUSION OF OTHER SPIRITUAL FORMS

The system of the spirit—The forms of genius—Non-existence of a fifth form of activity—Law; sociability—Religion—Metaphysic—Mental imagination and the intuitive intellect—Mystical Æsthetic—Mortality and immortality of art

IX 67

INDIVISIBILITY OF EXPRESSION INTO MODES OR DEGREES AND CRITICISM OF RHETORIC

The characters of art—Non-existence of modes of expression—Impossibility of translations—Criticism of the rhetorical categories—Empirical sense of the rhetorical categories—Their use as synonyms of the æsthetic fact—Their use to indicate various æsthetic imperfections—Their use in a sense transcending æsthetic, in the service of science—Rhetoric in the schools—The resemblances of expressions—The relative possibility of translations

X 74

ÆSTHETIC FEELINGS AND THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE UGLY

Various significations of the word feeling—Feeling as activity —Identification of feeling with economic activity—Criticism of hedonism—Feeling as a concomitant of every form of activity —Meaning of certain ordinary distinctions of feelings—Value and disvalue: the contraries and their union—The beautiful as the value of expression, or expression without qualification—The ugly, and the elements of beauty which compose it—Illusion that there exist expressions neither beautiful nor ugly—True æsthetic feelings and concomitant and accidental feelings—Criticism of apparent feelings

[Pg x]

XI 82

CRITICISM OF ÆSTHETIC HEDONISM

Criticism of the beautiful as that which pleases the higher senses—Criticism of the theory of play—Criticism of the theory of sexuality and of triumph—Criticism of the Æsthetic of the sympathetic: meaning in it of content and form—Æsthetic hedonism and moralism—The rigoristic negation, and the pedagogic justification of art—Criticism of pure beauty

XII 87

THE ÆSTHETIC OF THE SYMPATHETIC AND PSEUDO-ÆSTHETIC CONCEPTS

Pseudo-æsthetic concepts, and the Æsthetic of the sympathetic—Criticism of the theory of the ugly in art and of the overcoming of it—Pseudo-æsthetic concepts belong to Psychology—Impossibility of rigorous definitions of them—Examples: definitions of the sublime, of the comic, of the humorous—Relation between these concepts and æsthetic concepts

XIII 94

THE "PHYSICALLY BEAUTIFUL" IN NATURE AND IN ART

Æsthetic activity and physical concepts—Expression in the æsthetic sense, and expression in the naturalistic sense—Representations and memory—The production of aids to memory—Physical beauty—Content and form: another meaning—Natural beauty and artificial beauty—Mixed beauty—Writings—Free and non-free beauty—Criticism of non-free beauty—Stimulants of production

XIV 104

ERRORS ARISING FROM THE CONFUSION BETWEEN PHYSICS AND ÆSTHETIC

Criticism of æsthetic associationism—Criticism of æsthetic Physics—Criticism of the theory of the beauty of the human body—Criticism of the beauty of geometrical figures—Criticism of another aspect[Pg xi] of the imitation of nature—Criticism of the theory of the elementary forms of the beautiful—Criticism of the search for the objective conditions of the beautiful—The astrology of Æsthetic

XV 111

THE ACTIVITY OF EXTERNALIZATION. TECHNIQUE AND THE THEORY OF THE ARTS

The practical activity of externalization—The technique of externalization—Technical theories of the different arts—Criticism of æsthetic theories of particular arts—Criticism of the classification of the arts—Criticism of the theory of the union of the arts—Relation of the activity of externalization to utility and morality

XVI 118

TASTE AND THE REPRODUCTION OF ART

Æsthetic judgement: its identity with æsthetic reproduction—Impossibility of divergences—Identity of taste and genius—Analogy with other activities—Criticism of æsthetic absolutism (intellectualism) and relativism—Criticism of relative relativism—Objection founded on the variation of the stimulus and of psychic disposition—Criticism of the distinction of signs into natural and conventional—The surmounting of variety—Restorations and historical interpretation

XVII 128

THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE AND OF ART

Historical criticism in literature and art: its importance—Literary and artistic history: its distinction from historical criticism and from the æsthetic judgement—The method of artistic and literary history—Criticism of the problem of the origin of art—The criterion of progress and history—Non-existence of a single line of progress in artistic and literary history—Errors committed against this law— Other meanings of the word "progress" in relation to Æsthetic

XVIII 140

CONCLUSION: IDENTITY OF LINGUISTIC AND ÆSTHETIC

Summary of the study—Identity of Linguistic with Æsthetic—Æsthetic formulation of linguistic problems—Nature of language—Origin[Pg xii] of language and its development—Relation between Grammar and Logic—Grammatical kinds or parts of speech—The individuality of speech and the classification of languages—Impossibility of a normative Grammar—Didactic organisms—Elementary linguistic facts, or roots—Æsthetic judgement and the model language—Conclusion

II

HISTORY OF ÆSTHETIC

I 155

ÆSTHETIC IDEAS IN GRÆCO-ROMAN ANTIQUITY

Point of view of this History of Æsthetic—Mistaken tendencies, and attempts towards an Æsthetic, in Græco-Roman antiquity—Origin of the æsthetic problem in Greece—Plato's rigoristic negation—Æsthetic hedonism and moralism—Mystical æsthetic in antiquity—Investigations as to the Beautiful—Distinction between the theory of Art and the theory of the Beautiful—Fusion of the two by Plotinus—The scientific tendency: Aristotle—The concepts of imitation and of imagination after Aristotle: Philostratus—Speculations on language

II 175

ÆSTHETIC IDEAS IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE

Middle Ages. Mysticism: Ideas on the Beautiful—The pedagogic theory of art in the Middle Ages—Hints of an Æsthetic in scholastic philosophy—Renaissance: Philography and philosophical and empirical inquiries concerning the Beautiful—The pedagogic theory of art and the Poetics of Aristotle—The "Poetics of the Renaissance"—Dispute concerning the universal and the probable in art—G. Fracastoro—L. Castelvetro—Piccolomini and Pinciano—Fr. Patrizzi (Patricius)

III 189

FERMENTS OF THOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

New words and new observations in the seventeenth century—Wit—Taste—Various meanings of the word taste—Fancy or imaginatio[Pg xiii]n—Feeling—Tendency to unite these terms—Difficulties and contradictions in their definition—Wit and intellect—Taste and intellectual judgement—The "je ne sais quoi"—Imagination and sensationalism: the corrective of imagination—Feeling and sensationalism

IV 204

ÆSTHETIC IDEAS OF THE CARTESIAN AND LEIBNITIAN SCHOOLS, AND THE "ÆSTHETIC" OF BAUMGARTEN

Cartesianism and imagination—Crousaz and André—The English: Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and the Scottish School—Leibniz: "petites perceptions" and confused knowledge—Intellectualism of Leibniz—Speculations on language—J. C. Wolff—Demand for an organon of inferior knowledge—Alexander Baumgarten: his "Æsthetic"—Æsthetic as science of sensory consciousness—Criticism of judgements passed on Baumgarten—Intellectualism of Baumgarten—New names and old meanings

V 220

GIAMBATTISTA VICO

Vico as inventor of æsthetic science—Poetry and philosophy: imagination and intellect—Poetry and history—Poetry and language—Inductive and formalistic logic—Vico opposed to all former theories of poetry—Vico's judgements of the grammarians and linguists who preceded him—Influence of seventeenth-century writers on Vico—Æsthetic in the Scienza Nuova—Vico's mistakes—Progress still to be achieved

VI 235

MINOR ÆSTHETIC DOCTRINES OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The influence of Vico—Italian writers: A. Conti—Quadrio and Zanotti—M. Cesarotti—Bettinelli and Pagano—German disciples of Baumgarten: G. F. Meier—Confusions of Meier—M. Mendelssohn and other followers of Baumgarten—Vogue of Æsthetic—Eberhard and Eschenburg—J. G. Sulzer—K. H. Heydenreich—J. G. Herder—Philosophy of language

[Pg xiv]

VII 257

OTHER ÆSTHETIC DOCTRINES OF THE SAME PERIOD

Other writers of the eighteenth century: Batteux—The English: W. Hogarth—E. Burke—H. Home—Eclecticism and sensationalism: E. Platner—Fr. Hemsterhuis—Neo-Platonism and mysticism: Winckelmann—Beauty and lack of significance—Winckelmann's contradictions and compromises—A. R. Mengs—G. E. Lessing—Theorists of ideal Beauty—G. Spalletti and the characteristic—Beauty and the characteristic: Hirt, Meyer, Goethe

VIII 272

IMMANUEL KANT

I. Kant—Kant and Vico—Identity of the concept of Art in Kant and Baumgarten—Kant's "Lectures"—Art in the Critique of Judgment—Imagination in Kant's system—The forms of intuition and the Transcendental Æsthetic—Theory of Beauty distinguished by Kant from that of Art—Mystical features in Kant's theory of Beauty

IX 283

THE ÆSTHETIC OF IDEALISM: SCHILLER, SCHELLING, SOLGER, HEGEL

The Critique of Judgment and metaphysical idealism—F. Schiller—Relations between Schiller and Kant—The æsthetic sphere as the sphere of Play—Æsthetic education—Vagueness and lack of precision in Schiller's Æsthetic—Schiller's caution and the rashness of the Romanticists—Ideas on Art: J. P. Richter—Romantic Æsthetic and idealistic Æsthetic—J. G. Fichte—Irony: Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis—F. Schelling—Beauty and character—Art and Philosophy—Ideas and the gods: Art and mythology—K. W. Solger—Fancy and imagination—Art, practice and religion—G. W. F. Hegel—Art in the sphere of absolute spirit—Beauty as sensible appearance of the Idea—Æsthetic in metaphysical idealism and Baumgartenism—Mortality and decay of art in Hegel's system

X 304

SCHOPENHAUER AND HERBART

Æsthetic mysticism in the opponents of idealism—A. Schopenhauer—Ideas as the object of art—Æsthetic catharsis—Signs of a better[Pg xv] theory in Schopenhauer—J. F. Herbart—Pure Beauty and relations of form—Art as sum of content and form—Herbart and Kantian thought

XI 312

FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER

Æsthetic of content and Æsthetic of form: meaning of the contrast—Friedrich Schleiermacher—Wrong judgements concerning him—Schleiermacher contrasted with his predecessors—Place assigned to Æsthetic in his Ethics—Æsthetic activity as immanent and individual—Artistic truth and intellectual truth—Difference of artistic consciousness from feeling and religion—Dreams and art: inspiration and deliberation—Art and the typical—Independence of art—Art and language—Schleiermacher's defects—Schleiermacher's services to Æsthetic.

XII 324

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE: HUMBOLDT AND STEINTHAL

Progress of Linguistic—Linguistic speculation at the beginning of the nineteenth century—Wilhelm von Humboldt: relics of intellectualism—Language as activity: internal form—Language and art in Humboldt—II. Steinthal: the linguistic function independent of the logical—Identity of the problems of the origin and the nature of language—Steinthal's mistaken ideas on art: his failure to unite Linguistic and Æsthetic

XIII 334

MINOR GERMAN ÆSTHETICIANS

Minor æstheticians in the metaphysical school—Krause, Trahndorff, Weisse and others—Fried. Theodor Vischer—Other tendencies—Theory of the Beautiful in nature, and that of the Modifications of Beauty—Development of the first theory: Herder—Schelling, Solger, Hegel—Schleiermacher—Alexander von Humboldt—Vischer's "Æsthetic Physics"—The theory of the Modifications of Beauty: from antiquity to the eighteenth century—Kant and the post-Kantians—Culmination of the development—Double form of the theory: the overcoming of the ugly: Solger, Weisse and others—Passage from abstract to concrete: Vischer—The "legend of Sir Purebeauty"

[Pg xvi]

XIV 350

ÆSTHETIC IN FRANCE, ENGLAND AND ITALY DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Æsthetic movement in France: Cousin, Jouffroy—English Æsthetic— Italian Æsthetic—Rosmini and Gioberti—Italian Romantics. Dependence of art

XV 358

FRANCESCO DE SANCTIS

F. de Sanctis: development of his thought—Influence of Hegelism—Unconscious criticism of Hegelism—Criticisms of German Æsthetic—Final rebellion against metaphysical Æsthetic—De Sanctis' own theory—The concept of form—De Sanctis as art-critic—De Sanctis as philosopher

XVI 370

ÆSTHETIC OF THE EPIGONI

Revival of Herbartian Æsthetic—Robert Zimmermann—Vischer versus Zimmermann—Hermann Lotze—Efforts to reconcile Æsthetic of form and Æsthetic of content—K. Köstlin—Æsthetic of content. M. Schasler —Eduard von Hartmann—Hartmann and the theory of modifications —Metaphysical Æsthetic in France: C. Levêque—In England: J. Ruskin —Æsthetic in Italy—Antonio Tari and his lectures—Æsthesigraphy

XVII 388

ÆSTHETIC POSITIVISM AND NATURALISM

Positivism and evolutionism—Æsthetic of H. Spencer—Physiologists of Æsthetic: Grant Allen, Helmholtz and others—Method of the natural sciences in Æsthetic—H. Taine's Æsthetic—Taine's metaphysic and moralism—G. T. Fechner: inductive Æsthetic—Experiments—Trivial nature of his ideas on Beauty and Art—Ernst Grosse: speculative Æsthetic and the Science of Art—Sociological Æsthetic—Proudhon—J. M. Guyau—M. Nordau—Naturalism: C. Lombroso—Decline of linguistic—Signs of revival: H. Paul—The linguistic of Wundt

[Pg xvii]

XVIII 404

ÆSTHETIC PSYCHOLOGISM AND OTHER RECENT TENDENCIES

Neo-criticism and empiricism—Kirchmann—Metaphysic translated into Psychology: Vischer—Siebeck—M. Diez—Psychological tendency. Teodor Lipps—K. Groos—The modifications of the Beautiful in Groos and Lipps—E. Véron and the double form of Æsthetic—L. Tolstoy—F. Nietzsche —An æsthetician of Music: E. Hanslick—Hanslick's concept of form —Æstheticians of the figurative arts: C. Fiedler—Intuition and expression—Narrow limits of these theories—H. Bergson—Attempts to return to Baumgarten: C. Hermann—Eclecticism: B. Bosanquet —Æsthetic of expression: present state 404

XIX 420

HISTORICAL SKETCHES OF SOME PARTICULAR DOCTRINES

Result of the history of Æsthetic—History of science and history of the scientific criticism of particular errors

I. RHETORIC: OR THE THEORY OF ORNATE FORM. 422

Rhetoric in the ancient sense—Criticism from moral point of view—Accumulation without system—Its fortunes in the Middle Ages and Renaissance—Criticisms by Vives, Ramus and Patrizzi—Survival into modern times—Modern signification of Rhetoric: theory of literary form—Concept of ornament—Classes of ornament—The concept of the Fitting—The theory of ornament in the Middle Ages and Renaissance—Reductio ad absurdum in the seventeenth century—Polemic concerning the theory of ornament—Du Marsais and metaphor—Psychological interpretation—Romanticism and Rhetoric: present day

II. HISTORY OF ARTISTIC AND LITERARY KINDS 436

The kinds in antiquity: Aristotle—In the Middle Ages and Renaissance—The doctrine of the three unities—Poetics of the kinds and rules: Scaliger—Lessing—Compromises and extensions—Rebellion against rules in general—G. Bruno, Guarini—Spanish critics—G. B. Marino—G. V. Gravina—Fr. Montani—Critics of the eighteenth century—Romanticism and the "strict kinds": Berchet, V. Hugo—Their persistence in philosophical theories—Fr. Schelling—E. von Hartmann—The kinds in the schools

[Pg xviii]

III. THE THEORY OF THE LIMITS OF THE ARTS 449

The limits of the arts in Lessing—Arts of space and arts of time—Limits and classifications of the arts in later philosophy: Herder and Kant—Schelling, Solger—Schopenhauer, Herbart—Weisse, Zeising, Vischer—M. Schasler—E. v. Hartmann—The supreme art: Richard Wagner—Lotze's attack on classifications—Contradictions in Lotze—Doubts in Schleiermacher

IV. OTHER PARTICULAR DOCTRINES 459

The Æsthetic theory of natural beauty—The theory of æsthetic senses—The theory of kinds of style—The theory of grammatical forms or parts of speech—Theory of æsthetic criticism—Distinction between taste and genius—Concept of artistic and literary history—Conclusion

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX 475

INDEX 491

[Pg xix]

I can lay no claim to having discovered an America, but I do claim to have discovered a Columbus. His name is Benedetto Croce, and he dwells on the shores of the Mediterranean, at Naples, city of the antique Parthenope.

It was at Naples, in the winter of 1907, that I first saw the Philosopher of Æsthetic. Benedetto Croce, although born in the Abruzzi, Province of Aquila (1866), is essentially a Neapolitan, and rarely remains long absent from the city, on the shore of that magical sea where once Ulysses sailed, and where sometimes yet (near Amalfi) we may hear the Syrens sing their song. But more wonderful than the song of any Syren seems to me the Theory of Æsthetic as the Science of Expression, and that is why I have overcome the obstacles that stood between me and the giving of this theory, which in my belief is the truth, to the English-speaking world.

. . . . . . . . . .

The solution of the problem of Æsthetic is not in the gift of the Muses.

This Philosophy of the Spirit is symptomatic of the happy reaction of the twentieth century against the crude materialism of the second half of the nineteenth. It is the spirit which gives to the work of art its value, not this or that method of arrangement, this or that tint or cadence, which can always be copied by skilful plagiarists:[Pg xx] not so the spirit of the creator. In England we hear too much of (natural) science, which has usurped the very name of Philosophy. The natural sciences are very well in their place, but discoveries such as aviation are of infinitely less importance to the race than the smallest addition to the philosophy of the spirit. Empirical science, with the collusion of positivism, has stolen the cloak of philosophy and must be made to give it back.

. . . . . . . . . .

Yet though severe, the editor of La Critica is uncompromisingly just, and would never allow personal dislike or jealousy, or any extrinsic consideration, to stand in the way of fair treatment to the writer concerned. Many superficial English critics might benefit considerably by attention to this quality in one who is in other respects also so immeasurably their superior. A good instance of this impartiality is his critique of Schopenhauer, with whose system he is in complete disagreement, yet affords him full credit for what of truth is contained in his voluminous writings.

. . . . . . . . . .

This thoroughness it is which gives such importance to the literary and philosophical criticisms of La Critica. Croce's method is always historical, and his object in approaching any work of art is to classify the spirit of its author, as expressed in that work. There are, he maintains, but two things to be considered in criticizing a book. These are, firstly, what is its peculiarity, in what way is it singular, how is it differentiated from other works? Secondly, what is its degree of purity?—That is, to what extent has its author kept himself free from all considerations alien to the perfection of the work as an expression, as a lyrical intuition? With the answering of these questions Croce is satisfied. He does not care to know if the author keep a motor-car, like Mæterlinck; or prefer[Pg xxi] to walk on Putney Heath, like Swinburne. This amounts to saying that all works of art must be judged by their own standard. How far has the author succeeded in doing what he intended?

. . . . . . . . . .

As regards Croce's general philosophical position, it is important to understand that he is not a Hegelian, in the sense of being a close follower of that philosopher. One of his last works is that in which he deals in a masterly manner with the philosophy of Hegel. The title may be translated, "What is living and what is dead of the philosophy of Hegel." Here he explains to us the Hegelian system more clearly than that wondrous edifice was ever before explained, and we realize at the same time that Croce is quite as independent of Hegel as of Kant, of Vico as of Spinoza. Of course he has made use of the best of Hegel, just as every thinker makes use of his predecessors and is in his turn made use of by those that follow him. But it is incorrect to accuse of Hegelianism the author of an anti-hegelian Æsthetic, of a Logic where Hegel is only half accepted, and of a Philosophy of the Practical which contains hardly a trace of Hegel. I give an instance. If the great conquest of Hegel be the dialectic of opposites, his great mistake lies in the confusion of opposites with things which are distinct but not opposite. If, says Croce, we take as an example the application of the Hegelian triad that formulates becoming (affirmation, negation and synthesis), we find it applicable for those opposites which are true and false, good and evil, being and not-being, but not applicable to things which are distinct but not opposite, such as art and philosophy, beauty and truth, the useful and the moral. These confusions led Hegel to talk of the death of art, to conceive as possible a Philosophy of History, and to the application of the natural sciences to the absurd task of[Pg xxii] constructing a Philosophy of Nature. Croce has cleared away these difficulties by showing that if from the meeting of opposites must arise a superior synthesis, such a synthesis cannot arise from things which are distinct but not opposite, since the former are connected together as superior and inferior, and the inferior can exist without the superior, but not vice versa. Thus we see how philosophy cannot exist without art, while art, occupying the lower place, can and does exist without philosophy. This brief example reveals Croce's independence in dealing with Hegelian problems.

I know of no philosopher more generous than Croce in praise and elucidation of other workers in the same field, past and present. For instance, and apart from Hegel, Kant has to thank him for drawing attention to the marvellous excellence of the Critique of Judgment, generally neglected in favour of the Critiques of Pure Reason and of Practical Judgment; Baumgarten for drawing the attention of the world to his obscure name and for reprinting his Latin thesis in which the word Æsthetic occurs for the first time; and Schleiermacher for the tributes paid to his neglected genius in the History of Æsthetic. La Critica, too, is full of generous appreciation of contemporaries by Croce and by that profound thinker, Gentile.

. . . . . . . . . .

There can be no doubt of the great value of Croce's work as an educative influence, and if we are to judge of a philosophical system by its action on others, then we must place the Philosophy of the Spirit very high. It may be said with perfect truth that since the death of the poet Carducci there has been no influence in Italy to compare with that of Benedetto Croce.

. . . . . . . . . .

Of the popularity that his system and teaching have[Pg xxiii] already attained we may judge by the fact that the Æsthetic, despite the difficulty of the subject, is already in its third edition in Italy, where, owing to its influence, philosophy sells better than fiction; while the French and Germans, not to mention the Czechs, have long had translations of the earlier editions. His Logic is on the point of appearing in its second edition, and I have no doubt that the Philosophy of the Practical will eventually equal these works in popularity. The importance and value of Italian thought have been too long neglected in Great Britain. Where, as in Benedetto Croce, we get the clarity of vision of the Latin, joined to the thoroughness and erudition of the best German tradition, we have a combination of rare power and effectiveness, which can by no means be neglected.

The philosopher feels that he has a great mission, which is nothing less than the leading back of thought to belief in the spirit, deserted by so many for crude empiricism and positivism. His view of philosophy is that it sums up all the higher human activities, including religion, and that in proper hands it is able to solve any problem. But there is no finality about problems: the solution of one leads to the posing of another, and so on. Man is the maker of life, and his spirit ever proceeds from a lower to a higher perfection.

. . . . . . . . . .

I believe that Croce will one day be recognized as one of the very few great teachers of humanity. At present he is not appreciated at nearly his full value. One rises from a study of his philosophy with a sense of having been all the time as it were in personal touch with the truth, which is very far from the case after the perusal of certain other philosophies.

Secure in his strength, Croce will often introduce a joke[Pg xxiv] or some amusing illustration from contemporary life, in the midst of a most profound and serious argument. This spirit of mirth is a sign of superiority. He who is not sure of himself can spare no energy for the making of mirth. Croce loves to laugh at his enemies and with his friends. So the philosopher of Naples sits by the blue gulf and explains the universe to those who have ears to hear. "One can philosophize anywhere," he says—but he remains significantly at Naples.

Thus I conclude these brief remarks upon the author of the Æsthetic, confident that those who give time and attention to its study will be grateful for having placed in their hands this pearl of great price from the diadem of the antique Parthenope.

DOUGLAS AINSLIE.

THE ATHENÆUM, PALL MALL,

May 1909.

[Pg xxv]

This second edition of the Æsthetic will be found to contain the complete translation of the historical portion, which I was obliged to summarize in the first edition. I have made a number of alterations and some additions to the theoretical portion, following closely the fourth (definitive) Italian edition, and in so doing have received much advice and assistance of value from Mrs. Salusbury, to whom I beg to tender my best thanks. I trust that this new edition will enable all those desirous of studying the work to get into direct touch with the thought of the author.

THE ATHENÆUM, PALL MALL, S.W.,

November 1920.

[Pg xxvi]
[Pg xxvii]

This volume is composed of a theoretical and of a historical part, which form two independent but complementary books.

The nucleus of the theoretical part is a memoir, bearing the title Fundamental Theses of an Æsthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, which was read at the Accademia Pontaniana of Naples during the sessions of February 18 and May 6, 1900, and printed in vol. xxx. of its Acts. The author has added few substantial variations, but not a few additions and amplifications in rewriting it, also following a somewhat different sequence with a view to rendering the exposition more plain and easy. The first five chapters only of the historical portion were inserted in the Neapolitan review Flegrea (April 1901), under the title Giambattista Vico, First Discoverer of Æsthetic Science, and these also reappear amplified and brought into harmony with the rest.

The author has dwelt, especially in the theoretical part, upon general questions which are side-issues in respect to the theme that he has treated. But this will not seem a digression to those who remember that, strictly speaking, there are no particular philosophical sciences, standing by themselves. Philosophy is unity, and when we treat of Æsthetic or of Logic or of Ethics, we treat always of the whole of philosophy, although[Pg xxviii] illustrating for didactic purposes only one side of that inseparable unity. In like manner, owing to this intimate connexion of all the parts of philosophy, the uncertainty and misunderstanding as to the æsthetic activity, the representative and productive imagination, this firstborn of the spiritual activities, mainstay of the others, generates everywhere else misunderstandings, uncertainties and errors: in Psychology as in Logic, in History as in the Philosophy of Practice. If language is the first spiritual manifestation, and if the æsthetic form is language itself, taken in all its true scientific extension, it is hopeless to try to understand clearly the later and more complicated phases of the life of the spirit, when their first and simplest moment is ill known, mutilated and disfigured. From the explanation of the æsthetic activity is also to be expected the correction of several concepts and the solution of certain philosophic problems which generally seem to be almost desperate. Such is precisely the spirit animating the present work. And if the present attempt and the historical illustrations which accompany it may be of use in winning friends to these studies, by levelling obstacles and indicating paths to be followed; if this happen, especially here in Italy, whose æsthetic traditions (as has been demonstrated in its place) are very noble, the author will consider that he has gained his end, and one of his keenest desires will have been satisfied.

NAPLES, December 1901.

In addition to a careful literary revision, (in which, as well as in the revision of the notes, I have received valuable help from my friend Fausto Nicolini) I have in this third edition made certain alterations of theory,[Pg xxix] especially in Chapters X. and XI. of Part I., suggested by further reflexion and self-criticism.

But I have refrained from introducing corrections or additions of such a kind as to alter the original plan of the book, which was, or was meant to be, a complete but brief æsthetic theory set in the framework of a general sketch of a Philosophy of the Spirit.

The reader who desires a complete statement of the general or collateral doctrines or a more particular exposition of the other parts of philosophy (e.g. the lyrical nature of art) is now referred to the volumes on Logic and the Philosophy of Practice, which together with the present work compose the Philosophy of the Spirit which in the author's opinion exhausts the entire field of Philosophy. The three volumes were not conceived and written simultaneously; if they had been, some details would have been differently arranged. When I wrote the first I had no idea of giving it, as I have now done, two such companions; and I therefore designed it to be, as I say, complete in itself. In the second place, the present state of the study of Æsthetic made it desirable to append to the theoretical exposition a somewhat full history of the science, whereas for the other parts of Philosophy I was able to restrict myself to brief historical notes merely designed to show how, from my point of view, such a history would best be composed. Lastly, there are many things which now, after a systematic exposition of the various philosophical sciences, I see in closer connexions and in a clearer, or at least a different, light; a certain hesitation and even some doctrinal errors visible here and there in the Æsthetic, especially where subjects foreign to Æsthetic itself are being treated, would now no longer be justified. For all these reasons the three volumes, in spite of their substantial unity of spirit and of aim, have each its own physiognomy, and show marks[Pg xxx] of the different periods of life at which they were written, so as to group themselves, and to demand interpretation, as a progressive series according to their dates of publication.

With what may be called the minor problems of Æsthetic, and the objections which have been or might be brought against my theory, I have dealt and am continuing to deal in special essays, of which I shall shortly publish a first collection which will form a kind of explanatory and polemical appendix to the present volume.

November 1907.

In revising this book once more for a fourth edition, I take the opportunity of announcing that the supplementary volume of essays promised above was published in 1910 under the title Problems of Æsthetic and Contributions to the History of Æsthetic in Italy.

B. C.

May 1911.

[Pg 1]

Knowledge has two forms: it is either intuitive knowledge or logical knowledge; knowledge obtained through the imagination or knowledge obtained through the intellect; knowledge of the individual or knowledge of the universal; of individual things or of the relations between them: it is, in fact, productive either of images or of concepts.

In ordinary life, constant appeal is made to intuitive knowledge. It is said that we cannot give definitions of certain truths; that they are not demonstrable by syllogisms; that they must be learnt intuitively. The politician finds fault with the abstract reasoner, who possesses no lively intuition of actual conditions; the educational theorist insists upon the necessity of developing the intuitive faculty in the pupil before everything else; the critic in judging a work of art makes it a point of honour to set aside theory and abstractions, and to judge it by direct intuition; the practical man professes to live rather by intuition than by reason.

But this ample acknowledgment granted to intuitive knowledge in ordinary life, does not correspond to an equal and adequate acknowledgment in the field of theory and of philosophy. There exists a very ancient science of intellectual knowledge, admitted by all without discussion, namely, Logic; but a science of intuitive knowledge is timidly and with difficulty asserted by but a few. Logical knowledge has appropriated the lion's share; and if she does not slay and devour her[Pg 2] companion outright, yet yields to her but grudgingly the humble place of maid-servant or doorkeeper.—What can intuitive knowledge be without the light of intellectual knowledge? It is a servant without a master; and though a master find a servant useful, the master is a necessity to the servant, since he enables him to gain his livelihood. Intuition is blind; intellect lends her eyes.

Now, the first point to be firmly fixed in the mind is that intuitive knowledge has no need of a master, nor to lean upon any one; she does not need to borrow the eyes of others, for she has excellent eyes of her own. Doubtless it is possible to find concepts mingled with intuitions. But in many other intuitions there is no trace of such a mixture, which proves that it is not necessary. The impression of a moonlight scene by a painter; the outline of a country drawn by a cartographer; a musical motive, tender or energetic; the words of a sighing lyric, or those with which we ask, command and lament in ordinary life, may well all be intuitive facts without a shadow of intellectual relation. But, think what one may of these instances, and admitting further the contention that the greater part of the intuitions of civilized man are impregnated with concepts, there yet remains to be observed something more important and more conclusive. Those concepts which are found mingled and fused with the intuitions are no longer concepts, in so far as they are really mingled and fused, for they have lost all independence and autonomy. They have been concepts, but have now become simple elements of intuition. The philosophical maxims placed in the mouth of a personage of tragedy or of comedy, perform there the function, not of concepts, but of characteristics of such personage; in the same way as the red in a painted face does not there represent the red colour of the physicists, but is a characteristic element of the portrait. The whole is that which determines the quality of the parts. A work of art may be full of philosophical concepts; it may contain them in greater[Pg 3] abundance and they may there be even more profound than in a philosophical dissertation, which in its turn may be rich to overflowing with descriptions and intuitions. But notwithstanding all these concepts the total effect of the work of art is an intuition; and notwithstanding all those intuitions, the total effect of the philosophical dissertation is a concept. The Promessi Sposi contains copious ethical observations and distinctions, but does not for that reason lose as a whole its character of simple story or intuition. In like manner the anecdotes and satirical effusions to be found in the works of a philosopher like Schopenhauer do not deprive those works of their character of intellectual treatises. The difference between a scientific work and a work of art, that is, between an intellectual fact and an intuitive fact, lies in the difference of the total effect aimed at by their respective authors. This it is that determines and rules over the several parts of each not these parts separated and considered abstractly in themselves.

But to admit the independence of intuition as regards concept does not suffice to give a true and precise idea of intuition. Another error arises among those who recognize this, or who at any rate do not explicitly make intuition dependent upon the intellect, to obscure and confuse the real nature of intuition. By intuition is frequently understood perception, or the knowledge of actual reality, the apprehension of something as real.

Certainly perception is intuition: the perceptions of the room in which I am writing, of the ink-bottle and paper that are before me, of the pen I am using, of the objects that I touch and make use of as instruments of my person, which, if it write, therefore exists;—these are all intuitions. But the image that is now passing through my brain of a me writing in another room, in another town, with different paper, pen and ink, is also an intuition. This means that the distinction between reality and non-reality is extraneous, secondary, to the true nature of intuition. If we imagine a human mind having intuitions for the first time, it would seem that[Pg 4] it could have intuitions of actual reality only, that is to say, that it could have perceptions of nothing but the real. But since knowledge of reality is based upon the distinction between real images and unreal images, and since this distinction does not at the first moment exist, these intuitions would in truth not be intuitions either of the real or of the unreal, not perceptions, but pure intuitions. Where all is real, nothing is real. The child, with its difficulty of distinguishing true from false, history from fable, which are all one to childhood, can furnish us with a sort of very vague and only remotely approximate idea of this ingenuous state. Intuition is the undifferentiated unity of the perception of the real and of the simple image of the possible. In our intuitions we do not oppose ourselves as empirical beings to external reality, but we simply objectify our impressions, whatever they be.

Those, therefore, who look upon intuition as sensation formed and arranged simply according to the categories of space and time, would seem to approximate more nearly to the truth. Space and time (they say) are the forms of intuition; to have an intuition is to place it in space and in temporal sequence. Intuitive activity would then consist in this double and concurrent function of spatiality and temporality. But for these two categories must be repeated what was said of intellectual distinctions, when found mingled with intuitions. We have intuitions without space and without time: the colour of a sky, the colour of a feeling, a cry of pain and an effort of will, objectified in consciousness: these are intuitions which we possess, and with their making space and time have nothing to do. In some intuitions, spatiality may be found without temporality, in others, vice versa; and even where both are found, they are perceived by later reflexion: they can be fused with the intuition in like manner with all its other elements: that is, they are in it materialiter and not formaliter, as ingredients and not as arrangement. Who, without an act of reflexion which for a moment breaks[Pg 5] in upon his contemplation, can think of space while looking at a drawing or a view? Who is conscious of temporal sequence while listening to a story or a piece of music without breaking into it with a similar act of reflexion? What intuition reveals in a work of art is not space and time, but character, individual physiognomy. The view here maintained is confirmed in several quarters of modern philosophy. Space and time, far from being simple and primitive functions, are nowadays conceived as intellectual constructions of great complexity. And further, even in some of those who do not altogether deny to space and time the quality of formative principles, categories and functions, one observes an effort to unite them and to regard them in a different manner from that in which these categories are generally conceived. Some limit intuition to the sole category of spatiality, maintaining that even time can only be intuited in terms of space. Others abandon the three dimensions of space as not philosophically necessary, and conceive the function of spatiality as void of all particular spatial determination. But what could such a spatial function be, a simple arrangement that should arrange even time? It represents, surely, all that criticism and refutation have left standing—the bare demand for the affirmation of some intuitive activity in general. And is not this activity truly determined, when one single function is attributed to it, not spatializing nor temporalizing, but characterizing? Or rather, when it is conceived as itself a category or function which gives us knowledge of things in their concreteness and individuality?

Having thus freed intuitive knowledge from any suggestion of intellectualism and from every later and external addition, we must now explain it and determine its limits from another side and defend it from a different kind of invasion and confusion. On the hither side of the lower limit is sensation, formless matter, which the spirit can never apprehend in itself as simple matter. This it can only possess with form and in form, but postulates the notion of it as a mere limit. Matter, in its[Pg 6] abstraction, is mechanism, passivity; it is what the spirit of man suffers, but does not produce. Without it no human knowledge or activity is possible; but mere matter produces animality, whatever is brutal and impulsive in man, not the spiritual dominion, which is humanity. How often we strive to understand clearly what is passing within us! We do catch a glimpse of something, but this does not appear to the mind as objectified and formed. It is in such moments as these that we best perceive the profound difference between matter and form. These are not two acts of ours, opposed to one another; but the one is outside us and assaults and sweeps us off our feet, while the other inside us tends to absorb and identify itself with that which is outside. Matter, clothed and conquered by form, produces concrete form. It is the matter, the content, which differentiates one of our intuitions from another: the form is constant: it is spiritual activity, while matter is changeable. Without matter spiritual activity would not forsake its abstractness to become concrete and real activity, this or that spiritual content, this or that definite intuition.

It is a curious fact, characteristic of our times, that this very form, this very activity of the spirit, which is essentially ourselves, is so often ignored or denied. Some confound the spiritual activity of man with the metaphorical and mythological activity of what is called nature, which is mechanism and has no resemblance to human activity, save when we imagine, with Æsop, that "arbores loquuntur non tantum ferae." Some affirm that they have never observed in themselves this "miraculous" activity, as though there were no difference, or only one of quantity, between sweating and thinking, feeling cold and the energy of the will. Others, certainly with greater reason, would unify activity and mechanism in a more general concept, though they are specifically distinct. Let us, however, refrain for the moment from examining if such a final unification be possible, and in what sense, but admitting that the attempt may be[Pg 7] made, it is clear that to unify two concepts in a third implies to begin with the admission of a difference between the two first. Here it is this difference that concerns us and we set it in relief.

Intuition has sometimes been confused with simple sensation. But since this confusion ends by being offensive to common sense, it has more frequently been attenuated or concealed with a phraseology apparently designed at once to confuse and to distinguish them. Thus, it has been asserted that intuition is sensation, but not so much simple sensation as association of sensations. Here a double meaning is concealed in the word "association." Association is understood, either as memory, mnemonic association, conscious recollection, and in that case the claim to unite in memory elements which are not intuited, distinguished, possessed in some way by the spirit and produced by consciousness, seems inconceivable: or it is understood as association of unconscious elements, in which case we remain in the world of sensation and of nature. But if with certain associationists we speak of an association which is neither memory nor flux of sensations, but a productive association (formative, constructive, distinguishing); then our contention is admitted and only its name is denied to it. For productive association is no longer association in the sense of the sensationalists, but synthesis, that is to say, spiritual activity. Synthesis may be called association; but with the concept of productivity is already posited the distinction between passivity and activity, between sensation and intuition.

Other psychologists are disposed to distinguish from sensation something which is sensation no longer, but is not yet intellectual concept: the representation or image. What is the difference between their representation or image and our intuitive knowledge? Everything and nothing: for "representation" is a very equivocal word. If by representation be understood something cut off and standing out from the psychic basis of the sensations, then representation is intuition. If, on the other[Pg 8] hand, it be conceived as complex sensation we are back once more in crude sensation, which does not vary in quality according to its richness or poverty, or according to whether the organism in which it appears is rudimentary or highly developed and full of traces of past sensations. Nor is the ambiguity remedied by defining representation as a psychic product of secondary degree in relation to sensation, defined as occupying the first place. What does secondary degree mean here? Does it mean a qualitative, formal difference? If so, representation is an elaboration of sensation and therefore intuition. Or does it mean greater complexity and complication, a quantitative, material difference? In that case intuition is once more confused with simple sensation.

And yet there is a sure method of distinguishing true intuition, true representation, from that which is inferior to it: the spiritual fact from the mechanical, passive, natural fact. Every true intuition or representation is also expression. That which does not objectify itself in expression is not intuition or representation, but sensation and mere natural fact. The spirit only intuites in making, forming, expressing. He who separates intuition from expression never succeeds in reuniting them.

Intuitive activity possesses intuitions to the extent that it expresses them. Should this proposition sound paradoxical, that is partly because, as a general rule, a too restricted meaning is given to the word "expression." It is generally restricted to what are called verbal expressions alone. But there exist also non-verbal expressions, such as those of line, colour and sound, and to all of these must be extended our affirmation, which embraces therefore every sort of manifestation of the man, as orator, musician, painter, or anything else. But be it pictorial, or verbal, or musical, or in whatever other form it appear, to no intuition can expression in one of its forms be wanting; it is, in fact, an inseparable part of intuition. How can we really possess an intuition of a geometrical figure, unless we possess so accurate an image of it as to be able to trace it immediately upon paper or on the blackboard?

[Pg 9]

How can we really have an intuition of the contour of a region, for example of the island of Sicily, if we are not able to draw it as it is in all its meanderings? Every one can experience the internal illumination which follows upon his success in formulating to himself his impressions and feelings, but only so far as he is able to formulate them. Feelings or impressions, then, pass by means of words from the obscure region of the soul into the clarity of the contemplative spirit. It is impossible to distinguish intuition from expression in this cognitive process. The one appears with the other at the same instant, because they are not two, but one.

The principal reason which makes our view appear paradoxical as we maintain it, is the illusion or prejudice that we possess a more complete intuition of reality than we really do. One often hears people say that they have many great thoughts in their minds, but that they are not able to express them. But if they really had them, they would have coined them into just so many beautiful, sounding words, and thus have expressed them. If these thoughts seem to vanish or to become few and meagre in the act of expressing them, the reason is that they did not exist or really were few and meagre. People think that all of us ordinary men imagine and intuite countries, figures and scenes like painters, and bodies like sculptors; save that painters and sculptors know how to paint and carve such images, while we bear them unexpressed in our souls. They believe that any one could have imagined a Madonna of Raphæl; but that Raphæl was Raphæl owing to his technical ability in putting the Madonna upon canvas. Nothing can be more false than this view. The world which as a rule we intuite is a small thing. It consists of little expressions, which gradually become greater and wider with the increasing spiritual concentration of certain moments. They are the words we say to ourselves, our silent judgments: "Here is a man, here is a horse, this is heavy, this is sharp, this pleases me," etc. It is a medley of light and colour, with no greater pictorial value than[Pg 10] would be expressed by a haphazard splash of colours, from among which one could barely make out a few special, distinctive traits. This and nothing else is what we possess in our ordinary life; this is the basis of our ordinary action. It is the index of a book. The labels tied to things (it has been said) take the place of the things themselves. This index and these labels (themselves expressions) suffice for small needs and small actions. From time to time we pass from the index to the book, from the label to the thing, or from the slight to the greater intuitions, and from these to the greatest and most lofty. This passage is sometimes far from easy. It has been observed by those who have best studied the psychology of artists that when, after having given a rapid glance at any one, they attempt to obtain a real intuition of him, in order, for example, to paint his portrait, then this ordinary vision, that seemed so precise, so lively, reveals itself as little better than nothing. What remains is found to be at the most some superficial trait, which would not even suffice for a caricature. The person to be painted stands before the artist like a world to discover. Michæl Angelo said, "One paints, not with the hands, but with the brain." Leonardo shocked the prior of the Convent of the Graces by standing for days together gazing at the "Last Supper," without touching it with the brush. He remarked of this attitude: "The minds of men of lofty genius are most active in invention when they are doing the least external work." The painter is a painter, because he sees what others only feel or catch a glimpse of, but do not see. We think we see a smile, but in reality we have only a vague impression of it, we do not perceive all the characteristic traits of which it is the sum, as the painter discovers them after he has worked upon them and is thus able to fix them on the canvas. We do not intuitively possess more even of our intimate friend, who is with us every day and at all hours, than at most certain traits of physiognomy which enable us to distinguish him from others. The illusion is less easy as regards musical expression; because it would[Pg 11] seem strange to every one to say that the composer had added or attached notes to a motive which was already in the mind of him who is not the composer; as if Beethoven's Ninth Symphony were not his own intuition and his intuition the Ninth Symphony. Now, just as one who is deluded as to the amount of his material wealth is confuted by arithmetic, which states its exact amount, so he who nourishes delusions as to the wealth of his own thoughts and images is brought back to reality, when he is obliged to cross the Pons Asinorum of expression. Let us say to the former, count; to the latter, speak; or, here is a pencil, draw, express yourself.

Each of us, as a matter of fact, has in him a little of the poet, of the sculptor, of the musician, of the painter, of the prose writer: but how little, as compared with those who bear those names, just because they possess the most universal dispositions and energies of human nature in so lofty a degree! How little too does a painter possess of the intuitions of a poet! And how little does one painter possess those of another painter! Nevertheless, that little is all our actual patrimony of intuitions or representations. Beyond these are only impressions, sensations, feelings, impulses, emotions, or whatever else one may term what still falls short of the spirit and is not assimilated by man; something postulated for the convenience of exposition, while actually non-existent, since to exist also is a fact of the spirit.

We may thus add this to the various verbal descriptions of intuition, noted at the beginning: intuitive knowledge is expressive knowledge. Independent and autonomous in respect to intellectual function; indifferent to later empirical discriminations, to reality and to unreality, to formations and apperceptions of space and time, which are also later: intuition or representation is distinguished as form from what is felt and suffered, from the flux or wave of sensation, or from psychic matter; and this form, this taking possession, is expression. To intuite is to express; and nothing else (nothing more, but nothing less) than to express.

[Pg 12]

Before proceeding further, it may be well to draw certain consequences from what has been established and to add some explanations.

We have frankly identified intuitive or expressive knowledge with the æsthetic or artistic fact, taking works of art as examples of intuitive knowledge and attributing to them the characteristics of intuition, and vice versa. But our identification is combated by a view held even by many philosophers, who consider art to be an intuition of an altogether special sort. "Let us admit" (they say) "that art is intuition; but intuition is not always art: artistic intuition is a distinct species differing from intuition in general by something more."

But no one has ever been able to indicate of what this something more consists. It has sometimes been thought that art is not a simple intuition, but an intuition of an intuition, in the same way as the concept of science has been defined, not as the ordinary concept, but as the concept of a concept. Thus man would attain to art by objectifying, not his sensations, as happens with ordinary intuition, but intuition itself. But this process of raising to a second power does not exist; and the comparison of it with the ordinary and scientific concept does not prove what is intended, for the good reason that it is not true that the scientific concept is the concept of a concept. If this comparison proves anything, it proves just the opposite. The ordinary concept, if it be really a concept[Pg 13] and not a simple representation, is a perfect concept, however poor and limited. Science substitutes concepts for representations; for those concepts that are poor and limited it substitutes others, larger and more comprehensive; it is ever discovering new relations. But its method does not differ from that by which is formed the smallest universal in the brain of the humblest of men. What is generally called par excellence art, collects intuitions that are wider and more complex than those which we generally experience, but these intuitions are always of sensations and impressions.

Art is expression of impressions, not expression of expression.

For the same reason, it cannot be asserted that the intuition, which is generally called artistic, differs from ordinary intuition as intensive intuition. This would be the case if it were to operate differently on the same matter. But since the artistic function is extended to wider fields, yet does not differ in method from ordinary intuition, the difference between them is not intensive but extensive. The intuition of the simplest popular love-song, which says the same thing, or very nearly, as any declaration of love that issues at every moment from the lips of thousands of ordinary men, may be intensively perfect in its poor simplicity, although it be extensively so much more limited than the complex intuition of a love-song by Leopardi.

The whole difference, then, is quantitative, and as such is indifferent to philosophy, scientia qualitatum. Certain men have a greater aptitude, a more frequent inclination fully to express certain complex states of the soul. These men are known in ordinary language as artists. Some very complicated and difficult expressions are not often achieved, and these are called works of art. The limits of the expression-intuitions that are called art, as opposed to those that are vulgarly called non-art, are empirical and impossible to define. If an epigram be art, why not a simple word? If a story, why not the news-jottings of the journalist? If a landscape,[Pg 14] why not a topographical sketch? The teacher of philosophy in Molière's comedy was right: "whenever we speak, we create prose." But there will always be scholars like Monsieur Jourdain, astonished at having spoken prose for forty years without knowing it, who will have difficulty in persuading themselves that when they call their servant John to bring their slippers, they have spoken nothing less than—prose.

We must hold firmly to our identification, because among the principal reasons which have prevented Æsthetic, the science of art, from revealing the true nature of art, its real roots in human nature, has been its separation from the general spiritual life, the having made of it a sort of special function or aristocratic club. No one is astonished when he learns from physiology that every cell is an organism and every organism a cell or synthesis of cells. No one is astonished at finding in a lofty mountain the same chemical elements that compose a small stone fragment. There is not one physiology of small animals and one of large animals; nor is there a special chemical theory of stones as distinct from mountains. In the same way, there is not a science of lesser intuition as distinct from a science of greater intuition, nor one of ordinary intuition as distinct from artistic intuition. There is but one Æsthetic, the science of intuitive or expressive knowledge, which is the æsthetic or artistic fact. And this Æsthetic is the true analogue of Logic, which includes, as facts of the same nature, the formation of the smallest and most ordinary concept and the most complicated scientific and philosophical system.

Nor can we admit that the word genius or artistic genius, as distinct from the non-genius of the ordinary man, possesses more than a quantitative signification. Great artists are said to reveal us to ourselves. But how could this be possible, unless there were identity of nature between their imagination and ours, and unless the difference were only one of quantity? It were better to change poeta nascitur into homo nascitur poeta: some men[Pg 15] are born great poets, some small. The cult of the genius with all its attendant superstitions has arisen from this quantitative difference having been taken as a difference of quality. It has been forgotten that genius is not something that has fallen from heaven, but humanity itself. The man of genius who poses or is represented as remote from humanity finds his punishment in becoming or appearing somewhat ridiculous. Examples of this are the genius of the romantic period and the superman of our time.

But it is well to note here, that those who claim unconsciousness as the chief quality of an artistic genius, hurl him from an eminence far above humanity to a position far below it. Intuitive or artistic genius, like every form of human activity, is always conscious; otherwise it would be blind mechanism. The only thing that can be wanting to artistic genius is the reflective consciousness, the superadded consciousness of the historian or critic, which is not essential to it.

The relation between matter and form, or between content and form, as is generally said, is one of the most disputed questions in Æsthetic. Does the æsthetic fact consist of content alone, or of form alone, or of both together? This question has taken on various meanings, which we shall mention, each in its place. But when these words are taken as signifying what we have above defined, and matter is understood as emotionality not æsthetically elaborated, or impressions, and form as intellectual activity and expression, then our view cannot be in doubt. We must, that is to say, reject both the thesis that makes the æsthetic fact to consist of the content alone (that is, the simple impressions), and the thesis which makes it to consist of a junction between form and content, that is, of impressions plus expressions. In the æsthetic fact, expressive activity is not added to the fact of the impressions, but these latter are formed and elaborated by it. The impressions reappear as it were in expression, like water put into a filter, which reappears the same and yet different on the other side.[Pg 16] The æsthetic fact, therefore, is form, and nothing but form.

From this was inferred not that the content is something superfluous (it is, on the contrary, the necessary point of departure for the expressive fact); but that there is no passage from the qualities of the content to those of the form. It has sometimes been thought that the content, in order to be æsthetic, that is to say, transformable into form, should possess some determined or determinable qualities. But were that so, then form and content, expression and impression, would be the same thing. It is true that the content is that which is convertible into form, but it has no determinable qualities until this transformation takes place. We know nothing about it. It does not become æsthetic content before, but only after it has been actually transformed. The æsthetic content has also been defined as the interesting. That is not an untrue statement; it is merely void of meaning. Interesting to what? To the expressive activity? Certainly the expressive activity would not have raised the content to the dignity of form, had it not been interested in it. Being interested is precisely the raising of the content to the dignity of form. But the word "interesting" has also been employed in another and a illegitimate sense, which we shall explain further on.

The proposition that art is imitation of nature has also several meanings. Sometimes truths have been expressed or at least shadowed forth in these words, sometimes errors have been promulgated. More frequently, no definite thought has been expressed at all. One of the scientifically legitimate meanings occurs when "imitation" is understood as representation or intuition of nature, a form of knowledge. And when the phrase is used with this intention, and in order to emphasize the spiritual character of the process, another proposition becomes legitimate also: namely, that art is the idealization or idealizing imitation of nature. But if by imitation of nature be understood that art gives mechanical reproductions, more or less perfect duplicates of natural[Pg 17] objects, in the presence of which is renewed the same tumult of impressions as that caused by natural objects, then the proposition is evidently false. The coloured waxen effigies that imitate the life, before which we stand astonished in the museums where such things are shown, do not give æsthetic intuitions. Illusion and hallucination have nothing to do with the calm domain of artistic intuition. But on the other hand if an artist paint the interior of a wax-work museum, or if an actor give a burlesque portrait of a man-statue on the stage, we have work of the spirit and artistic intuition. Finally, if photography have in it anything artistic, it will be to the extent that it transmits the intuition of the photographer, his point of view, the pose and grouping which he has striven to attain. And if photography be not quite an art, that is precisely because the element of nature in it remains more or less unconquered and ineradicable. Do we ever, indeed, feel complete satisfaction before even the best of photographs? Would not an artist vary and touch up much or little, remove or add something to all of them?

The statements repeated so often, that art is not knowledge, that it does not tell the truth, that it does not belong to the world of theory, but to the world of feeling, and so forth, arise from the failure to realize exactly the theoretic character of simple intuition. This simple intuition is quite distinct from intellectual knowledge, as it is distinct from perception of the real; and the statements quoted above arise from the belief that only intellectual cognition is knowledge. We have seen that intuition is knowledge, free from concepts and more simple than the so-called perception of the real. Therefore art is knowledge, form; it does not belong to the world of feeling or to psychic matter. The reason why so many æstheticians have so often insisted that art is appearance (Schein), is precisely that they have felt the necessity of distinguishing it from the more complex fact of perception, by maintaining its pure intuitiveness. And if for the same reason it has been claimed that art[Pg 18] is feeling the reason is the same. For if the concept as content of art, and historical reality as such, be excluded from the sphere of art, there remains no other content than reality apprehended in all its ingenuousness and immediacy in the vital impulse, in its feeling, that is to say again, pure intuition.

The theory of the æsthetic senses has also arisen from the failure to establish, or from having lost to view, the character of expression as distinct from impression, of form as distinct from matter.

This theory can be reduced to the error just indicated of wishing to find a passage from the qualities of the content to those of the form. To ask, in fact, what the æsthetic senses are, implies asking what sensible impressions are able to enter into æsthetic expressions, and which must of necessity do so. To this we must at once reply, that all impressions can enter into æsthetic expressions or formations, but that none are bound to do so of necessity. Dante raised to the dignity of form not only the "sweet colour of the oriental sapphire" (visual impressions), but also tactual or thermic impressions, such as the "dense air" and the "fresh rivulets" which "parch the more" the throat of the thirsty. The belief that a picture yields only visual impressions is a curious illusion. The bloom on a cheek, the warmth of a youthful body, the sweetness and freshness of a fruit, the edge of a sharp knife, are not these, too, impressions obtainable from a picture? Are they visual? What would a picture mean to an imaginary man, lacking all or many of his senses, who should in an instant acquire the organ of sight alone? The picture we are looking at and believe we see only with our eyes would seem to his eyes to be little more than an artist's paint-smeared palette.

Some who hold firmly to the æsthetic character of certain groups of impressions (for example, the visual and auditive), and exclude others, are nevertheless ready to admit that if visual and auditive impressions enter directly into the æsthetic fact, those of the other senses[Pg 19] also enter into it, but only as associated. But this distinction is altogether arbitrary. Æsthetic expression is synthesis, in which it is impossible to distinguish direct and indirect. All impressions are placed by it on a level, in so far as they are æstheticized. A man who absorbs the subject of a picture or poem does not have it before him as a series of impressions, some of which have prerogatives and precedence over the others. He knows nothing as to what has happened prior to having absorbed it, just as, on the other hand, distinctions made after reflexion have nothing whatever to do with art as such.

The theory of the æsthetic senses has also been presented in another way; as an attempt to establish what physiological organs are necessary for the æsthetic fact. The physiological organ or apparatus is nothing but a group of cells, constituted and disposed in a particular manner; that is to say, it is a merely physical and natural fact or concept. But expression does not know physiological facts. Expression has its point of departure in the impressions, and the physiological path by which these have found their way to the mind is to it altogether indifferent. One way or another comes to the same thing: it suffices that they should be impressions.

It is true that the want of given organs, that is, of certain groups of cells, prevents the formation of certain impressions (when these are not otherwise obtained through a kind of organic compensation). The man born blind cannot intuite and express light. But the impressions are not conditioned solely by the organ, but also by the stimuli which operate upon the organ. One who has never had the impression of the sea will never be able to express it, in the same way as one who has never had the impression of the life of high society or of the political arena will never express either. This, however, does not prove the dependence of the expressive function on the stimulus or on the organ. It merely repeats what we know already: expression presupposes impression, and particular expressions particular impressions. For the rest, every impression excludes other impressions during[Pg 20] the moment in which it dominates; and so does every expression.

Another corollary of the conception of expression as activity is the indivisibility of the work of art. Every expression is a single expression. Activity is a fusion of the impressions in an organic whole. A desire to express this has always prompted the affirmation that the work of art should have unity, or, what amounts to the same thing, unity in variety. Expression is a synthesis of the various, or multiple, in the one.

The fact that we divide a work of art into parts, a poem into scenes, episodes, similes, sentences, or a picture into single figures and objects, background, foreground, etc., may seem opposed to this affirmation. But such division annihilates the work, as dividing the organism into heart, brain, nerves, muscles and so on, turns the living being into a corpse. It is true that there exist organisms in which division gives rise to other living beings, but in such a case we must conclude, maintaining the analogy between the organism and the work of art, that in the latter case too there are numerous germs of life each ready to grow, in a moment, into a single complete expression.

It may be said that expression sometimes arises from other expressions. There are simple and there are compound expressions. One must surely admit some difference between the eureka, with which Archimedes expressed all his joy at his discovery, and the expressive act (indeed all the five acts) of a regular tragedy.—Not in the least: expression always arises directly from impressions. He who conceives a tragedy puts into a crucible a great quantity, so to say, of impressions: expressions themselves, conceived on other occasions, are fused together with the new in a single mass, in the same way as we can cast into a melting furnace formless pieces of bronze and choicest statuettes. Those choicest statuettes must be melted just like the pieces of bronze, before there can be a new statue. The old expressions must descend again to the level of[Pg 21] impressions, in order to be synthesized in a new single expression.

By elaborating his impressions, man frees himself from them. By objectifying them, he removes them from him and makes himself their superior. The liberating and purifying function of art is another aspect and another formula of its character as activity. Activity is the deliverer, just because it drives away passivity.

This also explains why it is usual to attribute to artists both the maximum of sensibility or passion, and the maximum of insensibility or Olympian serenity. The two characters are compatible, for they do not refer to the same object. The sensibility or passion relates to the rich material which the artist absorbs into his psychic organism; the insensibility or serenity to the form with which he subdues and dominates the tumult of the sensations and passions.

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The two forms of knowledge, æsthetic and intellectual or conceptual, are indeed different, but this does not altogether amount to separation and disjunction, as of two forces each pulling in its own direction. If we have shown that the æsthetic form is altogether independent of the intellectual and suffices to itself without external support, we have not said that the intellectual can stand without the æsthetic. To describe the independence as reciprocal would not be true.

What is knowledge by concepts? It is knowledge of the relations of things, and things are intuitions. Concepts are not possible without intuitions, just as intuition is itself impossible without the matter of impressions. Intuitions are: this river, this lake, this brook, this rain, this glass of water; the concept is: water, not this or that appearance and particular example of water, but water in general, in whatever time or place it be realized; the material of infinite intuitions, but of one single constant concept.

But the concept, the universal, if it be no longer intuition in one respect, is intuition in another respect, and cannot fail of being intuition. The man who thinks has impressions and emotions, in so far as he thinks. His impression and emotion will be not love or hate, not the passion of the man who is not a philosopher, not hate or love for certain objects and individuals, but the effort of his thought itself, with the pain and the joy, the love and the hate joined to it. This effort cannot[Pg 23] but assume an intuitive form, in becoming objective to the spirit. To speak is not to think logically; but to think logically is also to speak.

That thought cannot exist without speech, is a truth generally admitted. The negations of this thesis are all founded on equivocations and errors.

The first of the equivocations is that of those who observe that one can likewise think with geometrical figures, algebraical numbers, ideographic signs, without any word, even pronounced silently and almost insensibly within one; that there are languages in which the word, the phonetic sign, expresses nothing, unless the written sign also be examined, and so on. But when we said "speak," we intended to employ a synecdoche, by which was to be understood "expression" in general, for we have already remarked that expression is not only so-called verbal expression. It may or may not be true that certain concepts may be thought without phonetic manifestations. But the very examples adduced to show this also prove that those concepts never exist without expressions.

Others point out that animals, or certain animals, think and reason without speaking. Now as to how, whether, and what animals think, whether they be rudimentary men, like savages who refuse to be civilized, rather than physiological machines, as the old spiritualists maintained, are questions that do not concern us here. When the philosopher talks of animal, brutal, impulsive, instinctive nature and the like, he does not base himself on such conjectures as to dogs or cats, lions or ants; but upon observations of what is called animal and brutal in man: of the animal side or basis of what we feel in ourselves. If individual animals, dogs or cats, lions or ants, possess something of the activity of man, so much the better, or so much the worse, for them. This means that in respect to them also we must talk, not of "nature" as a whole, but of its animal basis, as being perhaps larger and stronger in them than the animal basis of man. And if we suppose that animals think and form concepts, what kind of conjecture would justify the assertion that they do so[Pg 24] without corresponding expressions? Analogy with man, knowledge of the spirit, human psychology, the instrument of all our conjectures as to animal psychology, would constrain us on the contrary to suppose that if they think in any way, they also somehow speak.

Another objection is derived from human psychology, and indeed literary psychology, to the effect that the concept can exist without the word, for it is certainly true that we all know books well thought and ill written: that is to say, a thought which remains beyond the expression, or notwithstanding faulty expression. But when we talk of books well thought and ill written, we cannot mean anything but that in such books are parts, pages, periods or propositions well thought and well written, and other parts (perhaps the least important) ill thought and ill written, not really thought and so not really expressed. Where Vico's Scienza nuova is really ill written, it is also ill thought. If we pass from the consideration of big books to a short sentence, the error or inaccuracy of such a contention will leap to the eyes. How could a single sentence be clearly thought and confusedly written?

All that can be admitted is that sometimes we possess thoughts (concepts) in an intuitive form, which is an abbreviated or rather peculiar expression, sufficient for us, but not sufficient to communicate it easily to any other given person or persons. Hence it is incorrect to say that we have the thought without the expression; whereas we should rather say that we have, indeed, the expression, but in such a form that it is not easy to communicate it to others. This, however, is a very variable, relative fact. There are always those who catch our thought on the wing, prefer it in this abbreviated form, and would be wearied by the greater development of it required by others. In other words, the thought considered abstractly and logically will be the same; but æsthetically we are dealing with two different intuition-expressions, into which different psychological elements enter. The same argument suffices to destroy, that is,[Pg 25] to interpret correctly, the altogether empirical distinctior between an internal and an external language.

The most lofty manifestations, the summits of intellectual and of intuitive knowledge shining from afar, are called, as we know, Art and Science. Art and Science, then, are different and yet linked together; they meet on one side, which is the æsthetic side. Every scientific work is also a work of art. The æsthetic side may remain little noticed when our mind is altogether taken up with the effort to understand the thought of the man of science and to examine its truth. But it is no longer unnoticed when we pass from the activity of understanding to that of contemplation and see that thought either develop itself before us, limpid, exact, well-shaped, without superfluous or insufficient words, with appropriate rhythm and intonation; or confused, broken, embarrassed, tentative. Great thinkers are sometimes called great writers, while other equally great thinkers remain more or less fragmentary writers even if their fragments have the scientific value of harmonious, coherent, and perfect works.

We pardon thinkers and men of science their literary mediocrity. The fragments, the flashes, console us for the whole, because it is far easier to recover the well-arranged composition from the fragmentary work of genius, to liberate the flame latent in the spark, than to achieve the discovery of genius. But how can we pardon mediocre expression in pure artists? "Mediocribus esse poetis non di, non homines, non concessere columnae" The poet or painter who lacks form, lacks everything, because he lacks himself. Poetical material permeates the souls of all: the expression alone, that is to say, the form, makes the poet. And here appears the truth of the view which denies all content to art, just the intellectual concept being understood as content. In this sense, when we take "content" as equal to "concept" it is most true, not only that art does not consist of content, but also that it has no content.

The distinction between poetry and prose also cannot[Pg 26] be justified, save as that between art and science. It was seen in antiquity that such distinction could not be founded on external elements, such as rhythm and metre, or on rhymed or unrhymed form; that it was, on the contrary, altogether internal. Poetry is the language of feeling, prose of the intellect; but since the intellect is also feeling, in its concreteness and reality, all prose has its poetical side.

The relation between intuitive knowledge or expression and intellectual knowledge or concept, between art and science, poetry and prose, cannot be otherwise defined than by saying that it is one of double degree. The first degree is the expression, the second the concept: the first can stand without the second, but the second cannot stand without the first. There is poetry without prose, but not prose without poetry. Expression, indeed, is the first affirmation of human activity. Poetry is "the mother tongue of the human race"; the first men "were by nature sublime poets." We assert this in another way, when we observe that the passage from soul to spirit, from animal to human activity, is effected by means of language. And this should be said of intuition or expression in general. But to us it appears somewhat inaccurate to define language or expression as an intermediate link between nature and humanity, as though it were a mixture of both. Where humanity appears, the other has already disappeared; the man who expresses himself, certainly emerges from the state of nature, but he really does emerge: he does not stand half within and half without, as the use of the phrase "intermediate link" would imply.

The cognitive spirit has no form other than these two. Expression and concept exhaust it completely. The whole speculative life of man is spent in passing from one to the other and back again.

Historicity is incorrectly held to be a third theoretical form. Historicity is not form, but content: as form, it is nothing but intuition or æsthetic fact. History does not seek for laws nor form concepts; it employs neither[Pg 27] induction nor deduction; it is directed ad narrandum, non ad demonstrandum; it does not construct universals and abstractions, but posits intuitions. The this and here, the individuum omnimode determinatum, is its domain, as it is the domain of art. History, therefore, is included in the universal concept of art.

As against this doctrine, in view of the impossibility of conceiving a third mode of knowledge, objections have been brought forward which would lead to the affiliation of history to intellectual or scientific knowledge. The greater portion of these objections is animated by the prejudice that in refusing to history the character of conceptual science something of its value and dignity has been taken from it. This really arises from a false idea of art, conceived not as an essential theoretic function, but as an amusement, a superfluity, a frivolity. Without reopening a long debate, which so far as we are concerned is finally closed, we will mention here one sophism which has been and still is widely repeated. Its purpose is to show the logical and scientific nature of history. The sophism consists in admitting that historical knowledge has for its object the individual; but not the representation, it is added, but rather the concept of the individual. From this it is argued that history is also a logical or scientific form of knowledge. History, in fact, is supposed to work out the concept of a personage such as Charlemagne or Napoleon; of an epoch, like the Renaissance or the Reformation; of an event, such as the French Revolution and the Unification of Italy. This it is held to do in the same way as Geometry works out the concepts of spatial forms, or Æsthetic that of expression. But all this is untrue. History cannot do otherwise than represent Napoleon and Charlemagne, the Renaissance and the Reformation, the French Revolution and the Unification of Italy as individual facts with their individual physiognomy: that is, in the sense in which logicians use the word "represent" when they say that one cannot have a concept of the individual, but only a representation. The so-called concept of the[Pg 28] individual is always a universal or general concept, full of characteristics, supremely full, if you like, but however full it be, incapable of attaining to that individuality to which historical knowledge, as æsthetic knowledge, alone attains.

To show how the content of history comes to be distinguished from that of art in the narrow sense, we must recall what has already been observed as to the ideal character of the intuition or first perception, in which all is real and therefore nothing is real. Only at a later stage does the spirit form the concepts of external and internal, of what has happened and what is desired, of object and subject, and the like: only at this later stage, that is, does it distinguish historical from non-historical intuition, the real from the unreal, real imagination from pure imagination. Even internal facts, what is desired and imagined, castles in the air, and countries of Cockaigne, have their reality, and the soul, too, has its history. His illusions form part of the biography of every individual as real facts. But the history of an individual soul is history, because the distinction between the real and the unreal is always active in it, even when the illusions themselves are the real. But these distinctive concepts do not appear in history like the concepts of science, but rather like those that we have seen dissolved and melted in the æsthetic intuitions, although in history they stand out in a manner altogether special to themselves. History does not construct the concepts of the real and unreal, but makes use of them. History, in fact, is not the theory of history. Mere conceptual analysis is of no use in ascertaining whether an event in our lives was real or imaginary. We must mentally reproduce the intuitions in the most complete form, as they were at the moment of production. Historicity is distinguished in the concrete from pure imagination as any one intuition is distinguished from any other: in memory.

Where this is not possible, where the delicate and fleeting shades between the real and unreal intuitions[Pg 29] are so slight as to mingle the one with the other, we must either renounce for the time being at least the knowledge of what really happened (and this we often do), or we must fall back upon conjecture, verisimilitude, probability. The principle of verisimilitude and of probability in fact dominates all historical criticism. Examination of sources and authorities is devoted to establishing the most credible evidence. And what is the most credible evidence, save that of the best observers, that is, of those who best remember and (be it understood) have not wished to falsify, nor had interest in falsifying the truth of things?

From this it follows that intellectualistic scepticism finds it easy to deny the certainty of any history, for the certainty of history differs from that of science. It is the certainty of memory and of authority, not that of analysis and demonstration. To speak of historical induction or demonstration is to make a metaphorical use of these expressions, which bear a quite different meaning in history to that which they bear in science. The conviction of the historian is the undemonstrable conviction of the juryman, who has heard the witnesses, listened attentively to the case, and prayed Heaven to inspire him. Sometimes, without doubt, he is mistaken, but the mistakes are in a negligible minority compared with the occasions when he grasps the truth. That is why good sense is right against the intellectualists in believing in history, which is not a "fable agreed upon," but what the individual and humanity remember of their past. We strive to enlarge and to render as precise as possible this record, which in some places is dim, in others very clear. We cannot do without it, such as it is, and taken as a whole it is rich in truth. Only in a spirit of paradox can one doubt that there ever was a Greece or a Rome, an Alexander or a Cæsar, a feudal Europe overthrown by a series of revolutions, that on the 1st of November 1517 the theses of Luther were fixed to the door of the church at Wittemberg, or that the Bastile was taken by the people of Paris on the 14th of July 1789.

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"What proof hast thou of all this?" asks the sophist, ironically. Humanity replies: "I remember it."

The world of what has happened, of the concrete, of historical fact, is the world called real, natural, including in this definition both the reality called physical and that called spiritual and human. All this world is intuition; historical intuition, if it be shown as it realistically is; imaginary or artistic intuition in the narrow sense, if presented in the aspect of the possible, that is to say, of the imaginable.

Science, true science, which is not intuition but concept, not individuality but universality, cannot be anything but science of the spirit, that is, of what reality has of universal: Philosophy. If natural sciences be spoken of, apart from philosophy, we must observe that these are not perfect sciences: they are aggregates of cognitions, arbitrarily abstracted and fixed. The so-called natural sciences indeed themselves recognize that they are surrounded by limitations, and these limitations are nothing but historical and intuitive data. They calculate, measure, establish equalities and uniformities, create classes and types, formulate laws, show in their own way how one fact arises out of other facts; but while doing this they are constantly running into facts known intuitively and historically. Even geometry now states that it rests altogether on hypotheses, since threedimensional or Euclidean space is but one of the possible spaces, selected for purposes of study because more convenient. What is true in the natural sciences is either philosophy or historical fact. What of properly naturalistic they contain, is abstraction and caprice. When the natural sciences wish to become perfect sciences, they must leave their circle and enter philosophy. They do this when they posit concepts which are anything but naturalistic, such as those of the unextended atom, of ether or vibration, of vital force, of non-intuitional space, and the like. These are true and proper attempts at philosophy, when they are not mere words void of meaning. The concepts of natural science are, without[Pg 31] doubt, most useful; but one cannot obtain from them that system which belongs only to the spirit.

These historical and intuitive data which cannot be eliminated from the natural sciences furthermore explain not only how, with the advance of knowledge, what was once believed to be true sinks gradually to the level of mythological belief and fantastic illusion, but also how among natural scientists some are to be found who call everything in their sciences upon which reasoning is founded mythical facts, verbal expedients, or conventions. Natural scientists and mathematicians who approach the study of the energies of the spirit without preparation, are apt to carry thither such mental habits and to speak in philosophy of such and such conventions as "decreed by man." They make conventions of truth and morality, and a supreme convention of the Spirit itself! But if there are to be conventions, something must exist which is no convention, but is itself the author of conventions. This is the spiritual activity of man. The limitation of the natural sciences postulates the illimitability of philosophy.

These explications have firmly established that the pure or fundamental forms of knowledge are two: the intuition and the concept—Art, and Science or Philosophy. With these are to be included History, which is, as it were, the product of intuition placed in contact with the concept, that is, of art receiving in itself philosophic distinctions, while remaining concrete and individual. All other forms (natural sciences and mathematics) are impure, being mingled with extraneous elements of practical origin. Intuition gives us the world, the phenomenon; the concept gives us the noumenon, the Spirit.

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These relations between intuitive or æsthetic knowledge and the other fundamental or derivative forms of knowledge having been definitely established, we are now in a position to reveal the errors of a series of theories which have been, or are, presented as theories of Æsthetic.

From the confusion between the demands of art in general and the particular demands of history has resulted the theory (which has lost ground to-day, but was once dominant) of the probable as the object of art. As is generally the case with erroneous propositions, the meaning of those who employed and employ the concept of probability has no doubt often been much more reasonable than their definition of the word. By probability used really to be meant the artistic coherence of the representation, that is to say, its completeness and effectiveness, its actual presence. If "probable" be translated "coherent," a very just meaning will often be found in the discussions, examples, and judgements of the critics who employ this word. An improbable personage, an improbable ending to a comedy, are really badly-drawn personages, badly-arranged endings, happenings without artistic motive. It has been said with reason that even fairies and sprites must have probability, that is to say, be really sprites and fairies, coherent artistic intuitions. Sometimes the word "possible" has been used instead of "probable." As we have already remarked in passing, this word possible is[Pg 33] synonymous with the imaginable or intuitible. Everything truly, that is to say coherently, imagined, is possible. But also, by a good many critics and theorists, the probable was taken to mean the historically credible, or that historical truth which is not demonstrable but conjecturable, not true but probable. This was the character which these theorists sought to impose upon art. Who does not remember how great a part was played in literary history by criticism based on probability, for example, censure of Jerusalem Delivered, based upon the history of the Crusades, or of the Homeric poems, upon the probable customs of emperors and kings? Sometimes too the æsthetic reproduction of historical reality has been imposed upon art. This is another of the erroneous forms taken by the theory of the imitation of nature. Verism and naturalism also have afforded the spectacle of a confusion of the æsthetic fact with the processes of the natural sciences, by aiming at some sort of experimental drama or romance.

Confusions between the methods of art and those of the philosophic sciences have been far more frequent. Thus it has often been held to be the task of art to expound concepts, to unite an intelligible with a sensible, to represent ideas or universals; putting art in the place of science, that is, confusing the artistic function in general with the particular case in which it becomes æsthetico-logical.

The theory of art as supporting theses, of art considered as an individual representation exemplifying scientific laws, can be proved false in like manner. The example, as example, stands for the thing exemplified, and is thus an exposition of the universal, that is to say, a form of science, more or less popular or vulgarizing.

The same may be said of the æsthetic theory of the typical, when by type is understood, as it frequently is, the abstraction or the concept, and it is affirmed that art should make the species shine in the individual. If individual be here understood by typical, we have here too a merely verbal variation. To typify would signify, in this case, to characterize; that is, to determine and[Pg 34] to represent the individual. Don Quixote is a type; but of what is he a type, save of all Don Quixotes? A type, so to speak, of himself. Certainly he is not a type of abstract concepts, such as the loss of the sense of reality, or of the love of glory. An infinite number of personages can be thought of under these concepts, who are not Don Quixotes. In other words, we find our own impressions fully determined and realized in the expression of a poet (for example in a poetical personage). We call that expression typical, which we might call simply æsthetic. Thus poetical or artistic universals have sometimes been spoken of, only to show that the artistic product is altogether spiritual and ideal.

Continuing to correct these errors, or to clear up misunderstandings, we shall also remark that the symbol has sometimes been given as the essence of art. Now, if the symbol be conceived as inseparable from the artistic intuition, it is a synonym for the intuition itself, which always has an ideal character. There is no double bottom to art, but one only; in art all is symbolical, because all is ideal. But if the symbol be conceived as separable—if the symbol can be on one side, and on the other the thing symbolized, we fall back again into the intellectualist error: the so-called symbol is the exposition of an abstract concept, an allegory; it is science, or art aping science. But we must also be just toward the allegorical. Sometimes it is altogether harmless. Given the Gerusalemme liberata, the allegory was imagined afterwards; given the A done of Marino, the poet of the lascivious afterwards insinuated that it was written to show how "immoderate indulgence ends in pain"; given a statue of a beautiful woman, the sculptor can attach a label to the statue saying that it represents Clemency or Goodness. This allegory that arrives attached to a finished work post festum does not change the work of art. What then is it? It is an expression externally added to another expression. A little page of prose is added to the Gerusalemme, expressing another thought of the poet; a verse or a strophe is added to the Adone,[Pg 35] expressing what the poet would like to make a part of his public believe; to the statue nothing but the single word: Clemency or Goodness.

But the greatest triumph of the intellectualist error lies in the theory of artistic and literary kinds, which still has vogue in literary treatises and disturbs the critics and the historians of art. Let us observe its genesis.

The human mind can pass from the æsthetic to the logical, just because the former is a first step in respect to the latter. It can destroy expression, that is, the thought of the individual, by thinking of the universal. It can gather up expressive facts into logical relations. We have already shown that this operation becomes in its turn concrete in an expression, but this does not mean that the first expressions have not been destroyed. They have yielded their place to the new æsthetico-logical expressions. When we are on the second step, we have left the first.

One who enters a picture-gallery, or who reads a series of poems, having looked and read, may go further: he may seek out the nature and the relations of the things there expressed. Thus those pictures and compositions, each of which is an individual inexpressible in logical terms, are gradually resolved into universals and abstractions, such as costumes, landscapes, portraits, domestic life, battles, animals, flowers, fruit, seascapes, lakes, deserts; tragic, comic, pathetic, cruel, lyrical, epic, dramatic, chivalrous, idyllic facts, and the like. They are often also resolved into merely quantitative categories, such as miniature, picture, statuette, group, madrigal, ballad, sonnet, sonnet-sequence, poetry, poem, story, romance, and the like.

When we think the concept domestic life, or chivalry, or idyll, or cruelty, or one of the quantitative concepts mentioned above, the individual expressive fact from which we started has been abandoned. From æsthetes that we were, we have changed into logicians; from contemplators of expression, into reasoners. Certainly no objection can be made to such a process. In what other way could science arise, which, if it have æsthetic expressions[Pg 36] presupposed in it, must yet go beyond them in order to fulfil its function? The logical or scientific form, as such, excludes the æsthetic form. He who begins to think scientifically has already ceased to contemplate æsthetically; although his thought assumes of necessity in its turn an æsthetic form, as has already been said, and as it would be superfluous to repeat.

Error begins when we try to deduce the expression from the concept, and to find in what takes its place the laws of the thing whose place is taken; when the difference between the second and the first step has not been observed, and when, in consequence, we declare that we are standing on the first step, when we are really standing on the second. This error is known as the theory of artistic and literary kinds.

"What is the æsthetic form of domestic life, of chivalry, of the idyll, of cruelty, and so forth? How should these contents be represented?" Such is the absurd problem implied in the theory of artistic and literary classes, when it has been shorn of excrescences and reduced to a simple formula. It is in this that consists all search after laws or rules of classes. Domestic life, chivalry, idyll, cruelty and the like, are not impressions, but concepts. They are not contents, but logical-æsthetic forms. You cannot express the form, for it is already itself expression. For what are the words cruelty, idyll, chivalry, domestic life, and so on, but the expression of those concepts?

Even the most refined of such distinctions, which possess the most philosophic appearance, do not resist criticism; as when works of art are divided into subjective and objective kinds, into lyric and epic, into works of feeling and decorative works. In æsthetic analysis it is impossible to separate subjective from objective, lyric from epic, the image of feeling from that of things.

From the theory of artistic and literary kinds derive those erroneous modes of judgement and of criticism, thanks to which, instead of asking before a work of art if it be expressive and what it expresses, whether it speak[Pg 37] or stammer or is altogether silent, they ask if it obey the laws of epic or of tragedy, of historical painting or of landscape. While making a verbal pretence of agreeing, or yielding a feigned obedience, artists have, however, really always disregarded these laws of the kinds. Every true work of art has violated some established kind and upset the ideas of the critics, who have thus been obliged to broaden the kinds, until finally even the broadened kind has proved too narrow, owing to the appearance of new works of art, naturally followed by new scandals, new upsettings and—new broadenings.

To the same theory are due the prejudices, owing to which at one time (is it really passed?) people used to lament that Italy had no tragedy (until one arose who bestowed such a wreath, which alone of adornments was wanting to her glorious locks), nor France the epic poem (until the Henriade, which slaked the thirsty throats of the critics). Eulogies accorded to the inventors of new kinds are connected with these prejudices, so much so, that in the seventeenth century the invention of the mock-heroic poem seemed an important event, and the honour of it was disputed, as though it were the discovery of America. But the works adorned with this name (the Secchia rapita and the Scherno degli Dei) were still-born, because their authors (a slight drawback) had nothing new or original to say. Mediocrities racked their brains to invent new kinds artificially. The piscatorial eclogue was added to the pastoral, and finally the military eclogue. The Aminta was dipped and became the Alceo. Finally, there have been historians of art and literature, so much fascinated with these ideas of kinds, that they claimed to write the history, not of individual and real literary and artistic works, but of those empty phantoms, their kinds. They have claimed to portray, not the evolution of the artistic spirit, but the evolution of kinds.

The philosophical condemnation of artistic and literary kinds is found in the formulation and demonstration of what artistic activity has always done and good taste always recognized. What are we to do if good taste and[Pg 38] the real fact, when reduced to formulas, sometimes assume the air of paradoxes?

It is not scientifically incorrect to talk of tragedies, comedies, dramas, romances, pictures of everyday life, battle-pieces, landscapes, seascapes, poems, versicles, lyrics, and the like, if it be only with a view to be understood, and to draw attention to certain groups of works, in general and approximately, to which, for one reason or another, it is desired to draw attention. To employ words and phrases is not to establish laws and definitions. The mistake only arises when the weight of a scientific definition is given to a word, when we ingenuously let ourselves be caught in the meshes of that phraseology. Pray permit me a comparison. The books in a library must be arranged in one way or another. This used generally to be done by a rough classification of subjects (among which the categories of miscellaneous and eccentric were not wanting); they are now generally arranged by sizes or by publishers. Who can deny the necessity and the utility of such arrangements? But what should we say if some one began seriously to seek out the literary laws of miscellanies and of eccentricities, of the Aldines or Bodonis, of shelf A or shelf B, that is to say, of those altogether arbitrary groupings whose sole object was their practical utility. Yet should any one attempt such an undertaking, he would be doing neither more nor less than those do who seek out the æsthetic laws which must in their belief control literary and artistic kinds.

[Pg 39]

The better to confirm these criticisms, it will be useful to cast a rapid glance over analogous and opposite errors, due to ignorance as to the true nature of art and its relation to history and to science. These errors have injured alike the theory of history and that of science, Historic (or Historiology) and Logic.

Historical intellectualism has opened the way to the many attempts, made especially during the last two centuries and continued to-day, to discover a philosophy of history, an ideal history, a sociology, a historical psychology, or whatever else a science may be called, whose object is to extract from history concepts and universal laws. What must these laws, these universals be? Historical laws and historical concepts? In that case, an elementary acquaintance with the theory of knowledge suffices to make clear the absurdity of the attempt. When such expressions as a historical law, a historical concept are not simply metaphors colloquially employed, they are truly contradictory terms: the adjective is as unsuitable to the substantive as in the expressions "qualitative quantity" or "pluralistic monism." History implies concreteness and individuality, law and concept mean abstractness and universality. But if the attempt to extract historical laws and concepts from history be abandoned, and it be merely desired to draw from it laws and concepts, the attempt is certainly not frivolous; but the science thus obtained will be, not a philosophy of[Pg 40] history, but rather, according to circumstances, either philosophy in its various forms of Ethics, Logic, etc., or empirical science with its infinite divisions and subdivisions. The search is in fact either for those philosophical concepts which, as already remarked, are the basis of every historical construction and differentiate perception from intuition, historical intuition from pure intuition, history from art; or already formed historical intuitions are collected and arranged in types and classes, which is exactly the method of the natural sciences. Great thinkers have sometimes donned the ill-fitting cloak of the philosophy of history, and notwithstanding the covering, they have attained philosophical truths of the greatest magnitude. The cloak discarded, the truth has remained. Modern sociologists are rather to be blamed, not so much for the illusion in which they are involved when they talk of an impossible science of sociology, as for the infecundity which almost always accompanies their illusion. It matters little that Æsthetic should be called "sociological Æsthetic," or Logic, "sociological Logic." The grave evil is that such Æsthetic is an old-fashioned expression of sensationalism, such Logic verbal and incoherent. The philosophical movement to which we have referred has however borne two good fruits in relation to history. First of all, a keener desire has arisen for a theory of history, that is, a theory of the nature and the limits of history, a theory which, in conformity with the analysis made above, cannot obtain satisfaction save in a general science of intuition, in an Æsthetic, in which the theory of history would form a special chapter, distinguished by the insertion of universal functions. Furthermore, concrete truths relating to historical events have often been expressed beneath the false and presumptuous cloak of a philosophy of history; rules and warnings have been formulated, empirical no doubt, yet by no means useless to students and critics. It does not seem possible to deny this utility even to the most recent of philosophies of history, known as historical materialism, which has[Pg 41] thrown a very vivid light upon many sides of social life formerly neglected or ill understood.

The principle of authority, of the ipse dixit, is an intrusion by historicity into the domains of science and philosophy which has dominated the schools and substitutes for introspection and philosophical analysis this or that evidence, document, or authoritative statement, with which history certainly cannot dispense. But Logic, the science of thought and of intellectual knowledge, has suffered the most grave and destructive of all disturbances and errors through an imperfect understanding of the æsthetic fact. How could it be otherwise, if logical activity come after and contain in itself æsthetic activity? An inexact Æsthetic must of necessity drag after it an inexact Logic.

Whoever opens a logical treatise, from the Organon of Aristotle to the modern works on the subject, must agree that all contain a haphazard mixture of verbal facts and facts of thought, of grammatical forms and of conceptual forms, of Æsthetic and of Logic. Not that attempts have been wanting to escape from verbal expression and to seize thought in its true nature. Aristotelian logic itself did not become mere syllogistic and verbalism without some hesitation and indecision. The problem proper to logic was often touched upon in their disputes by the nominalists, realists and conceptualists of the Middle Ages. With Galileo and with Bacon, the natural sciences gave an honourable place to induction. Vico combated formalist and mathematical logic in favour of inventive methods. Kant called attention to the a priori synthesis. Absolute idealism despised the Aristotelian Logic. The followers of Herbart, though still loyal to Aristotle, emphasized those judgements which they called narrative and which have a character altogether differing from that of other logical judgements. Finally, the linguists insisted upon the irrationality of the word, in relation to the concept. But a conscious, sure and radical movement of reform can find no basis or point of departure, save in the science of Æsthetic.

[Pg 42]

In a Logic suitably reformed on this basis, this truth must first and foremost be proclaimed, and all its consequences deduced: the logical fact, the only logical fact, is the concept, the universal, the spirit that forms, and in so far as it forms, the universal. And if by induction be understood, as sometimes it has been, the formation of universals, and by deduction their verbal development, then it is clear that true Logic can be nothing but inductive Logic. But since by the word "deduction" has been more frequently understood the special processes of mathematics, and the word "induction" those of the natural sciences, it will be best to avoid both words and say that true Logic is Logic of the concept. The Logic of the concept, while employing a method which is both induction and deduction, will employ neither exclusively, that is, it will employ the speculative method which is intrinsic to it.

The concept, the universal, considered abstractly in itself, is inexpressible. No word is proper to it. So true is this, that the logical concept remains always the same, notwithstanding the variation of verbal forms. In respect to the concept, expression is a simple sign or indication. There must be an expression, it cannot be absent; but what it is to be, this or that, is determined by the historical and psychological conditions of the individual who is speaking. The quality of the expression is not deducible from the nature of the concept. There does not exist a true (logical) sense of words. The true sense of words is that which is conferred upon them on each occasion by the person forming a concept.

This being so, the only truly logical (that is, æsthetico-logical) propositions, the only rigorously logical judgements, must be those whose proper and sole content is the determination of a concept. These propositions or judgements are definitions. Science itself is nothing but a collection of definitions, unified in a supreme definition; a system of concepts, or highest concept.

It is therefore necessary (at least as a preliminary) to exclude from Logic all those propositions which do not[Pg 43] affirm universals. Narrative judgements, not less than those termed non-enunciative by Aristotle, such as the expression of desires, are not properly logical judgements. They are either purely æsthetic propositions or historical propositions. "Peter is passing; it is raining to-day; I am sleepy; I want to read": these and an infinity of propositions of the same kind are nothing but either a mere enclosing in words the impression of the fact that Peter is passing, of the falling rain, of my organism inclining to sleep, and of my will directed to reading, or an existential affirmation concerning those facts. They are expressions of the real or of the unreal, historical-imaginative or pure-imaginative; they are certainly not definitions of universals.

This exclusion cannot meet with great difficulties. It is already almost an accomplished fact, and the only thing required is to render it explicit, decisive and coherent. But what is to be done with all that part of human thought called syllogistic, consisting of judgements and reasonings based upon concepts? What is syllogistic? Is it to be looked down upon with contempt, as something useless, as has so often been done by the humanists in their reaction against scholasticism, by absolute idealism, by the enthusiastic admiration of our times for the methods of observation and experiment of the natural sciences?—Syllogistic, reasonings forma, is not the discovery of truth; it is the art of expounding, debating, disputing with oneself and others. Proceeding from concepts already formed, from facts already observed, and appealing to the persistence of the true or of thought (such is the meaning of the laws of identity and contradiction), it infers consequences from those data, that is, it re-states what has already been discovered. Therefore, if it be an idem per idem from the point of view of invention, it is most efficacious in teaching and in exposition. To reduce affirmations to a syllogistic form is a way of controlling one's own thought and of criticizing the thought of others. It is easy to laugh at syllogizers, but, if syllogistic has been born and persists, it must have good reasons of its own. Satire on it can[Pg 44] concern only its abuses, such as the attempt to prove syllogistically questions of fact, observation and intuition, or the neglect of profound meditation and unprejudiced investigation of problems, in favour of syllogistic externality. And if so-called mathematical Logic can sometimes aid us in our attempt to remember with ease, rapidly to control the results of our own thought, let us welcome this form of syllogistic also, anticipated by Leibnitz among others and again attempted by some in our own days.

But precisely because syllogistic is the art of exposition and debate, its theory cannot hold the first place in a philosophical Logic, thus usurping that belonging to the doctrine of the concept, which is the central and dominating doctrine, to which everything logical in syllogistic is reducible, without leaving a residuum (relations of concepts, subordination, co-ordination, identification and so on). Nor must it ever be forgotten that concept and (logical) judgement and syllogism are not in the same line. The first alone is the logical fact, the second and third are the forms in which the first manifests itself. These, in so far as they are forms, can only be examined æsthetically (grammatically), and in so far as they possess logical content, only by ignoring the forms themselves and passing to the doctrine of the concept.

This confirms the truth of the ordinary remark to the effect that he who reasons ill, also speaks and writes ill, that exact logical analysis is the basis of good expression. This truth is a tautology, for to reason well is in fact to express oneself well, because the expression is the intuitive possession of one's own logical thought. The principle of contradiction itself is at bottom nothing but the æsthetic principle of coherence. It may be maintained that it is possible to write and to speak exceedingly well, as it is also possible to reason well though starting from erroneous concepts; that some, though lacking the acuteness that makes a great discoverer, are nevertheless exceedingly lucid writers; because to write well depends upon having a clear intuition of one's own[Pg 45] thought, even if it be erroneous; not of its scientific, but of its æsthetic truth, which indeed is the same thing as writing well. A philosopher like Schopenhauer can imagine that art is a representation of the Platonic ideas. This doctrine is scientifically false, yet he may develop this false knowledge in excellent prose, æsthetically most true. But we have already replied to these objections, when observing that at that precise point where a speaker or a writer enunciates an ill-thought concept, he is at the same time a bad speaker and a bad writer, although he may afterwards recover himself in the many other parts of his thought which contain true propositions not connected with the preceding error, and therefore lucid expressions following upon confused expressions.

All researches as to the forms of judgements and of syllogisms, their conversions and their various relations, which still encumber treatises on Logic, are therefore destined to diminish, to be transformed, to be converted into something else. The doctrine of the concept and of the organism of concepts, of definition, of system, of philosophy and the various sciences, and the like, will occupy the field and alone will constitute true and proper Logic.

Those who first had some suspicion of the intimate connexion between Æsthetic and Logic and conceived Æsthetic as a Logic of sensible knowledge were peculiarly addicted to applying logical categories to the new knowledge, talking of æsthetic concepts, æsthetic judgements, æsthetic syllogisms, and so on. We who are less superstitious as regards the permanence of the traditional Logic of the schools, and better informed as to the nature of Æsthetic, do not recommend the application of Logic to Æsthetic, but the liberation of Logic from æsthetic forms. These have given rise to non-existent forms or categories of Logic, due to the adoption of altogether arbitrary and ill-considered distinctions.

Logic thus reformed will still be formal Logic; it will study the true form or activity of thought, the concept,[Pg 46] excluding individual and particular concepts. The old Logic is ill called formal; it would be better to call it verbal or formalistic. Formal Logic will drive out formalistic Logic. To attain this object, it will not be necessary to have recourse, as some have done, to a real or material Logic, which is no longer a science of thought, but thought itself in action; not only a Logic, but the whole of Philosophy, in which Logic is also included. The science of thought (Logic) is that of the concept, as that of imagination (Æsthetic) is that of expression. The well-being of both sciences lies in exactly carrying out in every particular the distinction between the two domains.

Note to the Fourth Italian Edition.—The observations contained in this chapter on Logic, which are not all of them clear or accurate, should be clarified and corrected by means of the further treatment of the theme in the second volume of the Philosophy of the Spirit, dedicated to Logic, where the distinction between logical and historical propositions is again examined and their synthetic unity demonstrated.

[Pg 47]

The intuitive and intellectual forms contain between them, as we have said, the whole theoretic domain of the spirit. But it is not possible to know them thoroughly, nor to criticize another series of erroneous æsthetic theories, without first establishing clearly the relations of the theoretic spirit with the practical spirit.

The practical form or activity is the will. We do not here employ this word in the sense of some philosophical systems, where the will is the foundation of the universe, the ground of things and the true reality. Nor do we employ it in the wide sense of other systems, which understand by will the energy of the spirit, spirit or activity in general, making of every act of the human spirit an act of will. Neither such metaphysical nor such metaphorical meaning is ours. For us, the will is, as generally understood, that activity of the spirit which differs from the merely theoretical contemplation of things, and is productive, not of knowledge, but of actions. Action is really action, in so far as it is voluntary. It is not necessary to remark that in the will to do, we include, in the scientific sense, also what is usually called not-doing: the will to resist, to reject, the will of a Prometheus, which also is action.

Man understands things with the theoretical form, with the practical form he changes them; with the one he appropriates the universe, with the other he creates it. But the first form is the basis of the second; and[Pg 48] the relation of double degree, which we have already found existing between æsthetic and logical activity, is repeated between these two on a larger scale. A knowing independent of the will is thinkable, at least in a certain sense; will independent of knowing is unthinkable. Blind will is not will; true will has eyes.

How can we will, without having before us historical intuitions (perceptions) of objects, and knowledge of (logical) relations, which enlightens us as to the nature of those objects? How can we really will, if we do not know the world which surrounds us or how to change things by acting upon them?

It has been objected that men of action, practical men par excellence, are the least disposed to contemplate and to theorize: their energy is not delayed in contemplation, it rushes at once into will. And conversely, that contemplative men, philosophers, are often very mediocre in practical matters, weak willed, and therefore neglected and thrust aside in the tumult of life. It is easy to see that these distinctions are merely empirical and quantitative. Certainly, the practical man has no need of a philosophical system in order to act, but in the spheres where he does act, he starts from intuitions and concepts which are perfectly clear to him. Otherwise the most ordinary actions could not be willed. It would not be possible to will to feed oneself, for instance, without knowledge of the food, and of the link of cause and effect between certain movements and certain satisfactions. Rising gradually to the more complex forms of action, for example to the political, how could we will anything politically good or bad without knowing the real conditions of society, and consequently the means and expedients to be adopted? When the practical man feels himself in the dark about one or more of these points, or when he is seized with doubt, action either does not begin or stops. It is then that the theoretical moment, which in the rapid succession of human actions is hardly noticed and rapidly forgotten, becomes important and occupies consciousness for a longer time. And if this[Pg 49] moment be prolonged, then the practical man may become a Hamlet, divided between desire for action and his deficient theoretical clarity as regards the situation and the means to be employed. And if he develop a taste for contemplation and discovery, and leave willing and acting, to a greater or less extent, to others, there is formed in him the calm disposition of the artist, of the man of science, or of the philosopher, who in practice are sometimes incompetent or downright immoral. These observations are all obvious. Their exactitude cannot be denied. Let us, however, repeat that they are founded on quantitative distinctions and do not disprove but confirm the fact that an action, however slight it be, cannot really be an action, that is, an action that is willed, unless it be preceded by the cognitive activity.

Some psychologists, on the other hand, place before practical action an altogether special class of judgements, which they call practical judgements or judgements of value. They say that in order to resolve on performing an action there must have been a judgement to the effect: "this action is useful, this action is good." And at first sight this seems to have the testimony of consciousness on its side. But closer observation and analysis of greater subtlety reveal that such judgements follow instead of preceding the affirmation of the will, and are nothing but the expression of the volition already exercised. A good or useful action is an action willed. It will always be impossible to distil a single drop of usefulness or goodness from the objective study of things. We do not desire things because we know them to be good or useful; but we know them to be good and useful, because we desire them. Here too, the rapidity with which the facts of consciousness follow one another has given rise to an illusion. Practical action is preceded by knowledge, but not by practical knowledge, or rather, knowledge of the practical: to obtain this, we must first have practical action. The third moment, therefore, of practical judgements, or judgements of value, is altogether imaginary. It does not come between the two moments or degrees[Pg 50] of theory and practice. For the rest, normative sciences in general, which regulate or command, discover and indicate values to the practical activity, do not exist; indeed none exist for any sort of activity, since every science presupposes that activity to be already realized and developed, which it afterwards takes as its object.

These distinctions established, we must condemn as erroneous every theory which annexes the æsthetic activity to the practical, or introduces the laws of the second into the first. That science is theory and art practice has been many times affirmed. Those who make this statement, and look upon the æsthetic fact as a practical fact, do not do so capriciously or because they are groping in the void; but because they have their eye on something which is really practical. But the practical which they aim is not Æsthetic, nor within Æsthetic; it is outside and beside it; and although often found united, they are not united necessarily or by the bond of identity of nature.

The æsthetic fact is altogether completed in the expressive elaboration of impressions. When we have achieved the word within us, conceived definitely and vividly a figure or a statue, or found a musical motive, expression is born and is complete; there is no need for anything else. If after this we should open our mouths-will to open them to speak, or our throats to sing, that is to say, utter by word of mouth and audible melody what we have completely said or sung to ourselves; or if we should stretch out—will to stretch out our hands to touch the notes of the piano, or to take up the brush and chisel, thus making on a large scale movements which we have already made in little and rapidly, in a material in which we leave more or less durable traces; this is all an addition, a fact which obeys quite different laws from the former, with which we are not concerned for the moment, although we recognize henceforth that this second movement is a production of things, a practical fact, or fact of will. It is usual to distinguish the internal from the external work of art: the terminology seems[Pg 51] to us infelicitous, for the work of art (the æsthetic work) is always internal; and what is called external is no longer a work of art. Others distinguish between æsthetic fact and artistic fact, meaning by the second the external or practical stage, which may follow and generally does follow the first. But in this case, it is simply a question of a linguistic usage, doubtless permissible, though perhaps not advisable.

For the same reasons the search for the end of art is ridiculous, when it is understood of art as art. And since to fix an end is to choose, the theory that the content of art must be selected is another form of the same error. A selection among impressions and sensations implies that these are already expressions, otherwise how could a selection be made among the continuous and indistinct? To choose is to will: to will this and not to will that: and this and that must be before us, expressed. Practice follows, it does not precede theory; expression is free inspiration.

The true artist, in fact, finds himself big with his theme, he knows not how; he feels the moment of birth drawing near, but he cannot will it or not will it. If he were to wish to act in opposition to his inspiration, to make an arbitrary choice, if, born Anacreon, he should wish to sing of Atreus and of Alcides, his lyre would warn him of his mistake, sounding only of Venus and of Love, notwithstanding his efforts to the contrary.

The theme or content cannot, therefore, be practically or morally charged with epithets of praise or blame. When critics of art remark that a theme is badly selected, in cases where that observation has a just foundation, it is a question of blaming, not the selection of the theme (which would be absurd), but the manner in which the artist has treated it, the failure of the expression due to the contradictions which it contains. And when the same critics object to the theme or content of works which they proclaim to be artistically perfect as being unworthy of art and blameworthy; if these expressions really are perfect, there is nothing to be done but to[Pg 52] advise the critics to leave the artists in peace, for they can only derive inspiration from what has moved their soul. They should rather direct their attention towards effecting changes in surrounding nature and society, that such impressions and states of soul should not recur. If ugliness were to vanish from the world, if universal virtue and felicity were established there, perhaps artists would no longer represent perverse or pessimistic feelings, but calm, innocent and joyous feelings, Arcadians of a real Arcady. But so long as ugliness and turpitude exist in nature and impose themselves upon the artist, to prevent the expression of these things also is impossible; and when it has arisen, factum infectum fieri nequit. We speak thus entirely from the æsthetic point of view, and of pure criticism of art.

We are not concerned to estimate the damage which the criticism of "choice" does to artistic production, with the prejudices which it produces or maintains among the artists themselves, and with the conflict to which it gives rise between artistic impulse and critical demands. It is true that sometimes it seems also to do some good, by aiding artists to discover themselves, that is, their own impressions and their own inspiration, and to acquire consciousness of the task which is, as it were, imposed upon them by the historical moment in which they live, and by their individual temperament. In these cases, criticism of "choice," while believing that it generates, merely recognizes and aids the expressions which are already being formed. It believes itself to be the mother, where, at most, it is only the midwife.

The impossibility of choice of content completes the theorem of the independence of art, and is also the only legitimate meaning of the expression: art for art's sake. Art is independent both of science and of the useful and the moral. There should be no fear lest frivolous or cold art should thus be justified, since what is truly frivolous or cold is so because it has not been raised to expression; or in other words, frivolity and frigidity come always from the form of the æsthetic treatment, from failure to[Pg 53] grasp a content, not from the material qualities of the content itself.

The saying: the style is the man, can also not be completely criticized, save by starting from the distinction between the theoretic and the practical, and from the theoretic character of the æsthetic activity. Man is not simply knowledge and contemplation: he is will, which contains the cognitive moment in itself. Hence the saying is either altogether void, as when it is taken to mean that the style is the man qua style—is the man, that is, but only so far as he is expressive activity; or it is erroneous, as when the attempt is made to deduce what a man has done and willed from what he has seen and expressed, thereby asserting that there is a logical connexion between knowing and willing. Many legends in the biographies of artists have sprung from this erroneous identification, since it seemed impossible that a man who gives expression to generous feelings should not be a noble and generous man in practical life; or that the dramatist whose plays are full of stabbing, should not himself have done a little stabbing in real life. Artists protest vainly: "Lasciva est nobis pagina, vita proba." They are merely taxed in addition with lying and hypocrisy. How far more prudent you were, poor women of Verona, when you founded your belief that Dante had really descended to hell upon his blackened countenance! Yours was at any rate a historical conjecture.

Finally, sincerity imposed as a duty upon the artist (a law of ethics also said to be a law of æsthetic) rests upon another double meaning. For by sincerity may be meant, in the first place, the moral duty not to deceive one's neighbour; and in that case it is foreign to the artist. For indeed he deceives no one, since he gives form to what is already in his soul. He would only deceive if he were to betray his duty as an artist by failing to execute his task in its essential nature. If lies and deceit are in his soul, then the form which he gives to these things cannot be deceit or lies, precisely because it is æsthetic. If the artist be a charlatan, a[Pg 54] liar, or a miscreant, he purifies his other self by reflecting it in art. If by sincerity be meant, in the second place, fulness and truth of expression, it is clear that this second sense has no relation to the ethical concept. The law, called both ethical and æsthetic, reveals itself here as nothing but a word used both by Ethics and Æsthetic.

[Pg 55]

The double degree of the theoretical activity, æsthetic and logical, has an important parallel in the practical activity, which has not yet been placed in due relief. The practical activity is also divided into a first and second degree, the second implying the first. The first practical degree is the simply useful or economical activity; the second the moral activity.

Economy is, as it were, the Æsthetic of practical life; Morality its Logic.

If this has not been clearly seen by philosophers; if the correct place in the system of the spirit has not been given to the economic activity, if it has been left to wander about in the prolegomena to treatises on political economy, often vague and but little developed, this is due, among other reasons, to the fact that the useful or economic has been confused, sometimes with the concept of the technical, sometimes with that of the egoistical.

Technique is certainly not a special activity of the spirit. Technique is knowledge; or rather, it is knowledge itself in general which takes this name when it serves as basis, as we have seen it does, for practical action. Knowledge which is not followed, or is supposed not to be easily followed by practical action, is called "pure": the same knowledge, if effectively followed by action, is called "applied"; if it is supposed that it can be easily followed by a particular action, it is called "applicable"[Pg 56] or "technical." This word, then, indicates a situation in which knowledge is, or may easily be, not a special form of knowledge. So true is this, that it would be altogether impossible to establish whether a given order of knowledge were, intrinsically, pure or applied. All knowledge, however abstract and philosophical it may be believed to be, may be a guide to practical acts; a theoretical error in the ultimate principles of morality may be reflected and always in some way is reflected in practical life. One can only speak roughly and unscientifically of certain truths as pure and of others as applied.

The same knowledge that is called technical may also be called useful. But the word "useful" in conformity with the criticism of judgements of value made above, is to be understood as used here in a verbal or metaphorical sense. When we say that water is useful for putting out fire, the word "useful" is used in a non-scientific sense. Water thrown on the fire is the cause of its going out: this is the knowledge that serves for basis to the action, let us say, of firemen. There is a link, not of nature, but of simple succession, between the useful action of the person who extinguishes the conflagration and that knowledge. The technique of the effects of the water is the theoretical activity which precedes; the only useful thing is the action of the man who extinguishes the fire.

Some economists identify utility, that is to say, merely economic action or will, with the egoistic, that is to say, with what is profitable to the individual, in so far as individual, without regard to and indeed in complete opposition to the moral law. The egoistic is the immoral. In this case Economics would be a very strange science, standing not beside but opposite Ethics, like the devil facing God, or at least like the advocatus diaboli in the processes of canonization. Such a conception is altogether inadmissible: the science of immorality is implied in that of morality, as the science of the false is implied in Logic, science of the true, and a science of unsuccessful expression in Æsthetic, science of successful expression. If, then, Economics were the scientific treatment of egoism, it[Pg 57] would be a chapter of Ethics, or Ethics itself; because every moral determination implies, at the same time, a negation of its contrary.

Further, conscience tells us that to conduct oneself economically is not to conduct oneself egoistically; that even the most morally scrupulous man must conduct himself usefully (economically), if he does not wish to act at hazard and consequently in a manner quite the reverse of moral. If utility were egoism, how could it be the duty of the altruist to behave like an egoist?

If we are not mistaken, the difficulty is solved in a manner perfectly analogous to that in which is solved the problem of the relations between expression and concept, Æsthetic and Logic.

To will economically is to will an end; to will morally is to will the rational end. But whoever wills and acts morally, cannot but will and act usefully (economically). How could he will the rational end, unless he also willed it as his particular end?

The converse is not true; as it is not true in æsthetic science that the expressive fact must of necessity be linked with the logical fact. It is possible to will economically without willing morally; and it is possible to conduct oneself with perfect economic coherence, while pursuing an end which is objectively irrational (immoral), or, rather, an end which would be held to be so at a higher grade of consciousness.

Examples of the economic, without the moral character, are Machiavelli's hero Cæsar Borgia, or the Iago of Shakespeare. Who can help admiring their strength of will, although their activity is only economic, and is developed in opposition to what we hold moral? Who can help admiring the Ser Ciappelletto of Boccaccio, who pursues and realizes his ideal of the perfect rascal even on his death-bed, making the petty and timid little thieves who are present at his burlesque confession exclaim: "What manner of man is this, whose perversity neither age, nor infirmity, nor the fear of death which he sees at hand, nor the fear of God before whose[Pg 58] judgement-seat he must stand in a little while, have been able to remove, nor to make him wish to die otherwise than as he has lived?"

The moral man unites with the pertinacity and fearlessness of a Cæsar Borgia, of an Iago, or of a Ser Ciappelletto, the good will of the saint or of the hero. Or, rather, good will would not be will, and consequently not good, if it did not possess, in addition to the side which makes it good, also that which makes it will. So a logical thought which does not succeed in expressing itself is not thought, but at the most a confused presentiment of a thought beyond yet to come.

It is not correct, then, to conceive of the amoral man as also anti-economical, or to make of morality an element of coherence in the acts of life, and therefore of economicity. Nothing prevents us from conceiving (an hypothesis which is verified at least during certain periods and moments, if not during whole lifetimes) a man altogether without moral conscience. In a man thus organized, what for us is immorality is not so for him, because it is not felt as such. The consciousness of the contradiction between what is desired as a rational end and what is pursued egoistically cannot arise in him. This contradiction is anti-economicity. Immoral conduct becomes also anti-economical only in the man who possesses moral conscience. The moral remorse which is the indication of this, is also economical remorse; that is to say, sorrow at not having known how to will completely and to attain that moral ideal which was willed at first, instead of allowing himself to be led astray by the passions. Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. The video and the probo are here an initial volo immediately contradicted and overthrown. In the man without moral sense, we must admit a remorse that is merely economic; like that of a thief or of an assassin who, when on the point of robbing or of assassinating should abstain from doing so, not owing to a conversion of his being, but to nervousness and bewilderment, or even to a momentary awakening of moral consciousness. When he has come[Pg 59] back to himself, such a thief or assassin will regret and be ashamed of his incoherence; his remorse will not be due to having done wrong, but to not having done wrong; it is therefore economic, not moral, since the latter is excluded by hypothesis. But since a lively moral consciousness is generally found among the majority of men and its total absence is a rare and perhaps non-existent monstrosity, it may be admitted that morality, in general, coincides with economicity in the conduct of life.

There need be no fear lest the parallelism that we support should introduce afresh into science the category of the morally indifferent, of that which is in truth action and volition, but is neither moral nor immoral; the category in short of the licit and of the permissible, which has always been the cause or reflexion of ethical corruption, as was the case with Jesuitical morality, which it dominated. It remains quite certain that indifferent moral actions do not exist, because moral activity pervades and must pervade every least volitional movement of man. But far from upsetting the established parallelism, this confirms it. Are there by any chance intuitions which science and the intellect do not pervade and analyse, resolving them into universal concepts, or changing them into historical affirmations? We have already seen that true science, philosophy, knows no external limits which bar its way, as happens with the so-called natural sciences. Science and morality entirely dominate, the one the æsthetic intuitions, the other the economic volitions of man, although neither of them can appear in the concrete, save the one in the intuitive, the other in the economic form.

This combined identity and difference of the useful and the moral, of the economic and the ethical, explains the success at the present time and formerly of the utilitarian theory of Ethics. Indeed it is easy to discover and to illustrate a utilitarian side in every moral action; as it is easy to reveal the æsthetic side in every logical proposition. The criticism of ethical utilitarianism cannot begin by denying this truth and seeking out absurd and[Pg 60] non-existent examples of useless moral actions. It must admit the utilitarian side and explain it as the concrete form of morality, which consists in this, that it is inside this form. Utilitarians do not see this inside. This is not the place for the fuller development that such ideas deserve. Ethics and Economics cannot however fail to be gainers (as we have said of Logic and Æsthetic) by a more exact determination of the relations that exist between them. Economic science is now rising to the activistical concept of the useful, as it attempts to surpass the mathematical phase in which it is still entangled; a phase which was in its turn a progress when it superseded historicism, or the confusion of the theoretical with the historical, and destroyed a number of capricious distinctions and false economic theories. With this conception, it will be easy on the one hand to absorb and to verify the semi-philosophical theories of so-called pure economics, and on the other, by the introduction of successive complications and additions, to effect a transition from the philosophical to the empirical or naturalistic method and thus to embrace the particular theories expounded in the so-called political or national economy of the schools.

As æsthetic intuition knows the phenomenon or nature, and the philosophic concept the noumenon or spirit; so the economic activity wills the phenomenon or nature, and the moral activity the noumenon or spirit. The spirit which wills itself, its true self, the universal which is in the empirical and finite spirit: that is the formula which perhaps defines the essence of morality with the least impropriety. This will for the true self is absolute freedom.

[Pg 61]

In this summary sketch that we have given of the entire philosophy of the spirit in its fundamental moments, the spirit is thus conceived as consisting of four moments or degrees, disposed in such a way that the theoretical activity is to the practical as the first theoretical degree is to the second theoretical, and the first practical degree to the second practical. The four moments imply one another regressively by their concreteness. The concept cannot exist without expression, the useful without both and morality without the three preceding degrees. If the æsthetic fact is in a certain sense alone independent while the others are more or less dependent, then the logical is the least dependent and the moral will the most. Moral intention acts on given theoretic bases, with which it cannot dispense, unless we are willing to accept that absurd procedure known to the Jesuits as direction of intention, in which people pretend to themselves not to know what they know only too well.

If the forms of human activity are four, four also are the forms of genius. Men endowed with genius in art, in science, and in moral will or heroes, have always been recognized. But the genius of pure economicity has met with repugnance. It is not altogether without reason that a category of bad geniuses or of geniuses of evil has been created. The practical, merely economic genius, which is not directed to a rational end, cannot but excite an admiration mingled with alarm. To dispute as to whether the word "genius"[Pg 62] should be applied only to creators of æsthetic expression or also to men of scientific research and of action would be a mere question of words. To observe, on the other hand, that "genius," of whatever kind it be, is always a quantitative conception and an empirical distinction, would be to repeat what has already been explained as regards artistic genius.

A fifth form of spiritual activity does not exist. It would be easy to show how all the other forms either do not possess the character of activity, or are verbal variants of the activities already examined, or are complex and derivative facts, in which the various activities are mingled, and are filled with particular and contingent contents.

The juridical fact, for example, considered as what is called objective law, is derived both from the economic and from the logical activities. Law is a rule, a formula (whether oral or written matters little here) in which is fixed an economic relation willed by an individual or by a community, and this economic side at once unites it with and distinguishes it from moral activity. Take another example. Sociology (among the many meanings the word bears in our times) is sometimes conceived as the study of an original element, which is called sociability. Now what is it that distinguishes sociability, or the relations which are developed in a meeting of men, and not in a meeting of sub-human beings, if it be not just the various spiritual activities which exist among the former and which are supposed not to exist, or to exist only in a rudimentary degree, among the latter? Sociability, then, far from being an original, simple, irreducible conception, is very complex and complicated. A proof of this would be the impossibility, generally recognized, of enunciating a single law which could be described as purely sociological. Those that are improperly so called are shown to be either empirical historical observations, or spiritual laws, that is to say judgements into which the conceptions of the spiritual activities are translated, when they are not simply empty[Pg 63] and indeterminate generalities, like the so-called law of evolution. Sometimes, too, nothing more is understood by "sociability" than "social rule," and so law; thus confounding sociology with the science or theory of law itself. Law, sociability, and similar concepts, are to be dealt with in a mode analogous to that employed by us in the consideration and analysis of historicity and technique.

It may seem that religious activity should be judged otherwise. But religion is nothing but knowledge, and does not differ from its other forms and sub-forms. For it is in turn either the expression of practical aspirations and ideals (religious ideals), or historical narrative (legend), or conceptual science (dogma).

It can therefore be maintained with equal truth either that religion is destroyed by the progress of human knowledge, or that it is always present there. Their religion was the whole intellectual patrimony of primitive peoples: our intellectual patrimony is our religion. The content has been changed, bettered, refined, and it will change and become better and more refined in the future also; but its form is always the same. We do not know what use could be made of religion by those who wish to preserve it side by side with the theoretic activity of man, with his art, with his criticism and with his philosophy. It is impossible to preserve an imperfect and inferior kind of knowledge, such as religion, side by side with what has surpassed and disproved it. Catholicism, which is always consistent, will not tolerate a Science, a History, an Ethics, in contradiction to its views and doctrines. The rationalists are less coherent: they are disposed to allow a little space in their souls for a religion in contradiction with their whole theoretic world.

The religious affectations and weaknesses prevalent among the rationalists of our time have their origin in the superstitious worship so recklessly lavished upon the natural sciences. We know ourselves and their chief representatives admit that these sciences are all surrounded by limits. Science having been wrongly identified[Pg 64] with the so-called natural sciences, it could be foreseen that the remainder would be sought in religion; that remainder with which the human spirit cannot dispense. We are therefore indebted to materialism, to positivism, to naturalism for this unhealthy and often disingenuous recrudescence of religious exaltation, which belongs to the hospital, when it does not belong to the politician.

Philosophy removes from religion all reason for existing, because it substitutes itself for religion. As the science of the spirit, it looks upon religion as a phenomenon, a transitory historical fact, a psychic condition that can be surpassed. Philosophy shares the domain of knowledge with the natural sciences, with history and with art. To the first it leaves enumeration, measurement and classification; to the second, the chronicling of what has individually happened; to the third, the individually possible. There is nothing left to allot to religion. For the same reason, philosophy, as the science of the spirit, cannot be philosophy of the intuitive datum; nor, as has been seen, philosophy of history, nor philosophy of nature; and therefore there cannot be a philosophical science of what is not form and universal, but material and particular. This amounts to affirming the impossibility of Metaphysic.

The methodology or logic of history has supplanted the philosophy of history; an epistemology of the concepts employed in the natural sciences succeeded the Philosophy of Nature. What philosophy can study of history is its mode of construction (intuition, perception, document, probability, etc.); of the natural sciences the forms of the concepts which constitute them (space, time, motion, number, types, classes, etc.). Philosophy as metaphysic in the sense above described would, on the other hand, claim to compete with history and with the natural sciences, which alone are legitimate and effective in their field. Such a challenge could do nothing but reveal the incompetence of those who made it. In this sense we are anti-metaphysicans, while declaring ourselves to be[Pg 65] ultra-metaphysicians, when the word is used to claim and to affirm the office of philosophy as self-consciousness of the spirit, distinguished from the merely empirical and classificatory office of the natural sciences.

Metaphysic has been obliged to assert the existence of a specific spiritual activity producing it, in order to maintain itself side by side with the sciences of the spirit. This activity, called in antiquity mental or superior imagination, and more often in modern times intuitive intellect or intellectual intuition, was held to unite the characters of imagination and intellect in an altogether special form. It was supposed to provide the means of passing by deduction or dialectic from the infinite to the finite, from form to matter, from the concept to the intuition, from science to history, acting by a method which was held to penetrate both the universal and the particular, the abstract and the concrete, intuition and intellect. A faculty marvellous indeed and most valuable to possess; but we, who do not possess it, have no means of establishing its existence.

Intellectual intuition has sometimes been considered to be the true æsthetic activity. At others a no less marvellous æsthetic activity has been placed beside, below, or above it, a faculty altogether different from simple intuition. The glories of this faculty have been celebrated, and the production of art attributed to it, or at least of certain groups of artistic production, arbitrarily chosen. Art, religion and philosophy have seemed in turn to be one only, or three distinct faculties of the spirit, sometimes one, sometimes another of them being supreme in the dignity shared by all.

It is impossible to enumerate all the various attitudes assumed or capable of being assumed by this conception of Æsthetic, which we will call mystical. We are here in the kingdom, not of the science of imagination, but of imagination itself, which creates its world out of varying elements drawn from impressions and feelings. Suffice it to mention that this mysterious faculty has been conceived, sometimes as practical, sometimes as a[Pg 66] mean between the theoretic and the practical, at others again as a theoretic form side by side with philosophy and religion.

The immortality of art has sometimes been deduced from this last conception, as belonging with its sisters to the sphere of absolute spirit. At other times, on the other hand, when religion has been looked upon as mortal and as dissolved in philosophy, then has been proclaimed the mortality, even the death, actual or at least imminent, of art. This question has no meaning for us, because, seeing that the function of art is a necessary degree of the spirit, to ask if art can be eliminated is the same as to ask if sensation or intelligence can be eliminated. But Metaphysic, in the above sense, transplanting itself into an arbitrary world, is not to be criticized in its particulars, any more than we can criticize the botany of the garden of Alcina or the navigation of the voyage of Astolfo. Criticism can only exist when we refuse to join in the game; that is to say, when we reject the very possibility of Metaphysic, always in the sense above indicated.

There is therefore no intellectual intuition in philosophy, as there is no surrogate or equivalent of it in art, or any other mode by which this imaginary function may be called and represented. There does not exist (if we may repeat ourselves) a fifth degree, a fifth or supreme faculty, theoretic or practical-theoretic, imaginative-intellectual, or intellectual-imaginative, or however otherwise it may be attempted to conceive such a faculty.

[Pg 67]

It is customary to give long catalogues of the characters of art. Having reached this point of the treatise, after having studied art as spiritual activity, as theoretic activity, and as special theoretic activity (intuitive), we are able to discover that those varied and numerous determinations of characters, where they refer to anything real, do nothing but represent what we have already met with as genera, species and individuality of the æsthetic form. To the generic are reducible, as we have already observed, the characters, or rather, the verbal variants of unity, and of unity in variety, of simplicity, or originality, and so on; to the specific, the characters of truth, of sincerity, and the like; to the individual, the characters of life, of vivacity, of animation, of concreteness, of individuality, of characteristicality. The words may change again, but they will not contribute anything scientifically new. The analysis of expression as such is completely effected in the results expounded above.

It might, on the other hand, be asked at this point if there be modes or degrees of expression; if, having distinguished two degrees of activity of the spirit, each of which is subdivided into two other degrees, one of these, the intuitive-expressive, is not in its turn subdivided into two or more intuitive modes, into a first, second or third degree of expression. But this further division is impossible; a classification of intuition-expressions is certainly permissible, but is not philosophical: individual[Pg 68] expressive facts are so many individuals, not one of which is interchangeable with another, save in its common quality of expression. To employ the language of the schools: expression is a species which cannot function in its turn as a genus. Impressions or contents vary; every content differs from every other content, because nothing repeats itself in life; and the irreducible variety of the forms of expression corresponds to the continual variation of the contents, the æsthetic synthesis of impressions.

A corollary of this is the impossibility of translations, in so far as they pretend to effect the re-moulding of one expression into another, like a liquid poured from a vase of a certain shape into a vase of another shape. We can elaborate logically what we have already elaborated in æsthetic form only; but we cannot reduce what has already possessed its æsthetic form to another form also æsthetic. Indeed, every translation either diminishes and spoils, or it creates a new expression, by putting the former back into the crucible and mingling it with the personal impressions of the so-called translator. In the former case, the expression always remains one, that of the original, the translation being more or less deficient, that is to say, not properly expression: in the other case, there would certainly be two expressions, but with two different contents. "Faithful ugliness or faithless beauty" is a proverb that well expresses the dilemma with which every translator is faced. Un-æsthetic translations, such as those that are word for word, or paraphrastic, are to be looked upon as simple commentaries upon the original.

The illegitimate division of expressions into various grades is known in literature by the name of doctrine of ornament or of rhetorical categories. But similar attempts at distinctions in other artistic groups are not wanting: suffice it to recall the realistic and symbolic forms, so often mentioned in relation to painting and sculpture.

Realistic and symbolic, objective and subjective, classical[Pg 69] and romantic, simple and ornate, proper and metaphorical, the fourteen forms of metaphor, the figures of word and sentence, pleonasm, ellipse, inversion, repetition, synonyms and homonyms, these and all other determinations of modes or degrees of expression reveal their philosophical nullity when the attempt is made to develop them in precise definitions, because they either grasp the void or fall into the absurd. A typical example of this is the very common definition of metaphor as of another word used in place of the proper word. Now why give oneself this trouble? Why substitute the improper for the proper word? Why take the worse and longer road when you know the shorter and better road? Perhaps, as is commonly said, because the proper word is in certain cases not so expressive as the so-called improper word or metaphor? But if this be so the metaphor is exactly the proper word in that case, and the so-called "proper" word, if it were used, would be inexpressive and therefore most improper. Similar observations of elementary good sense can be made regarding the other categories, as, for example, the general one of the ornate. Here for instance it may be asked how an ornament can be joined to expression. Externally? In that case it is always separated from the expression. Internally? In that case, either it does not assist the expression and mars it; or it does form part of it and is not an ornament, but a constituent element of the expression, indivisible and indistinguishable in its unity.

It is needless to say how much harm has been done by rhetorical distinctions. Rhetoric has often been declaimed against, but although there has been rebellion against its consequences, its principles have, at the same time, been carefully preserved (perhaps in order to show proof of philosophic consistency). In literature the rhetorical categories have contributed, if not to make dominant, at least to justify theoretically, that particular kind of bad writing which is called fine writing or writing according to rhetoric.

The terms above mentioned would never have gone[Pg 70] beyond the schools, where we all of us learned them (only we never found an opportunity of using them in strictly æsthetic discussions, or at most of doing so jocosely and with a comic intention), were it not that they can sometimes be employed in one of the following significations: as verbal variants of the æsthetic concept; as indications of the anti-æsthetic, or, finally (and this is their most important use), no longer in the service of art and æsthetic, but of science and logic.

First. Expressions considered directly or positively are not divisible into classes, but some are successful, others half-successful, others failures. There are perfect and imperfect, successful and unsuccessful expressions. The words recorded, and others of the same sort, may therefore sometimes indicate the successful expression, and the various forms of the failures. But they do this in the most inconstant and capricious manner, so much so that the same word serves sometimes to proclaim the perfect, sometimes to condemn the imperfect.

For example, some will say of two pictures—one without inspiration, in which the author has copied natural objects without intelligence; the other inspired, but without close relation to existing objects—that the first is realistic, the second symbolic. Others, on the contrary, utter the word realistic before a picture strongly felt representing a scene of ordinary life, while they apply that of symbolic to another picture that is but a cold allegory. It is evident that in the first case symbolic means artistic and realistic inartistic, while in the second, realistic is synonymous with artistic and symbolic with inartistic. What wonder, then, that some hotly maintain the true art form is the symbolic, and that the realistic is inartistic; others, that the realistic is artistic and the symbolic inartistic? We cannot but grant that both are right, since each uses the same words in such a different sense.

The great disputes about classicism and romanticism were frequently based upon such equivocations. Sometimes the former was understood as the artistically perfect,[Pg 71] and the second as lacking balance and imperfect; at others "classic" meant cold and artificial, "romantic" pure, warm, powerful, truly expressive. Thus it was always possible reasonably to take the side of the classic against the romantic, or of the romantic against the classic.

The same thing happens as regards the word style. Sometimes it is said that every writer must have style. Here style is synonymous with form of expression. At others the form of a code of laws or of a mathematical work is said to be without style. Here the error is again committed of admitting diverse modes of expression, an ornate and a naked form, because, if style is form, the code and the mathematical treatise must also be asserted, strictly speaking, to have each its style. At other times, one hears the critics blaming some one for "having too much style" or for "writing a style." Here it is clear that style signifies, not the form, nor a mode of it, but improper and pretentious expression, a form of the inartistic.

Second. The second not altogether meaningless use of these words and distinctions is to be found when we hear in the examination of a literal composition such remarks as these: here is a pleonasm, here an ellipse, there a metaphor, here again a synonym or an ambiguity. The meaning is: Here is an error consisting of using a larger number of words than necessary (pleonasm); here, on the other hand, the error arises from too few having been used (ellipse), here from the use of an unsuitable word (metaphor), here of two words which seem to say two different things, but really say the same thing (synonym); here, on the contrary, of one word which seems to express the same thing, whereas it says two different things (ambiguity). This depreciatory and pathological use of the terms is, however, less common than the preceding.

Thirdly and finally, when rhetorical terminology possesses no æsthetic signification similar or analogous to those passed in review, and yet one feels that it is not void of meaning and designates something that[Pg 72] deserves to be noted, this means that it is used in the service of logic and of science. Granted that a concept used by a writer in a scientific sense is designated by a definite term, it is natural that other terms found in use by that writer on which he incidentally employs himself to signify the same thought, become in respect to the vocabulary fixed upon by him as true, metaphors, synecdoches, synonyms, elliptical forms and the like. We ourselves in the course of this treatise have several times made use of, and intend again to make use of such language, in order to make clear the sense of the words we employ, or may find employed. But this proceeding, which is of value in discussions pertaining to the criticism of science and philosophy, has none whatever in literary and artistic criticism. There are words and metaphors proper to science: the same concept may be psychologically formed in various circumstances and therefore differ in its intuitional expression. When the scientific terminology of a given writer has been established and one of these modes fixed as correct, then all other uses of it become improper or tropical. But in the æsthetic fact there are none but proper words: the same intuition can be expressed in one way only, precisely because it is intuition and not concept.

Some, while admitting the æsthetic non-existence of the rhetorical categories, yet make a reservation as to their utility and the service they are supposed to render, especially in schools of literature. We confess that we fail to understand how error and confusion can educate the mind to logical distinction, or aid the teaching of a science which they disturb and obscure. Perhaps what is meant is that such distinctions, as empirical classes, can aid memory and learning, as was admitted above for literary and artistic kinds. To this there is no objection. There is certainly another purpose for which the rhetorical categories should continue to appear in schools: to be criticized there. The errors of the past must not be forgotten and no more said, and truths cannot be kept alive save by making them combat errors. Unless[Pg 73] an account of the rhetorical categories be given, accompanied by a criticism of them, there is a risk of their springing up again, and it may be said that they are already springing up among certain philologists as the latest psychological discoveries.

It might seem that we thus wished to deny all bond of resemblance between different expressions and works of art. Resemblances exist, and by means of them, works of art can be arranged in this or that group. But they are likenesses such as are observed among individuals, and can never be rendered with abstract determinations. That is to say, it would be incorrect to apply identification, subordination, co-ordination and the other relations of concepts to these resemblances, which consist wholly of what is called a family likeness, derived from the historical conditions in which the various works have appeared and from relationship of soul among the artists.

It is in these resemblances that lies the relative possibility of translations; not as reproductions of the same original expressions (which it would be vain to attempt), but as productions of similar expressions more or less nearly resembling the originals. The translation called good is an approximation which has original value as a work of art and can stand by itself.

[Pg 74]

Passing to the study of more complex concepts, where the æsthetic activity is to be considered in conjunction with other orders of facts, and showing the mode of their union or complication, we find ourselves first face to face with the concept of feeling and with those feelings that are called æsthetic.

The word "feeling" is one of the richest in meanings in philosophic terminology. We have already had occasion to meet with it once, among those used to designate the spirit in its passivity, the matter or content of art, and so as synonym of impressions. Once again (and then the meaning was altogether different), we have met with it as designating the non-logical and non-historical character of the æsthetic fact, that is to say, pure intuition, a form of truth which defines no concept and affirms no fact.

But here it is not regarded in either of these two meanings, nor in the others which have also been conferred upon it to designate other cognitive forms of the spirit, but only in that where feeling is understood as a special activity, of non-cognitive nature, having its two poles, positive and negative, in pleasure and pain.

This activity has always greatly embarrassed philosophers, who have therefore attempted either to deny it as activity, or to attribute it to nature, excluding it from the spirit. But both these solutions bristle with difficulties of such a kind as to prove them finally unacceptable to any one who examines them with care. For what[Pg 75] could a non-spiritual activity ever be, an activity of nature, when we have no other knowledge of activity save as spirituality, nor of spirituality save as activity? Nature is in this case, by definition, the merely passive, inert, mechanical, material. On the other hand, the negation of the character of activity to feeling is energetically disproved by those very poles of pleasure and of pain which appear in it and manifest activity in its concreteness, or, so to say, quivering.

This critical conclusion should place us especially in the greatest embarrassment, for in the sketch of the system of the spirit given above we have left no room for the new activity of which we are now obliged to recognize the existence. But the activity of feeling, if it is activity, is not new. It has already had its place assigned to it in the system that we have sketched, where, however, it has been given another name, economic activity. What is called the activity of feeling is nothing but that more elementary and fundamental practical activity which we have distinguished from the ethical activity and made to consist of the appetition and volition for some individual end, apart from any moral determination.

If feeling has been sometimes considered to be an organic or natural activity, this has happened just because it does not coincide either with logical, æsthetic or ethical activity. Looked at from the standpoint of those three (which were the only ones admitted), it has seemed to lie outside the true and real spirit, spirit in its aristocracy, and to be almost a determination of nature, or of the soul in so far as it is nature. From this too results the truth of another thesis, often maintained, that the æsthetic activity, like the ethical and intellectual activities, is not feeling. This thesis is inexpugnable, when feeling has already been understood implicitly and unconsciously as economic volition.

The view refuted in this thesis is known as hedonism. This consists in reducing all the various forms of the spirit to one, which thus also loses its own distinctive character and[Pg 76] becomes something obscure and mysterious, like "the night in which all cows are black." Having brought about this reduction and mutilation, the hedonists naturally do not succeed in seeing anything else in any activity but pleasure and pain. They find no substantial difference between the pleasure of art and that of easy digestion, between the pleasure of a good action and that of breathing the fresh air with wide-expanded lungs.

But if the activity of feeling in the sense here defined must not be substituted for all the other forms of spiritual activity, we have not said that it cannot accompany them. Indeed it accompanies them of necessity, because they are all in close relation both with one another and with the elementary volitional form. Therefore each of them has for concomitants individual volitions and volitional pleasures and pains, known as feeling. But we must not confound a concomitant with the principal fact, and substitute the one for the other. The discovery of a truth, or the fulfilment of a moral duty, produces in us a joy which makes vibrate our whole being, which, by attaining the aim of those forms of spiritual activity, attains at the same time that to which it was practically tending, as its end. Nevertheless, economic or hedonistic satisfaction, ethical satisfaction, æsthetic satisfaction, intellectual satisfaction, though thus united, remain always distinct.

A question often asked is thus answered at the same time, one which has correctly seemed to be a matter of life or death for æsthetic science, namely, whether feeling and pleasure precede or follow, are cause or effect of the æsthetic fact. We must widen this question to include the relation between the various spiritual forms, and answer it by maintaining that one cannot talk of cause and effect and of a chronological before and after in the unity of the spirit.

And once the relation above expounded is established, all necessity for inquiry as to the nature of æsthetic, moral, intellectual and even what was sometimes called[Pg 77] economic feelings, must disappear. In this last case, it is clear that it is a question, not of two terms, but of one, and inquiry as to economic feeling must be the same as that relating to economic activity. But in the other cases also, we must attend, not to the substantive, but to the adjective: the æsthetic, moral and logical character will explain the colouring of the feelings as æsthetic, moral and intellectual, whereas feeling, studied alone, will never explain those refractions and colorations.

A further consequence is, that we no longer need retain the well-known distinctions between values or feelings of value, and feelings that are merely hedonistic and without value; disinterested and interested feelings, objective feelings and feelings not objective but simply subjective feelings of approbation and of mere pleasure (cf. the distinction of Gefallen and Vergnügen in German). Those distinctions were used to save the three spiritual forms, which were recognized as the triad of the True, the Good and the Beautiful, from confusion with the fourth form, still unknown, and therefore insidious in its indeterminateness and mother of scandals. For us this triad has completed its task, because we are capable of reaching the distinction far more directly, by receiving also the selfish, subjective, merely pleasurable feelings among the respectable forms of the spirit; and where formerly antitheses were conceived (by ourselves and others), between value and feelings, as between spirituality and naturality, henceforth we see nothing but differences between value and value.

As has already been said, feeling or the economic activity presents itself as divided into two poles, positive and negative, pleasure and pain, which we can now translate into useful and disuseful (or hurtful). This bipartition has already been noted above, as a mark of the activistic character of feeling, and one which is to be found in all forms of activity. If each of these is value, each has opposed to it antivalue or disvalue. Absence of value is not sufficient to cause dis value, but activity and passivity must be struggling between themselves, without[Pg 78] the one getting the better of the other; hence the contradiction and disvalue of the activity that is embarrassed, impeded, or interrupted. Value is activity that unfolds itself freely: disvalue is its contrary.

We will content ourselves with this definition of the two terms, without entering into the problem of the relation between value and disvalue, that is, the problem of contraries (that is to say, whether they are to be thought of dualistically, as two beings or two orders of beings, like Ormuzd and Ahriman, angels and devils, enemies to one another; or as a unity, which is also contrariety). This definition of the two terms will be sufficient for our purpose, which is to make clear the nature of æsthetic activity, and at this particular point one of the most obscure and disputed concepts of Æsthetic: the concept of the Beautiful.

Æsthetic, intellectual, economic and ethical values and disvalues are variously denominated in current speech: beautiful, true, good, useful, expedient, just, right and so on—thus designating the free development of spiritual activity, action, scientific research, artistic production, when they are successful; ugly, false, bad, useless, inexpedient, unjust, wrong designating embarrassed activity, the product that is a failure. In linguistic usage, these denominations are being continually shifted from one order of facts to another. Beautiful, for instance, is said not only of a successful expression, but also of a scientific truth, of an action successfully achieved, and of a moral action: thus we talk of an intellectual beauty, of a beautiful action, of a moral beauty. The attempt to keep up with these infinitely varying usages leads into a trackless labyrinth of verbalism in which many philosophers and students of art have lost their way. For this reason we have thought it best studiously to avoid the use of the word "beautiful" to indicate successful expression in its positive value. But after all the explanations that we have given, all danger of misunderstanding being now dissipated, and since on the other hand we cannot fail to recognize that the prevailing[Pg 79] tendency, both in current speech and in philosophy, is to limit the meaning of the word "beautiful" precisely to the æsthetic value, it seems now both permissible and advisable to define beauty as successful expression, or rather, as expression and nothing more, because expression when it is not successful is not expression.

Consequently, the ugly is unsuccessful expression. The paradox is true, for works of art that are failures, that the beautiful presents itself as unity, the ugly as multiplicity. Hence we hear of merits in relation to works of art that are more or less failures, that is to say, of those parts of them that are beautiful, which is not the case with perfect works. It is in fact impossible to enumerate the merits or to point out what parts of the latter are beautiful, because being a complete fusion they have but one value. Life circulates in the whole organism: it is not withdrawn into the several parts.

Unsuccessful works may have merit in various degrees, even the greatest. The beautiful does not possess degrees, for there is no conceiving a more beautiful, that is, an expressive that is more expressive, an adequate that is more than adequate. Ugliness, on the other hand, does possess degrees, from the rather ugly (or almost beautiful) to the extremely ugly. But if the ugly were complete, that is to say, without any element of beauty, it would for that very reason cease to be ugly, because it would be without the contradiction in which is the reason of its existence. The disvalue would become non-value; activity would give place to passivity, with which it is not at war, save when activity is really present to oppose it.

And because the distinctive consciousness of the beautiful and of the ugly is based on the conflicts and contradictions in which æsthetic activity is developed, it is evident that this consciousness becomes attenuated to the point of disappearing altogether, as we descend from the more complicated to the more simple and to the simplest instances of expression. Hence the illusion that there are expressions neither beautiful nor ugly, those[Pg 80] which are obtained without sensible effort and appear easy and natural being considered such.

The whole mystery of the beautiful and the ugly is reduced to these henceforth most easy definitions. Should any one object that there exist perfect æsthetic expressions before which no pleasure is felt, and others, perhaps even failures, which give him the greatest pleasure, we must recommend him to concentrate his attention in the æsthetic fact, upon that which is truly æsthetic pleasure. Æsthetic pleasure is sometimes reinforced or rather complicated by pleasures arising from extraneous facts, which are only accidentally found united with it. The poet or any other artist affords an instance of purely æsthetic pleasure at the moment when he sees (or intuites) his work for the first time; that is to say, when his impressions take form and his countenance is irradiated with the divine joy of the creator. On the other hand, a mixed pleasure is experienced by one who goes to the theatre, after a day's work, to witness a comedy: when the pleasure of rest and amusement, or that of laughingly snatching a nail from his coffin, accompanies the moment of true æsthetic pleasure in the art of the dramatist and actors. The same may be said of the artist who looks upon his labour with pleasure when it is finished, experiencing, in addition to the æsthetic pleasure, that very different one which arises from the thought of self-complacency satisfied, or even of the economic gain which will come to him from his work. Instances could be multiplied.

A category of apparent æsthetic feelings has been formed in modern Æsthetic, not arising from the form, that is to say, from the works of art as such, but from their content. It has been remarked that artistic representations arouse pleasure and pain in their infinite shades of variety. We tremble with anxiety, we rejoice, we fear, we laugh, we weep, we desire, with the personages of a drama or of a romance, with the figures in a picture and with the melody of music. But these feelings are not such as would be aroused by the real fact outside art; or rather, they are the same in quality, but are[Pg 81] quantitatively an attenuation of real things. Æsthetic and apparent pleasure and pain show themselves to be light, shallow, mobile. We have no need to treat here of these apparent feelings, for the good reason that we have already amply discussed them; indeed, we have hitherto treated of nothing but them. What are these apparent or manifested feelings, but feelings objectified, intuited, expressed? And it is natural that they do not trouble and afflict us as passionately as those of real life, because those were matter, these are form and activity; those true and proper feelings, these intuitions and expressions. The formula of apparent feelings is therefore for us nothing but a tautology, through which we can run the pen without scruple.

[Pg 82]

As we are opposed to hedonism in general, that is to say, to the theory based upon the pleasure and pain intrinsic to the economic activity and accompanying every other form of activity, which, confounding container and content, fails to recognize any process but the hedonistic; so we are opposed to æsthetic hedonism in particular, which looks at any rate upon the æsthetic, if not also upon all other activities, as a simple fact of feeling, and confounds the pleasurable expression, which is the beautiful, with the simply pleasurable and all its other species.

The æsthetic-hedonistic point of view has been presented in several forms. One of the most ancient conceives the beautiful as that which pleases sight and hearing, that is to say, the so-called higher senses. When analysis of æsthetic facts first began, it was, indeed, difficult to avoid the false belief that a picture and a piece of music are impressions of sight or hearing and correctly to interpret the obvious remark that the blind man does not enjoy the picture, nor the deaf man the music. To show, as we have shown, that the æsthetic fact does not depend upon the nature of the impressions, but that all sensible impressions can be raised to æsthetic expression and that none need of necessity be so raised, is an idea which presents itself only when all other doctrinal constructions of this problem have been tried. Any one who holds that the æsthetic fact is something pleasing to the eyes or to the hearing, has no line of defence against[Pg 83] him who consistently proceeds to identify the beautiful with the pleasurable in general, and includes in Æsthetic cooking, or (as some positivists have called it) the viscerally beautiful.

The theory of play is another form of æsthetic hedonism. The concept of play has sometimes helped towards the realization of the activistic character of the expressive fact: man (it has been said) is not really man, save when he begins to play (that is to say, when he frees himself from natural and mechanical causality and works spiritually); and his first game is art. But since the word "play" also means that pleasure which arises from the expenditure of the exuberant energy of the organism (which is a practical fact), the consequence of this theory has been that every game has been called an æsthetic fact, or that the æsthetic function has been called a game, because like science and everything else, it may form part of a game. Morality alone cannot ever be caused by the will to play (for it will never consent to such an origin), but on the contrary itself dominates and regulates the act itself of playing.

Finally, some have tried to deduce the pleasure of art from the echo of that of the sexual organs. And some of the most recent æstheticians confidently find the genesis of the æsthetic fact in the pleasure of conquering and in that of triumphing, or, as others add, in the wish of the male to conquer the female. This theory is seasoned with much anecdotal erudition, heaven knows of what degree of credibility, as to the customs of savage peoples. But there was really no need for such assistance, since in ordinary life one often meets poets who adorn themselves with their poetry, like cocks raising their crests, or turkeys spreading out their tails. But any one who does this, in so far as he does it, is not a poet but a poor fool, in fact, a poor fool of a cock or turkey, and the desire for the victorious conquest of women has nothing to do with the fact of art. It would be just as correct to look upon poetry as economic, because there once were court poets and salaried poets, and there are poets now[Pg 84] who find in the sale of their verses an aid to life if not a complete living. This deduction and definition has not failed to attract some zealous neophytes in historical materialism.

Another less vulgar current of thought considers Æsthetic as the science of the sympathetic, as that with which we sympathize, which attracts, rejoices, arouses pleasure and admiration. But the sympathetic is nothing but the image or representation of what pleases. And as such it is a complex fact, resulting from a constant element, the æsthetic element of representation, and a variable element, the pleasing in its infinite forms, arising from all the various classes of values.

In ordinary language, there is sometimes a feeling of repugnance at calling an expression "beautiful," unless it is an expression of the sympathetic. Hence the continual conflicts between the point of view of the æsthetician or art critic and that of the ordinary person, who cannot succeed in persuading himself that the image of pain and baseness can be beautiful or at least that it has as much right to be beautiful as the pleasing and the good.

The conflict could be put an end to by distinguishing two different sciences, one of expression and the other of the sympathetic, if the latter could be the object of a special science; that is to say, if it were not, as has been shown, a complex and equivocal concept. If predominance be given to the expressive fact, it enters Æsthetic as science of expression; if to the pleasurable content, we fall back to the study of facts essentially hedonistic (utilitarian), however complicated they may appear. The particular origin of the doctrine which conceives the relation between form and content as the sum of two values is also to be sought in the doctrine of the sympathetic.

In all the doctrines just now discussed, art is considered as a merely hedonistic thing. But æsthetic hedonism cannot be maintained, save by uniting it with a general philosophical hedonism, which does not admit any other form of value. Hardly has this hedonistic[Pg 85] conception of art been received by philosophers who admit one or more spiritual values, truth or morality, when the following question must necessarily be asked: What must be done with art? To what use should it be put? Should a free course be allowed to the pleasures it procures? And if so, to what extent? The question of the end of art, which in the Æsthetic of expression is inconceivable, has a clear significance in the Æsthetic of the Sympathetic and demands a solution.

Now it is evident that such solution can have but two forms, one altogether negative, the other of a restrictive nature. The first, which we shall call rigoristic or ascetic, appears several times, although not frequently, in the history of ideas. It looks upon art as an inebriation of the senses and therefore as not only useless but harmful. According to this theory, then, we must exert all our strength to liberate the human soul from its disturbing influence. The other solution, which we shall call pedagogic or moralistic-utilitarian, admits art, but only in so far as it co-operates with the end of morality; in so far as it assists with innocent pleasure the work of him who points the way to the true and the good; in so far as it anoints the edge of the cup of wisdom and morality with sweet honey.

It is well to observe that it would be an error to divide this second view into intellectualistic and moralistic-utilitarian, according as to whether be assigned to art the end of leading to the true or to what is practically good. The educational task which is imposed upon it, precisely because it is an end which is sought after and advised, is no longer merely a theoretical fact, but a theoretical fact already become the ground for practical action; it is not, therefore, intellectualism, but pedagogism and practicism. Nor would it be more exact to subdivide the pedagogic view into pure utilitarian and moralistic-utilitarian; because those who admit only the satisfaction of the individual (the desire of the individual), precisely because they are absolute hedonists, have no motive for seeking an ulterior justification for art.

[Pg 86]

But to enunciate these theories at the point to which we have attained is to confute them. We prefer to restrict ourselves to observing that in the pedagogic theory of art is to be found another of the reasons why the claim has erroneously been made that the content of art should be chosen with a view to certain practical effects.

The thesis that art consists of pure beauty has often been brought forward against hedonistic and pedagogic Æsthetic, and eagerly taken up by artists: "Heaven places all our joy in pure beauty, and the Verse is everything." If by this be understood that art is not to be confounded with sensual pleasure (utilitarian practicism), nor with the exercise of morality, then our Æsthetic also must be permitted to adorn itself with the title of Æsthetic of pure beauty. But if (as is often the case) something mystical and transcendent be meant by this, something unknown to our poor human world, or something spiritual and beatific, but not expressive, we must reply that while applauding the conception of a beauty free from all that is not the spiritual form of expression, we are unable to conceive a beauty superior to this and still less that it should be purified of expression, or severed from itself.

[Pg 87]

The doctrine of the sympathetic (very often animated and seconded in this by the capricious metaphysical and mystical Æsthetic, and by that blind traditionalism which assumes an intimate connection between things fortuitously treated together by the same authors in the same books), has introduced and rendered familiar in systems of Æsthetic a series of concepts a rapid mention of which suffices to justify our resolute expulsion of them from our own treatise.

Their catalogue is long, not to say interminable: tragic, comic, sublime, pathetic, moving, sad, ridiculous, melancholy, tragi-comic, humorous, majestic, dignified, serious, grave, imposing, noble, decorous, graceful, attractive, piquant, coquettish, idyllic, elegiac, cheerful, violent, ingenuous, cruel, base, horrible, disgusting, dreadful, nauseating; the fist can be increased at will.

Since that doctrine took the sympathetic as its special object, it was naturally unable to neglect any of the varieties of the sympathetic, any of the mixtures or gradations by means of which, starting from the sympathetic in its loftiest and most intense manifestation, its contrary, the antipathetic and repugnant, is finally reached. And since the sympathetic content was held to be the beautiful and the antipathetic the ugly, the varieties (tragic, comic, sublime, pathetic, etc.) constituted for that conception of Æsthetic the shades and gradations intervening between the beautiful and the ugly.

[Pg 88]

Having enumerated and defined as well as it could, the chief of these varieties, the Æsthetic of the sympathetic set itself the problem of the place to be assigned to the ugly in art. This problem is without meaning for us, who do not recognize any ugliness save the anti-æsthetic or inexpressive, which can never form part of the æsthetic fact, being, on the contrary, its antithesis. But in the doctrine which we are here criticizing the positing and discussion of that problem meant neither more nor less than the necessity of reconciling in some way the false and defective idea of art from which it started—art reduced to the representation of the pleasurable—with real art, which occupies a far wider field. Hence the artificial attempt to settle what examples of the ugly (antipathetic) could be admitted in artistic representation, and for what reasons, and in what ways.

The answer was: that the ugly is admissible, only when it can be overcome; an unconquerable ugliness, such as the disgusting or the nauseating, being altogether excluded. Further, that the duty of the ugly, when admitted in art, is to contribute towards heightening the effect of the beautiful (sympathetic), by producing a series of contrasts, from which the pleasurable may issue more efficacious and joy-giving. It is, indeed, a common observation that pleasure is more vividly felt when preceded by abstinence and suffering. Thus the ugly in art was looked upon as adapted for the service of the beautiful, a stimulant and condiment of æsthetic pleasure.

That special refinement of hedonistic theory which used to be pompously called the doctrine of the overcoming of the ugly falls with the Æsthetic of the sympathetic, and with it the enumeration and definition of the concepts mentioned above, which show themselves to be completely foreign to Æsthetic. For Æsthetic does not recognize the sympathetic or the antipathetic or their varieties, but only the spiritual activity of representation.

Nevertheless, the important place which, as we have said, those concepts have hitherto occupied in æsthetic treatises makes it advisable to supply a rather more[Pg 89] complete explanation as to their nature. What shall be their lot? Excluded from Æsthetic, in what other part of Philosophy will they be received?

In truth, nowhere; for all those concepts are without philosophical value. They are nothing but a series of classes, which can be fashioned in the most various ways and multiplied at pleasure, to which it is sought to reduce the infinite complications and shadings of the values and disvalues of life. Of these classes, some have an especially positive significance, like the beautiful, the sublime, the majestic, the solemn, the serious, the weighty, the noble, the elevated; others a significance chiefly negative, like the ugly, the painful, the horrible, the dreadful, the tremendous, the monstrous, the insipid, the extravagant; finally in others a mixed significance prevails, such as the comic, the tender, the melancholy, the humorous, the tragi-comic. The complications are infinite, because the individuations are infinite; hence it is not possible to construct the concepts, save in the arbitrary and approximate manner proper to the natural sciences, satisfied with making the best classification they can of that reality which they can neither exhaust by enumeration, nor understand and conquer speculatively. And since Psychology is the naturalistic science which undertakes to construct types and schemes of the spiritual life of man (a science whose merely empirical and descriptive character becomes more evident day by day), these concepts do not belong to Æsthetic, nor to Philosophy in general, but must simply be handed over to Psychology.

The case of those concepts is that of all other psychological constructions: no rigorous definitions of them are possible; and consequently they cannot be deduced from one another nor be connected in a system, though this has often been attempted, with great waste of time and without obtaining thereby any useful results. Nor can it be claimed as possible to obtain empirical definitions, universally acceptable as precise and true in the place of those philosophical definitions recognized as impossible. For no single definition of a single fact[Pg 90] can be given, but there are innumerable definitions of it, according to the cases and the purposes for which they are made; and it is clear that if there were only one which had the value of truth it would no longer be an empirical, but a rigorous and philosophical definition. And as a matter of fact whenever one of the terms to which we have referred has been employed (or indeed any other belonging to the same class), a new definition of it has been given at the same time, expressed or understood. Each one of those definitions differed somehow from the others, in some particular, however minute, and in its implied reference to some individual fact or other, which thus became a special object of attention and was raised to the position of a general type. Thus it is that not one of such definitions satisfies either the hearer or the constructor of it. For a moment later he finds himself before a new instance to which he recognizes that his definition is more or less insufficient, ill-adapted, and in need of retouching. So we must leave writers and speakers free to define the sublime or the comic, the tragic or the humorous, on every occasion as they please and as may suit the end they have in view. And if an empirical definition of universal validity be demanded, we can but submit this one:—The sublime (or comic, tragic, humorous, etc.) is everything that is or shall be so called by those who have employed or shall employ these words.

What is the sublime? The unexpected affirmation of an overwhelming moral force: that is one definition. But the other definition is equally good, which recognizes the sublime also where the force which affirms itself is certainly overwhelming, but immoral and destructive. Both remain vague and lack precision, until applied to a concrete case, to an example which makes clear what is meant by "overwhelming," and what by unexpected. They are quantitative concepts, but falsely quantitative, since there is no way of measuring them; they are at bottom metaphors, emphatic phrases, or logical tautologies. The humorous will be laughter amid tears, bitter laughter, the sudden spring from the comic to the tragic[Pg 91] and from the tragic to the comic, the romantic comic, the opposite of the sublime, war declared against every attempt at insincerity, compassion ashamed to weep, a laugh, not at the fact, but at the ideal itself; and what you will beside, according as it is wished to get a view of the physiognomy of this or that poet, of this or that poem, which, in its uniqueness, is its own definition, and though momentary and circumscribed, is alone adequate. The comic has been defined as the displeasure arising from the perception of a deformity immediately followed by a greater pleasure arising from the relaxation of our psychical forces, strained in expectation of a perception looked upon as important. While listening to a narrative, which might, for example, be a description of the magnificently heroic purpose of some individual, we anticipate in imagination the occurrence of a magnificent and heroic action, and we prepare for its reception by concentrating our psychic forces. All of a sudden, however, instead of the magnificent and heroic action, which the preliminaries and the tone of the narrative had led us to expect, there is an unexpected change to a small, mean, foolish action, which does not satisfy to our expectation. We have been deceived, and the recognition of the deceit brings with it an instant of displeasure. But this instant is as it were conquered by that which immediately follows: we are able to relax our strained attention, to free ourselves from the provision of accumulated psychic energy henceforth superfluous, to feel ourselves light and well. This is the pleasure of the comic, with its physiological equivalent of laughter. If the unpleasant fact that has appeared should painfully affect our interests, there would not be pleasure, laughter would be at once suffocated, the psychic energy would be strained and overstrained by other more weighty perceptions. If on the other hand such more weighty perceptions do not appear, if the whole loss be limited to a slight deception of our foresight, then the feeling of our psychic wealth that ensues affords ample compensation for this very slight disappointment. Such, expressed in a few words,[Pg 92] is one of the most accurate modern definitions of the comic. It boasts of containing in itself, justified or corrected and verified, the manifold attempts to define the comic, from Hellenic antiquity to our own day, from Plato's definition in the Philebus, and from Aristotle's, which is more explicit, and looks upon the comic as an ugliness without pain, to that of Hobbes, who replaced it in the feeling of individual superiority; of Kant, who saw in it the relaxation of a tension; or from the other proposals of those for whom it was the conflict between great and small, between the finite and the infinite and so on. But on close observation, the analysis and definition above given, although in appearance most elaborate and precise, yet enunciates characteristics which are applicable, not only to the comic, but to every spiritual process; such as the succession of painful and pleasing moments and the satisfaction arising from the consciousness of strength and of its free expansion. The differentiation is here given by quantitative determinations whose limits cannot be laid down. They therefore remain vague words, possessing some degree of meaning from their reference to this or that particular comic fact, and from the psychic disposition of qualities of the speaker. If such definitions be taken too seriously, there happens to them what Jean Paul Richter said of all the definitions of the comic: namely, that their sole merit is to be themselves comic and to produce in reality the fact which they vainly try to fix logically. And who will ever logically determine the dividing line between the comic and the non-comic, between laughter and smiles, between smiling and gravity, or cut the ever varying continuum into which life melts into clearly divided parts?

The facts, classified as far as possible in these psychological concepts, bear no relation to the artistic fact, beyond the general one, that all of them, in so far as they constitute the material of life, can become the object of artistic representation; and the other, an accidental relation, that æsthetic facts also may sometimes enter the processes described, such as the impression of the sublime aroused[Pg 93] by the work of a Titanic artist, such as Dante or Shakespeare, and of the comic produced by the attempts of a dauber or scribbler.

But here too the process is external to the æsthetic fact, to which is linked only the feeling of æsthetic value and disvalue, of the beautiful and of the ugly. Dante's Farinata is æsthetically beautiful and nothing but beautiful: if the force of will of that personage seem also sublime, or the expression that Dante gives him seem, by reason of his great genius, sublime in comparison with that of a less energetic poet, these are things altogether outside æsthetic consideration. We repeat again that this last pays attention always and only to the adequateness of the expression, that is to say, to beauty.

[Pg 94]

Æsthetic activity, distinct from the practical activity, is always accompanied by it in its manifestations. Hence its utilitarian or hedonistic side, and the pleasure and pain which are, as it were, the practical echo of æsthetic value and disvalue, of the beautiful and of the ugly. But this practical side of the æsthetic activity has in its turn a physical or psycho-physical accompaniment, which consists of sounds, tones, movements, combinations of lines and colours, and so on.

Does it really possess this side, or does it only seem to possess it, through the construction which we put on it in physical science, and the useful and arbitrary methods which we have already several times set in relief as proper to the empirical and abstract sciences? Our reply cannot be doubtful, that is, it must affirm to the second of the two hypotheses.

However, it will be better to leave this point in suspense, since it is not at present necessary to press this line of inquiry further. The mere mention suffices to secure our speaking (for reasons of simplicity and adhesion to ordinary language) of the physical element as something objective and existing, against leading to hasty conclusions as to the concepts of spirit and nature and their relation.

It is important, on the other hand, to make clear that as the existence of the hedonistic side in every spiritual activity has given rise to the confusion between the[Pg 95] æsthetic activity and the useful or pleasurable, so the existence of, or rather the possibility of constructing, this physical side, has caused the confusion between æsthetic expression and expression in a naturalistic sense; that is to say, between a spiritual fact and a mechanical and passive fact (not to say, between a concrete reality and an abstraction or fiction). In common speech, sometimes it is the words of the poet that are called expressions, the notes of the musician, or the figures of the painter; sometimes the blush which generally accompanies the feeling of shame, the pallor often due to fear, the grinding of the teeth proper to violent anger, the shining of the eyes and certain movements of the muscles of the mouth, which manifest cheerfulness. We also say that a certain degree of heat is the expression of fever, that the falling of the barometer is the expression of rain, and even that the height of the exchange expresses the depreciation of the paper currency of a State, or social discontent the approach of a revolution. One can well imagine what sort of scientific results would be attained by allowing oneself to be governed by verbal usage and classing together facts so widely different. But there is, in fact, an abyss between a man who is the prey of anger with all its natural manifestations and another man who expresses it æsthetically; between the appearance, the cries and contortions of some one grieving at the loss of a dear one and the words or song with which the same individual portrays his suffering at another time; between the grimace of emotion and the gesture of the actor. Darwin's book on the expression of the emotions in man and animals does not belong to Æsthetic; because there is nothing in common between the science of spiritual expression and a Semiotic, whether it be medical, meteorological, political, physiognomic, or chiromantic.

Expression in the naturalistic sense simply lacks expression in the spiritual sense, that is to say, the very character of activity and of spirituality, and therefore the bipartition into the poles of beauty and of ugliness.[Pg 96] It is nothing but a relation between cause and effect, fixed by the abstract intellect. The complete process of æsthetic production can be symbolized in four stages, which are: a, impressions; b, expression or spiritual æsthetic synthesis; c, hedonistic accompaniment, or pleasure of the beautiful (æsthetic pleasure); d, translation of the æsthetic fact into physical phenomena (sounds, tones, movements, combinations of lines and colours, etc.). Any one can see that the capital point, the only one that is properly speaking æsthetic and truly real, is in b, which is lacking to the merely naturalistic manifestation or construction also metaphorically called expression.

The expressive process is exhausted when these four stages have been passed through. It begins again with new impressions, a new æsthetic synthesis, and the accompaniments that belong to it.

Expressions or representations follow one another, the one drives out the other. Certainly, this passing away, this being driven out, is not a perishing, it is not total elimination: nothing that is born dies with that complete death which would be identical with never having been born. If all things pass away, nothing can die. Even the representations that we have forgotten persist somehow in our spirit, for without this we could not explain acquired habits and capacities. Indeed the strength of life lies in this apparent forgetting: one forgets what has been absorbed and what life has superseded.

But other representations are also powerful elements in the present processes of our spirit; and it is incumbent upon us not to forget them, or to be capable of recalling them when they are wanted. The will is always vigilant in this work of preservation, which aims at preserving (we may say) the greater, the more fundamental part of all our riches. But its vigilance does not always suffice. Memory, as we say, abandons or betrays us in different ways. For this very reason, the human spirit devises expedients which succour the weakness of memory and are its aids.

[Pg 97]

How these aids are possible we have been informed from what has been said. Expressions or representations are also practical facts, which are also called physical in so far as physics classifies and reduces them to types. Now it is clear that if we can succeed in making those practical or physical facts somehow permanent, it will always be possible (all other conditions remaining equal) on perceiving them to reproduce in ourselves the already produced expression or intuition.

If that be called the object or physical stimulus in which the practical concomitant acts, or (to use physical terms) in which the movements have been isolated and made in some sort permanent, and if that object or stimulus be designated by the letter e; the process of reproduction will take place in the following order: e, the physical stimulus; d-b, perception of physical facts (sounds, tones, mimetic, combinations of lines and colours, etc.), which is together the æsthetic synthesis, already produced; c, the hedonistic accompaniment, which is also reproduced.

And what else are those combinations of words called poetry, prose, poems, novels, romances, tragedies or comedies, but physical stimulants of reproduction (the stage e); what else are those combinations of sound called operas, symphonies, sonatas; or those combinations of lines and colours called pictures, statues, architecture? The spiritual energy of memory, with the assistance of the physical facts above mentioned, makes possible the preservation and the reproduction of the intuitions produced by man. The physiological organism and with it the memory become weakened; the monuments of art are destroyed, and lo, all that æsthetic wealth, the fruit of the labours of many generations, diminishes and rapidly disappears.

Monuments of art, the stimulants of æsthetic reproduction, are called beautiful things or physical beauty. This combination of words constitutes a verbal paradox, for the beautiful is not a physical fact; it does not belong to things, but to the activity of man, to spiritual energy.[Pg 98] But it is now clear through what transferences and associations, physical things and facts which are simply aids to the reproduction of the beautiful are finally called elliptically beautiful things and physical beauty. And now that we have explained this elliptical usage, we shall ourselves employ it without hesitation.

The intervention of "physical beauty" serves to explain another meaning of the words "content" and "form," as used by æstheticians. Some call "content" the internal fact or expression (for us, on the other hand, form), and "form" the marble, the colours, the rhythm, the sounds (for us the antithesis of form); thus looking upon the physical fact as the form, which may or may not be joined to the content. It also serves to explain another aspect of what is called æsthetic "ugliness." Somebody who has nothing definite to express may try to conceal his internal emptiness in a flood of words, in sounding verse, in deafening polyphony, in painting that dazzles the eye, or by heaping together great architectural masses which arrest and astonish us without conveying anything whatever. Ugliness, then, is the capricious, the charlatanesque; and, in reality, if practical caprice did not intervene in the theoretic function, there might be absence of beauty, but never the real presence of something deserving the adjective "ugly."

Physical beauty is usually divided into natural and artificial beauty. Thus we reach one of the facts which have given the greatest trouble to thinkers: natural beauty. These words often designate facts of merely practical pleasure. Any one who calls a landscape beautiful where the eye rests upon verdure, where the body moves briskly and the warm sun envelops and caresses the limbs, does not speak of anything æsthetic. But it is nevertheless indubitable that on other occasions the adjective "beautiful," applied to objects and scenes existing in nature, has a completely æsthetic signification.

It has been observed that in order to enjoy natural objects æsthetically, we must abstract from their external[Pg 99] and historical reality, and separate their simple semblance or appearance from existence; that if we contemplate a landscape with our head between our legs, so as to cancel our wonted relations with it, the landscape appears to us to be an ideal spectacle; that nature is beautiful only for him who contemplates her with the eye of the artist; that zoologists and botanists do not recognize beautiful animals and flowers; that natural beauty is discovered (and examples of discovery are the points of view, pointed out by men of taste and imagination, to which more or less æsthetic travellers and excursionists afterwards have recourse in pilgrimage, whence a kind of collective suggestion); that, without the aid of the imagination, no part of nature is beautiful, and that with such aid the same natural object or fact is, according to the disposition of the soul, now expressive, now insignificant, now expressive of one definite thing, now of another, sad or glad, sublime or ridiculous, sweet or laughable; finally, that a natural beauty which an artist would not to some extent correct, does not exist.

All these observations are just, and fully confirm the fact that natural beauty is simply a stimulus to æsthetic reproduction, which presupposes previous production. Without the previous æsthetic intuitions of the imagination, nature cannot awaken any at all. As regards natural beauty, man is like the mythical Narcissus at the fountain. Leopardi said that natural beauty is "rare, scattered, and fugitive": it is imperfect, equivocal, variable. Each refers the natural fact to the expression in his mind. One artist is thrown into transports by a smiling landscape, another by a rag-shop, another by the pretty face of a young girl, another by the squalid countenance of an old rascal. Perhaps the first will say that the rag-shop and the ugly face of the old rascal are repulsive; the second, that the smiling landscape and the face of the young girl are insipid. They may dispute for ever; but they will never agree, save when they are supplied with a sufficient dose of æsthetic knowledge to enable them to recognize that both are[Pg 100] right. Artificial beauty, created by man, supplies an aid that is far more ductile and efficacious.

In addition to these two classes, æstheticians also sometimes talk in their treatises of a mixed beauty. A mixture of what? Precisely of natural and artificial. Whoever fixes and externalizes, operates with natural data which he does not create but combines and transforms. In this sense, every artificial product is a mixture of nature and artifice; and there would be no occasion to speak of a mixed beauty, as of a special category. But it sometimes happens that combinations already given in nature can be used a great deal more than in others; as, for instance, when we design a beautiful garden and include in our design groups of trees or ponds already in place. On other occasions externalization is limited by the impossibility of producing certain effects artificially. Thus we can mix colouring matters, but we cannot create a powerful voice or a face and figure appropriate to this or that character in a play. We must therefore seek them among already existing things, and make use of them when found. When, therefore, we employ a great number of combinations already existing in nature, such as we should not be able to produce artificially if they did not exist, the resulting fact is called mixed beauty.

We must distinguish from artificial beauty those instruments of reproduction called writings, such as alphabets, musical notes, hieroglyphics, and all pseudolanguages, from the language of flowers and flags to the language of patches (so much in vogue in the society of the eighteenth century). Writings are not physical facts which arouse directly impressions answering to æsthetic expressions; they are simple indications of what must be done in order to produce such physical facts. A series of graphic signs serves to remind us of the movements which we must execute with our vocal apparatus in order to emit certain definite sounds. If, through practice, we become able to hear the words without opening our mouths and (what is much more difficult) to hear the sounds by running the eye along the stave, all this does[Pg 101] not alter in any way the nature of the writings, which are altogether different from direct physical beauty. No one calls the book which contains the Divine Comedy, or the score which contains Don Giovanni, beautiful in the same sense in which the block of marble which contains Michæl Angelo's Moses, or the piece of coloured wood which contains the Transfiguration, is metaphorically called beautiful. Both serve the reproduction of the beautiful, but the former by a far longer and more indirect route than the latter.

Another division of the beautiful, still found in treatises, is that into free and not free. By not-free beauties have been understood those objects which have to serve a double purpose, extra-æsthetic and æsthetic (stimulants of intuitions); and since it seems that the first purpose sets limits and barriers in the way of the second, the resulting beautiful object has been considered as not-free beauty.

Architectural works are especially cited; and just for this reason, architecture has often been excluded from the number of what are called the fine arts. A temple must above all things be for the use of a cult; a house must contain all the rooms needed for the convenience of life, and they must be arranged with a view to this convenience; a fortress must be a construction capable of resisting the attacks of given armies and the blows of given instruments of war. It is therefore concluded that the architect's field is restricted: he may embellish to some extent the temple, the house, the fortress; but he is bound by the object of those edifices, and he can only manifest that part of his vision of beauty which does not impair their extra-æsthetic but fundamental objects.

Other examples are taken from what is called art applied to industry. Plates, glasses, knives, guns and combs can be made beautiful; but it is held that their beauty must not be pushed so far as to prevent our eating from the plate, drinking from the glass, cutting with the knife, firing off the gun, or combing one's hair with the comb. The same is said of the art of typography: a[Pg 102] book should be beautiful, but not to the extent of being difficult or impossible to read.

In respect of all this we must observe in the first place that the extrinsic purpose is not necessarily, precisely because it is such, a limit or impediment to the other purpose of being a stimulus to æsthetic reproduction. It is therefore quite false to maintain that architecture, for example, is by its nature imperfect and not free, since it must also obey other practical purposes; in fact, the mere presence of fine works of architecture is enough to dispel any such illusion.

In the second place, not only are the two purposes not necessarily contradictory, but we must add that the artist always has the means of preventing this contradiction from arising. How? by simply making the destination of the object which serves a practical end enter as material into his æsthetic intuition and externalization. He will not need to add anything to the object, in order to make it the instrument of æsthetic intuitions: it will be so, if perfectly adapted to its practical purpose. Rustic dwellings and palaces, churches and barracks, swords and ploughs, are beautiful, not in so far as they are embellished and adorned, but in so far as they express their end. A garment is only beautiful because it is exactly suitable to a given person in given conditions. The sword bound to the side of the warrior Rinaldo by the amorous Armida was not beautiful: "so adorned that it may seem a useless ornament, not the free instrument of war," or it was beautiful, if you will, but to the eyes and imagination of the sorceress, who liked to see her lover equipped in that effeminate way. The æsthetic activity can always agree with the practical, because expression is truth.

It cannot however be denied that æsthetic contemplation sometimes hinders practical usage. For instance, it is a quite common experience to find certain new objects seem so well adapted to their purpose, and therefore so beautiful, that people occasionally feel scruples in maltreating them by passing from their contemplation to their use. It was for this reason that King Frederick[Pg 103] William of Prussia showed such repugnance to sending his magnificent grenadiers, so well adapted to war, into the mud and fire of battle, while his less æsthetic son, Frederick the Great, obtained from them excellent service.

It might be objected to the explanation of the physically beautiful as a simple aid to the reproduction of the internally beautiful, or expressions, that the artist creates his expressions by painting or by sculpturing, by writing or by composing, and that therefore the physically beautiful, instead of following, sometimes precedes the æsthetically beautiful. This would be a somewhat superficial mode of understanding the procedure of the artist, who never in reality makes a stroke with his brush without having previously seen it with his imagination; and if he has not yet seen it, he will make the stroke, not in order to externalize his expression (which does not yet exist), but as a kind of experiment and in order to have a point of departure for further meditation and internal concentration. The physical point of departure is not the physically beautiful instrument of reproduction, but a means that may be called pedagogic, like retiring into solitude, or the many other expedients frequently very strange, adopted by artists and scientists, who vary in these according to their various idiosyncrasies. The old æsthetician Baumgarten advised poets seeking inspiration to ride on horseback, to drink wine in moderation, and (provided they were chaste) to look at beautiful women.

[Pg 104]

We must mention a series of fallacious scientific doctrines which have arisen from the failure to understand the purely external relation between the æsthetic fact or artistic vision and the physical fact or instrument which aids in its reproduction, together with brief criticisms of them deduced from what has already been said.

That form of associationism which identifies the æsthetic fact with the association of two images finds support in such lack of apprehension. By what path has it been possible to arrive at such an error, so repugnant to our æsthetic consciousness, which is a consciousness of perfect unity, never of duality? Precisely because the physical and æsthetic facts have been considered separately, as two distinct images, which enter the spirit, the one drawn in by the other, first one and then the other. A picture has been divided into the image of the picture and the image of the meaning of the picture; a poem, into the image of the words and the image of the meaning of the words. But this dualism of images is non-existent: the physical fact does not enter the spirit as an image, but causes the reproduction of the image (the only image, which is the æsthetic fact), in so far as it blindly stimulates the psychic organism and produces the impression which answers to the æsthetic expression already produced.

The efforts of the associationists (the usurpers of to-day in the field of Æsthetic) to emerge from the difficulty, and to reaffirm in some way the unity which has been destroyed[Pg 105] by their principle of association, are highly instructive. Some maintain that the image recalled is unconscious; others, leaving unconsciousness alone, hold that, on the contrary, it is vague, vaporous, confused, thus reducing the force of the æsthetic fact to the weakness of bad memory. But the dilemma is inexorable: either keep association and give up unity, or keep unity and give up association. No third way out of the difficulty exists.

From the failure to analyse so-called natural beauty thoroughly and to recognize that it is simply an incident of æsthetic reproduction, and from having looked upon it, on the contrary, as given in nature, is derived all that portion of treatises upon Æsthetic entitled Beauty of Nature or Æsthetic Physics; sometimes even subdivided, save the mark, into æsthetic Mineralogy, Botany and Zoology. We do not wish to deny that such treatises contain many just observations, and are sometimes themselves works of art, in so far as they represent beautifully the imaginings and fancies or impressions of their authors. But we must affirm it to be scientifically false to ask oneself if the dog be beautiful and the ornithorhynchus ugly, the lily beautiful and the artichoke ugly. Indeed, the error is here double. On the one hand, æsthetic Physics falls back into the equivocation of the theory of artistic and literary kinds, of attempting to attach æsthetic determinations to the abstractions of our intellect; on the other, it fails to recognize, as we said, the true formation of so-called natural beauty, a formation which excludes even the possibility of the question as to whether some given individual animal, flower or man be beautiful or ugly. What is not produced by the æsthetic spirit, or cannot be referred to it, is neither beautiful nor ugly. The æsthetic process arises from the ideal connexions in which natural objects are placed.

The double error can be exemplified by the question as to the Beauty of the human body, upon which whole volumes have been written. Here we must before everything turn those who discuss this subject from the abstract toward the concrete, by asking: "What do you mean by[Pg 106] the human body, that of the male, the female, or the hermaphrodite?" Let us assume that they reply by dividing the inquiry into two distinct inquiries, as to male and female beauty (there really are writers who seriously discuss whether man or woman is the more beautiful); and let us continue: "Masculine or feminine beauty; but of what race of men—the white, the yellow or the black, or any others that may exist, according to the division you prefer?" Let us assume that they limit themselves to the white race, and drive home the argument: "To what sub-species of the white race?" And when we have restricted them gradually to one corner of the white world, going, let us say, from the Italian to the Tuscan, the Siennese, the Porta Camollia quarter, we will proceed: "Very good; but at what age of the human body, and in what condition and stage—that of the newborn babe, of the child, of the boy, of the adolescent, of the man of middle age, and so on? and of him who is at rest or of him who is at work, or of him who is occupied like Paul Potter's bull, or the Ganymede of Rembrandt?"

Having thus arrived, by successive reductions, at the individual omnimode determinatum, or rather at "this man here," pointed out with the finger, it will be easy to expose the other error, by recalling what we have said about the natural fact, which is now beautiful, now ugly, according to the point of view and to what is passing in the soul of the artist. If even the Gulf of Naples have its detractors, and if there be artists who declare it inexpressive, preferring the "gloomy firs," the "clouds and perpetual north winds," of northern seas; is it really possible that such relativity does not exist for the human body, source of the most varied suggestions?

The question of the beauty of geometrical figures is connected with æsthetic Physics. But if by geometrical figures be understood the concepts of geometry (the concepts of the triangle, the square, the cone), these are neither beautiful nor ugly, just because they are concepts. If, on the other hand, by such figures be understood bodies which possess definite geometrical forms, they will be[Pg 107] beautiful or ugly, like every natural fact, according to the ideal connexions in which they are placed. Some hold that those geometrical figures are beautiful which point upwards, since they give the suggestion of firmness and of power. We do not deny that this may be so. But it must not be denied on the other hand that those also may possess beauty which give the impression of instability and weakness, where they represent just the insecure and the feeble; and that in these last cases the firmness of the straight fine and the lightness of the cone or of the equilateral triangle would seem to be on the contrary elements of ugliness.

Certainly, such questions as to the beauty of nature and the beauty of geometry, like others analogous as to the historically beautiful and human beauty, seem less absurd in the Æsthetic of the sympathetic, which really means by the words "æsthetic beauty" the representation of the pleasing. But the claim to determine scientifically what are sympathetic contents and what are irremediably antipathetic is none the less erroneous, even in the sphere of that doctrine and after laying down those premises. One can only answer such questions by repeating with an infinitely long postscript the Sunt quos of the first ode of the first book of Horace, and the Havvi chi of Leopardi's letter to Carlo Pepoli. To each man his beautiful (= sympathetic), as to each man his fair one. Philography is not science.

The artist sometimes has naturally existing facts before him, in producing the artificial instrument, or physically beautiful. These are called his models: bodies, stuffs, flowers and so on. Let us run over the sketches, studies and notes of artists: Leonardo noted down in his pocket-book, when he was working on the Last Supper: "Giovannina, weird face, is at St. Catherine's, at the Hospital; Cristofano di Castiglione is at the Pietà, he has a fine head; Christ, Giovan Conte, of Cardinal Mortaro's suite." And so on. From this comes the illusion that the artist imitates nature, when it would perhaps be more exact to say that nature imitates the artist, and[Pg 108] obeys him. The illusion that art imitates nature has sometimes found ground and support in this illusion, as also in its variant, more easily maintained, which makes of art the idealizer of nature. This last theory presents the process out of its true order, which indeed is not merely upset but actually inverted; for the artist does not proceed from external reality, in order to modify it by approximating it to the ideal; he goes from the impression of external nature to expression, that is to say, his ideal, and from this passes to the natural fact, which he employs as instrument of reproduction of the ideal fact.

Another consequence of the confusion between the æsthetic fact and the physical fact is the theory of the elementary forms of the beautiful. If expression, if the beautiful, be indivisible, the physical fact on the contrary, in which it externalizes itself, can easily be divided and subdivided: for example, a painted surface, into lines and colours, groups and curves of lines, kinds of colours, and so on; a poem, into strophes, verses, feet, syllables; a piece of prose, into chapters, paragraphs, headings, periods, phrases, words and so on. The parts thus obtained are not æsthetic facts, but smaller physical facts, arbitrarily divided. If this path were followed and the confusion persisted in, we should end by concluding that the true elementary forms of the beautiful are atoms.

The æsthetic law, several times promulgated, that beauty must have bulk, could be invoked against the atoms. It cannot be the imperceptibility of the too small, or the inapprehensibility of the too large. But a greatness determined by perceptibility, not by measurement, implies a concept widely different from the mathematical. Indeed, what is called imperceptible and inapprehensible does not produce an impression, because it is not a real fact, but a concept: the demand for bulk in the beautiful is thus reduced to the actual presence of the physical fact, which serves for the reproduction of the beautiful.

Continuing the search for the physical laws or for the objective conditions of the beautiful, it has been asked: To what physical facts does the beautiful correspond? To[Pg 109] what the ugly? To what unions of tones, colours, sizes, mathematically determinable? Such inquiries are as if in Political Economy one were to seek for the laws of exchange in the physical nature of the objects exchanged. The persistent fruitlessness of the attempt should have given rise before long to some suspicion of its vanity. In our times, especially, necessity for an inductive Æsthetic has been often proclaimed, of an Æsthetic starting from below, proceeding like natural science and not jumping to its conclusions. Inductive? But Æsthetic has always been both inductive and deductive, like every philosophical science; induction and deduction cannot be separated, nor can they separately avail to characterize a true science. But the word "induction" was not pronounced here by chance. The intention was to imply that the æsthetic fact is really nothing but a physical fact, to be studied by the methods proper to the physical and natural sciences.

With such a presupposition and in such a faith did inductive Æsthetic or Æsthetic from below (what pride in this modesty!) begin its labours. It conscientiously began by making a collection of beautiful things, for example, a great number of envelopes of various shapes and sizes, and asked which of these give the impression of beauty and which of ugliness. As was to be expected, the inductive æstheticians speedily found themselves in a difficulty, for the same objects that appeared ugly in one aspect appeared beautiful in another. A coarse yellow envelope, which would be extremely ugly for the purpose of enclosing a love-letter, is just what is wanted for a writ served by process on stamped paper, which in its turn would look very bad, or seem at any rate an irony, enclosed in a square envelope of English paper. Such considerations of simple common sense should have sufficed to convince inductive æstheticians that the beautiful has no physical existence, and cause them to desist from their vain and ridiculous quest. But no: they had recourse to an expedient, as to which we should hardly like to say how far it belongs to the strict method of natural science. They sent their envelopes round[Pg 110] and opened a referendum, trying to settle in what beauty or ugliness consists by the votes of the majority.

We will not waste time over this subject, lest we should seem to be turning ourselves into tellers of comic tales rather than expositors of æsthetic science and of its problems. It is a matter of fact that the inductive æstheticians have not yet discovered one single law.

He who despairs of doctors is apt to abandon himself to charlatans. This has befallen those who have believed in the naturalistic laws of the beautiful. Artists sometimes adopt empirical canons, such as that of the proportions of the human body, or of the golden section, that is to say, of a line divided into two parts in such a manner that the less is to the greater as is the greater to the whole line (be : ac = ac : ab). Such canons easily become their superstitions, and they attribute to them the success of their works. Thus Michæl Angelo left as a precept to his disciple Marco del Pino da Siena that "he should always make a pyramidal serpentine figure multiplied by one two and three," a precept which did not enable Marco da Siena to emerge from that mediocrity which we can yet observe in many of his paintings that exist here in Naples. Others took Michæl Angelo's words as authority for the precept that serpentine undulating lines were the true lines of beauty. Whole volumes have been composed on these laws of beauty, on the golden section and on the undulating and serpentine lines. These should in our opinion be looked upon as the astrology of Æsthetic.

[Pg 111]

The fact of the production of physical beauty implies, as has already been remarked, a vigilant will, which persists in not allowing certain visions, intuitions or representations to be lost. Such a will must be able to act with the utmost rapidity and as it were instinctively, and may also need long and laborious deliberations. In any case, thus and thus only does the practical activity enter into relations with the æsthetic, that is to say, no longer as its simple accompaniment, but as a really distinct moment of it. We cannot will or not will our æsthetic vision: we can however will or not will to externalize it, or rather, to preserve and communicate to others, or not, the externalization produced.

This volitional fact of externalization is preceded by a complex of various kinds of knowledge. These are known as technique, like all knowledge which precedes a practical activity. Thus we talk of an artistic technique in the same metaphorical and elliptic manner that we talk of the physically beautiful, that is to say (in more precise language), knowledge at the service of the practical activity directed to producing stimuli to æsthetic reproduction. In place of employing so lengthy a phrase, we shall here avail ourselves of ordinary terminology, whose meaning we now understand.

The possibility of this technical knowledge, at the service of artistic reproduction, is what has led minds astray to imagine the existence of an æsthetic technique of internal expression, which is tantamount to saying, a[Pg 112] doctrine of the means of internal expression, a thing that is altogether inconceivable. And we know well the reason of its inconceivability; expression, considered in itself, is a primary theoretic activity, and as such precedes practice and intellectual knowledge which illumines practice and is independent alike of both. It aids for its part to illumine practice, but is not illuminated by it. Expression does not possess means, because it has not an end; it has intuitions of things, but it does not will and is therefore unanalysable into the abstract components of volition, means and end. Sometimes a certain writer is said to have invented a new technique of fiction or of drama, or a painter is said to have discovered a new technique of distributing light. The word is used here at hazard; because the so-called new technique is really that romance itself, or that new picture itself and nothing else. The distribution of light belongs to the vision of the picture itself; as the technique of a dramatist is his dramatic conception itself. On other occasions, the word "technique" is used to designate certain merits or defects in a work that is a failure; and it is euphemistically said that the conception is bad but the technique good, or that the conception is good but the technique bad.

On the other hand, when we talk of the different ways of painting in oils, or of etching, or of sculpturing in alabaster, then the word "technique" is in its place; but in such a case the adjective "artistic" is used metaphorically. And if a dramatic technique in the æsthetic sense be impossible, a theatrical technique of processes of externalization of certain particular æsthetic works is not impossible. When, for instance, women were introduced on the stage in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century, in place of men dressed as women, this was a true and real discovery in theatrical technique; such too was the perfecting in the following century of machines for the rapid changing of scenery by the impresarios of Venice.

The collection of technical knowledge at the service of artists desirous of externalizing their expressions, can[Pg 113] be divided into groups, which may be entitled theories of the arts. Thus arises a theory of Architecture, comprising mechanical laws, information relating to the weight or resistance of the materials of construction or of fortification, manuals relating to the method of mixing lime or stucco; a theory of Sculpture, containing advice as to the instruments to be used for sculpturing the various sorts of stone, for obtaining a successful mixture of bronze, for working with the chisel, for the accurate casting of the clay or plaster model, for keeping clay damp; a theory of Painting, on the various techniques of tempera, of oil-painting, of water-colour, of pastel, on the proportions of the human body, on the laws of perspective; a theory of Oratory, with precepts as to the method of producing, of exercising and of strengthening the voice, of attitude in impersonation and gesture; a theory of Music, on the combinations and fusions of tones and sounds; and so on. Such collections of precepts abound in all literatures. And since it is impossible to say what is useful and what useless to know, books of this sort become very often a sort of encyclopædias or catalogues of desiderata. Vitruvius, in his treatise on Architecture, claims for the architect a knowledge of letters, of drawing, of geometry, of arithmetic, of optic, of history, of natural and moral philosophy, of jurisprudence, of medicine, of astrology, of music, and so on. Everything is worth knowing: learn the art and have done with it.

It should be evident that such empirical collections are not reducible to science. They are composed of notions, taken from various sciences and disciplines, and their philosophical and scientific principles are to be found in the latter. To propose to construct a scientific theory of the different arts would be to wish to reduce to the single and homogeneous what is by nature multiple and heterogeneous; to wish to destroy the existence as a collection of what was put together precisely to form a collection. Were we to try to give scientific form to the manuals of the architect, the painter, or the musician, it is clear that nothing would remain in our hands but[Pg 114] the general principles of Mechanics, Optics, or Acoustics. And if we were to extract and isolate what may be scattered among them of properly artistic observations, to make of them a scientific system, then the sphere of the individual art would be abandoned and that of Æsthetic entered, for Æsthetic is always general Æsthetic, or rather it cannot be divided into general and special. This last case (that is, the attempt to furnish a technique which ends in composing an Æsthetic) arises when men possessing strong scientific instincts and a natural tendency to philosophy set themselves to work to produce such theories and technical manuals.

But the confusion between Physics and Æsthetic has attained to its highest degree, when æsthetic theories of particular arts are imagined, to answer such questions as: What are the limits of each art? What can be represented with colours, and what with sounds? What with simple monochromatic lines and what with touches of various colours? What with tones, and what with metres and rhythms? What are the limits between the figurative and the auditive arts, between painting and sculpture, poetry and music?

This, translated into scientific language, is tantamount to asking: What is the connexion between Acoustics and æsthetic expression? What between the latter and Optics?—and the like. Now, if there is no passage from the physical fact to the æsthetic, how could there be from the æsthetic to particular groups of physical facts, such as the phenomena of Optics or of Acoustics?

The so-called arts have no æsthetic limits, because, in order to have them, they would need to have also æsthetic existence in their particularity; and we have demonstrated the altogether empirical genesis of those partitions. Consequently, any attempt at an æsthetic classification of the arts is absurd. If they be without limits, they are not exactly determinable, and consequently cannot be philosophically classified. All the books dealing with classifications and systems of the arts could be burned without any loss whatever. (We say this with the[Pg 115] utmost respect to the writers who have expended their labours upon them.)

The impossibility of such systematizations finds something like a proof in the strange attempts made to carry it out. The first and most common partition is that into arts of hearing, sight, and imagination; as if eyes, ears, and imagination were on the same level and could be deduced from the same logical variable as fundamentum divisionis. Others have proposed the division into arts of space and arts of time, arts of rest; and movement; as if the concepts of space, time, rest and motion could determine special æsthetic forms and possess anything in common with art as such. Finally, others have amused themselves by dividing them into classic and romantic, or into oriental, classic, and romantic, thereby conferring the value of scientific concepts upon simple historical denominations, or falling into those rhetorical partitions of expressive forms, already criticized above; or into arts that can only be seen from one side, like painting, and arts that can be seen from all sides, like sculpture—and similar extravagances, which hold good neither in heaven nor on earth.

The theory of the limits of the arts was perhaps at the time when it was put forward a beneficial critical reaction against those who believed in the possibility of remodelling one expression into another, as the Iliad or Paradise Lost into a series of paintings, and indeed held a poem to be of greater or lesser value according as it could or could not be translated into pictures by a painter. But if the rebellion were reasonable and resulted in victory, this does not mean that the arguments employed and the systems constructed for the purpose were sound.

Another theory which is a corollary to that of the arts and their limits, falls with them; that of the union of the arts. Given particular arts, distinct and limited, it was asked: Which is the most powerful? Do we not obtain more powerful effects by uniting several? We know nothing of this: we know only that in each particular case certain given artistic intuitions have need of[Pg 116] definite physical means for their reproduction and other artistic intuitions of other means. We can obtain the effect of certain plays by simply reading them; others need declamation and scenic display: there are some artistic intuitions which need for their full externalization words, song, musical instruments, colours, statuary, architecture, actors; while others are quite complete in a slight outline made with the pen, or a few strokes of the pencil. But it is false to suppose that declamation and scenic effects and all the other things together that we have mentioned are more powerful than a simple reading or a simple outline of pen or pencil; because each of those facts or groups of facts has, so to say, a different purpose, and the power of the means cannot be compared when the purposes are different.

Finally, it is only from the point of view of a clear and rigorous distinction between the true and proper æsthetic activity and the practical activity of externalization that we can solve the complicated and confused questions as to the relations between art and utility and art and morality.

We have demonstrated above that art as art is independent both of utility and of morality, as also of all practical value. Without this independence, it would not be possible to speak of an intrinsic value of art, nor indeed to conceive an æsthetic science, which demands the autonomy of the æsthetic fact as its necessary condition.

But it would be erroneous to maintain that this independence of the vision or intuition or internal expression of the artist should be simply extended to the practical activity of externalization and communication which may or may not follow the æsthetic fact. If by art be understood the externalization of art, then utility and morality have a perfect right to enter into it; that is to say, the right to be master in one's own house.

Indeed we do not externalize and fix all the many expressions and intuitions which we form in our spirit; we do not declare our every thought in a loud voice, or[Pg 117] write it down, or print, or draw, or paint, or expose it to the public. We select from the crowd of intuitions which are formed or at least sketched within us; and the selection is ruled by the criteria of the economic disposition of life and of its moral direction. Therefore, when we have fixed an intuition, we have still to decide whether or no we should communicate it to others, and to whom, and when, and how; all which deliberations come equally under the utilitarian and ethical criterion.

Thus we find the concepts of selection, of the interesting, of morality, of an educational end, of popularity, etc., to some extent justified, although these can in no way be justified when imposed upon art as art, and we have ourselves rejected them in pure Æsthetic. Error always contains an element of truth. He who formulated those erroneous æsthetic propositions in reality had his eye on practical facts, which attach themselves externally to the æsthetic fact and belong to economic and moral fife.

It is well to advocate yet greater freedom in making known the means of æsthetic reproduction; we are of the same opinion, and leave projects for legislation and for legal action against immoral art, to hypocrites, to the ingenuous and to wasters of time. But the proclamation of this freedom, and the fixing of its limits, how wide soever they be, is always the task of morality. And it would in any case be out of place to invoke that highest principle, that fundamentum æsthetices, which is the independence of art, to deduce from it the guiltlessness of the artist who calculates like an immoral speculator upon the unhealthy tastes of his readers in the externalization of his imaginings, or the freedom of hawkers to sell obscene statuettes in the public squares. This last case is the affair of the police, as the first must be brought before the tribunal of the moral consciousness. The æsthetic judgement on the work of art has nothing to do with the morality of the artist as a practical man, or with the provisions to be taken that the things of art may not be diverted to evil ends alien to her nature, which is pure theoretic contemplation.

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When the entire æsthetic and externalizing process has been completed, when a beautiful expression has been produced and it has been fixed in a definite physical material, what is meant by judging ill To reproduce it in oneself, answer the critics of art, almost with one voice. Very good. Let us try thoroughly to understand this fact, and with that object in view, let us represent it schematically.

The individual A is seeking the expression of an impression which he feels or anticipates, but has not yet expressed. See him trying various words and phrases which may give the sought-for expression, that expression which must exist, but which he does not possess. He tries the combination m, but rejects it as unsuitable, inexpressive, incomplete, ugly: he tries the combination n, with a like result. He does not see at all, or does not see clearly. The expression still eludes him. After other vain attempts, during which he sometimes approaches, sometimes retreats from the mark at which he aims, all of a sudden (almost as though formed spontaneously of itself) he forms the sought-for expression, and lux facta est. He enjoys for an instant æsthetic pleasure or the pleasure of the beautiful. The ugly, with its correlative displeasure, was the æsthetic activity which had not succeeded in conquering the obstacle; the beautiful is the expressive activity which now displays itself triumphant.

We have taken this example from the domain of[Pg 119] speech, as being nearer and more accessible, and because we all talk, though we do not all draw or paint. Now if another individual, whom we shall call B, is to judge that expression and decide whether it be beautiful or ugly, he must of necessity place himself at A's point of view, and go through the whole process again, with the help of the physical sign supplied to him by A. If A has seen clearly, then B (who has placed himself at A's point of view) will also see clearly and will see this expression as beautiful. If A has not seen clearly, then B also will not see clearly, and will find the expression more or less ugly, just as A did.

It may be observed that we have not taken into consideration two other cases: that of A having a clear and B an obscure vision; and that of A having an obscure and B a clear vision. Strictly speaking, these two cases are impossible.

Expressive activity, just because it is activity, is not caprice, but spiritual necessity; it cannot solve a definite æsthetic problem save in one way, which is the right way. It will be objected to this plain statement that works which seem beautiful to the artists are afterwards found to be ugly by the critics; while other works with which the artists were discontented and held to be imperfect or failures are, on the contrary, held to be beautiful and perfect by the critics. But in this case, one of the two is wrong: either the critics or the artists, sometimes the artists, at other times the critics. Indeed, the producer of an expression does not always fully realize what is happening in his soul. Haste, vanity, want of reflexion, theoretic prejudices, make people say, and others sometimes almost believe, that works of ours are beautiful, which, if we really looked into ourselves, we should see to be ugly, as they are in reality. Thus poor Don Quixote, when he had reattached to his helmet as well as he could the vizor of cardboard—the vizor that had showed itself to possess but the feeblest force of resistance at the first encounter,—took good care not to test it again with a well-delivered sword-thrust, but simply declared and maintained it to be (says the author) por[Pg 120] celada finisima de encaxe. And in other cases, the same reasons, or opposite but analogous ones, trouble the consciousness of the artist, and cause him to value badly what he has successfully produced, or to strive to undo! and do again for the worse what he has done well in artistic spontaneity. An instance of this is Tasso and his passage from the Gerusalemme liberata to the Gerusalemme conquistata. In the same way, haste, laziness, want of reflexion, theoretic prejudices, personal sympathies or animosities, and other motives of a similar sort, sometimes cause the critics to proclaim ugly what is beautiful, and beautiful what is ugly. Were they to eliminate such disturbing elements, they would feel the work of art as it really is, and would not leave it to posterity, that more diligent and more dispassionate judge, to award the palm, or to do that justice which they have refused.

It is clear from the preceding theorem that the activity of judgement which criticizes and recognizes the beautiful is identical with what produces it. The only difference lies in the diversity of circumstances, since in the one case it is a question of æsthetic production, in the other of reproduction. The activity which judges is called taste; the productive activity is called genius: genius and taste are therefore substantially identical.

The common remark that the critic should possess something of the genius of the artist and that the artist should possess taste, gives a glimpse of this identity; or the remark that there exists an active (productive) and a passive (reproductive) taste. But it is also negated in other equally common remarks, as when people speak of taste without genius, or of genius without taste. These last observations are meaningless, unless they allude to quantitative or psychological differences, those being called geniuses without taste who produce works of art, inspired in their chief parts and neglected or defective in their secondary parts, and men of taste without genius, those who, while they succeed in obtaining certain isolated or secondary merits, do not possess sufficient power for[Pg 121] a great artistic synthesis. Analogous explanations can easily be given of other similar expressions. But to posit a substantial difference between genius and taste, between artistic production and reproduction, would render both communication and judgement alike inconceivable. How could we judge what remained external to us? How could that which is produced by a given activity be judged by a different activity? The critic may be a small genius, the artist a great one; the former may have the strength of ten, the latter of a hundred; the former, in order to reach a certain height, will have need of the assistance of the other; but the nature of both must remain the same. To judge Dante, we must raise ourselves to his level: let it be well understood that empirically we are not Dante, nor Dante we; but in that moment of contemplation and judgement, our spirit is one with that of the poet, and in that moment we and he are one thing. In this identity alone resides the possibility that our little souls can echo great souls, and grow great with them in the universality of the spirit.

Let us remark in passing that what has been said of the æsthetic judgement holds good equally for every other activity and for every other judgement; and that scientific, economic, and ethical criticism is effected in a like manner. To limit ourselves to this last, only if we place ourselves ideally in the same conditions in which he found himself who took a given resolution, can we form a judgement as to whether his decision were moral or immoral. An action would otherwise remain incomprehensible and therefore impossible to judge. A homicide may be a rascal or a hero: if this be, within limits, indifferent as regards the defence of society, which condemns both to the same punishment, it is not indifferent to one who wishes to distinguish and judge from the moral point of view, and we therefore cannot dispense with reconstructing the individual psychology of the homicide, in order to determine the true nature of his deed, not merely in its legal, but also in its moral aspect. In Ethics, a moral taste or tact is sometimes mentioned, answering to what is[Pg 122] generally called the moral consciousness, that is to say, to the activity of the good will itself.

The explanation above given of æsthetic judgement or reproduction both agrees with and condemns the absolutists and relativists, those who affirm and those who deny the absoluteness of taste.

In affirming that the beautiful can be judged, the absolutists are right; but the theory on which they found their affirmation is not tenable, because they conceive of the beautiful, that is, æsthetic value, as something placed outside the æsthetic activity, as a concept or a model which an artist realizes in his work, and of which the critic avails himself afterwards in judging the work itself. These concepts and models have no existence in art, for when proclaiming that every art can be judged only in itself and that it has its model in itself, they implicitly denied the existence of objective models of beauty, whether these are intellectual concepts, or ideas suspended in a metaphysical heaven.

In proclaiming this, their-adversaries, the relativists, are perfectly right, and effect an advance upon them. However, the initial rationality of their thesis in its turn becomes converted into a false theory. Repeating the ancient adage that there is no accounting for tastes, they believe that æsthetic expression is of the same nature as the pleasant and the unpleasant, which every one feels in his own way, and about which there is no dispute. But we know that the pleasant and the unpleasant are utilitarian, practical facts. Thus the relativists deny the specific character of the æsthetic fact, and again confound expression with impression, the theoretic with the practical.

The true solution lies in rejecting alike relativism or psychologism and false absolutism; and in recognizing that the criterion of taste is absolute, but absolute in a different way from that of the intellect, which expresses itself in ratiocination. The criterion of taste is absolute, with the intuitive absoluteness of the imagination. Thus any act of expressive activity, which is so really, is to be recognized as beautiful, and any fact as ugly in which[Pg 123] expressive activity and passivity are found engaged with one another in an unfinished struggle.

Between absolutists and relativists is a third class, which may be called that of the relative relativists. These affirm the existence of absolute values in other fields, such as Logic and Ethic, but deny it in the field of Æsthetic. To dispute about science or morals seems to them to be rational and justifiable, because science depends upon the universal, common to all men, and morality upon duty, which is also a law of human nature; but how dispute about art, which depends upon imagination? Not only, however, is the imaginative activity universal and no less inherent in human nature than the logical concept and practical duty; but there is a preliminary objection to the thesis in question. If the absoluteness of the imagination be denied, we must also deny intellectual or conceptual truth and implicitly morality. Does not morality presuppose logical distinctions? How could these be known, otherwise than in expressions and words, that is to say, in imaginative form? If the absoluteness of the imagination were removed, the life of the spirit would tremble to its foundations. One individual would no longer understand another, nor indeed his own self of a moment before, which is already another individual considered a moment after.

Nevertheless, variety of judgements is an indubitable fact. Men disagree as to logical, ethical, and economical valuations; and they disagree equally or even more as to the æsthetic. If certain reasons recorded by us above, such as haste, prejudices, passions, etc., may lessen the importance of this disagreement, they do not on that account annul it. When speaking of the stimuli of reproduction we have added a caution, for we said that reproduction takes place, if all the other conditions remain equal. Do they remain equal? Does the hypothesis correspond to reality?

It would appear not. In order to reproduce an impression several times by means of a suitable physical stimulus it is necessary that this stimulus be not changed, and that[Pg 124] the organism remain in the same psychical conditions as those in which was experienced the impression that it is desired to reproduce. Now it is a fact that the physical stimulus is continually changing, and in like manner the psychological conditions.

Oil-paintings grow dark, frescoes fade, statues lose noses, hands and legs, architecture becomes totally or partially a ruin, the tradition of the execution of a piece of music is lost, the text of a poem is corrupted by bad copyists or bad printing. These are obvious instances of I the changes which daily occur in objects or physical stimuli. As regards psychological conditions, we will not dwell upon the cases of deafness or blindness, that is to say, upon the loss of entire orders of psychical impressions; these cases are secondary and of less importance compared with the fundamental, daily, inevitable and perpetual changes of the society around us and of the internal conditions of our individual life. The phonetic manifestations or words and verses of Dante's Commedia must produce a very different impression on an Italian citizen engaged in the politics of the third Rome, from that experienced by a well-informed and intimate contemporary of the poet. The Madonna of Cimabue is still in the Church of Santa Maria Novella; but does she speak to the visitor of to-day as to the Florentines of the thirteenth century? Even though she were not also darkened by time, must we not suppose that the impression which she now produces is altogether different from that of former times? And even in the case of the same individual poet, will a poem composed by him in youth make the same impression upon him when he re-reads it in his old age, with psychic conditions altogether changed?

It is true that certain æstheticians have attempted a distinction between stimuli and stimuli, between natural and conventional signs. The former are held to have a constant effect upon all; the latter only upon a limited circle. In their belief, signs employed in painting are natural, those used in poetry conventional. But the difference between them is at the most only one of degree.[Pg 125] It has often been said that painting is a language understood by all, while with poetry it is otherwise. Here, for example, Leonardo found one of the prerogatives of his art, "which hath not need of interpreters of different tongues as have letters," and it pleases man and beast. He relates the anecdote of that portrait of the father of a family "which the little grandchildren were wont to caress while they were still in swaddling-clothes, and the dogs and cats of the house in like manner." But other anecdotes, such as those of the savages who took the portrait of a soldier for a boat, or considered the portrait of a man on horseback to be furnished with only one leg, are apt to shake one's faith in the understanding of painting by sucklings, dogs and cats. Fortunately, no arduous researches are necessary to convince oneself that pictures, poetry and all works of art only produce effects upon souls prepared to receive them. Natural signs do not exist; because all are equally conventional, or, to speak with greater exactness, historically conditioned.

Granting this, how are we to succeed in causing the expression to be reproduced by means of the physical object? How obtain the same effect, when the conditions are no longer the same? Would it not, rather, seem necessary to conclude that expressions cannot be reproduced, despite the physical instruments made for the purpose, and that what is called reproduction consists in ever new expressions? Such would indeed be the conclusion if the varieties of physical and psychical conditions were intrinsically insurmountable. But since the insuperability has none of the characteristics of necessity we must on the contrary conclude that reproduction always occurs when we can replace ourselves in the conditions in which the stimulus (physical beauty) was produced.

Not only can we replace ourselves in these conditions as an abstract possibility, but as a matter of fact we do so continually. Individual life, which is communion with ourselves (with our past), and social life, which is communion with our like, would not otherwise be possible.

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As regards the physical object, palæographers and philologists, who restore to texts their original physiognomy, restorers of pictures and of statues and other industrious toilers strive precisely to preserve or to restore to the physical object all its primitive energy. These efforts are certainly not always successful, or are not completely successful, for it is never or hardly ever possible to obtain a restoration complete in its smallest details. But the insurmountable is here only present accidentally and must not lead us to overlook the successes which actually are achieved.

Historical interpretation labours for its part to reintegrate in us the psychological conditions which have changed in the course of history. It revives the dead, completes the fragmentary, and enables us to see a work of art (a physical object) as its author saw it in the moment of production.

A condition of this historical labour is tradition, with the help of which it is possible to collect the scattered rays and concentrate them in one focus. With the help of memory we surround the physical stimulus with all the facts among which it arose; and thus we enable it to act upon us as it acted upon him who produced it.

Where the tradition is broken, interpretation is arrested; in this case, the products of the past remain silent for us. Thus the expressions contained in the Etruscan or Mexican inscriptions are unattainable; thus we still hear discussions among ethnographers as to whether certain products of the art of savages are pictures or writings; thus archæologists and prehistorians are not always able to establish with certainty whether the figures found on the pottery of a certain region, and on other instruments employed, are of a religious or profane nature. But the arrest of interpretation, as that of restoration, is never a definitely insurmountable barrier; and the daily discoveries of new historical sources and of new methods of better exploiting the old, which we may hope to see ever improving, link up again broken traditions.

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We do not wish to deny that erroneous historical interpretation sometimes produces what may be called palimpsests, new expressions imposed upon the ancient, artistic fancies instead of historical reproductions. The so-called "fascination of the past" depends in part upon these expressions of ours, which we weave upon the historical. Thus has been discovered in Greek plastic art the calm and serene intuition of life of those peoples, who nevertheless felt the universal sorrow so poignantly; thus "the terror of the year 1000" has recently been discerned on the faces of the Byzantine saints, a terror which is a misunderstanding, or an artificial legend invented later by men of learning. But historical criticism tends precisely to circumscribe fancies and to establish exactly the point of view from which we must look.

By means of the above process we live in communication with other men of the present and of the past; and we must not conclude because we sometimes, and indeed often, meet with an unknown or an ill-known, that therefore, when we believe we are engaged in a dialogue, we are always speaking a monologue; or that we are unable even to repeat the monologue which we formerly held with ourselves.

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This brief exposition of the method by which is obtained the reintegration of the original conditions in which the work of art was produced, and consequently reproduction and judgement are made possible, shows how important is the function fulfilled by historical research in relation to artistic and literary works which is what is usually called historical criticism or method in literature and art.

Without tradition and historical criticism the enjoyment of all or nearly all the works of art produced by humanity would be irrevocably lost: we should be little more than animals, immersed in the present alone, or in the most recent past. It is fatuous to despise and laugh at one who reconstitutes an authentic text, explains the sense of forgotten words and customs, investigates the conditions in which an artist lived, and accomplishes all those labours which revive the qualities and the original colouring of works of art.

Sometimes a depreciatory or negative judgement is passed upon historical research because of the presumed or proved inability of such researches, in many cases, to give us a true understanding of works of art. But it must be observed, in the first place, that historical research does not only fulfil the task of helping to reproduce and judge artistic works: the biography of a writer or of an artist, for example, and the study of the customs of a period, have an interest of their own, that is to say, extraneous to the history of art, but not to other forms of historiography. If allusion be made to[Pg 129] those researches which do not appear to have interest of any kind, nor to fulfil any purpose, it must be replied that the historical student must often reconcile himself to the useful but inglorious function of a collector of facts. These facts remain for the time being formless, incoherent and meaningless, but they are preserves or mines for the historian of the future and for whosoever may afterwards want them for any purpose. In the same way in a library, books which nobody asks for are placed on the shelves and catalogued, because they may be asked for at some time or other. Certainly, just as an intelligent librarian gives the preference to the acquisition and cataloguing of those books which he foresees may be of more or better service, so intelligent students possess an instinct as to what is or may more probably be of use among the material of facts which they are examining; while others less well endowed, less intelligent or more hasty in producing, accumulate useless rubbish, refuse and sweepings, and lose themselves in details and petty discussions. But this appertains to the economy of research, and does not concern us. It concerns at most the master who selects the subjects, the publisher who pays for the printing, and the critic who is called upon to praise or to blame the research workers.

On the other hand, it is clear that historical research directed to illuminate a work of art does not alone suffice to bring it to birth in our spirit and place us in a position to judge it, but presupposes taste, that is to say, an alert and cultivated imagination. The greatest historical erudition may accompany a gross or otherwise defective taste, a slow imagination, or, as they say, a cold hard heart closed to art. Which is the lesser evil, great erudition with defective taste, or natural taste and much ignorance? The question has often been asked, and perhaps it will be best to deny that it has any meaning, because one cannot tell which of two evils is the less, or what exactly that means. The merely learned man never succeeds in entering into direct communion with[Pg 130] great spirits; he keeps wandering for ever about the outer courts, the staircases and antechambers of their palaces; but the gifted ignoramus either passes by masterpieces to him inaccessible, or instead of understanding works of art as they really are, invents others with his fancy. Now, the labour of the former may at least serve to enlighten others; but the genius of the latter remains altogether sterile in relation to knowledge. How then can we in a certain respect fail to prefer the conscientious learned man to the inconclusive though gifted man, who is not really gifted, if he resign himself and in so far as he resigns himself, to his inconclusiveness?

We must accurately distinguish the history of art and literature from those historical labours where works of art are used, but for extraneous purposes (such as biography, civil, religious and political history, etc.), and also from historical erudition directed to the preparation of the æsthetic synthesis of reproduction.

The difference of the first two is obvious. The history of art and literature has the works of art themselves as its principal subject; those other labours invoke and interrogate works of art, but only as witnesses from whom to discover the truth of facts which are not æsthetic. The second difference to which we have referred may seem less profound. It is, however, very great. Erudition directed to illuminate the understanding of works of art aims simply at calling into existence a certain internal fact, an æsthetic reproduction. Artistic and literary history, on the other hand, does not appear until after such reproduction has been obtained. It implies, therefore, a further stage of labour.

Like all other history, its object is to record precisely such facts as have really taken place, in this case artistic and literary facts. A man who, after having acquired the requisite historical erudition, reproduces in himself and tastes a work of art, may remain simply a man of taste, or at the most express his own feeling with an exclamation of praise or condemnation. This does not[Pg 131] suffice for the making of a historian of literature and art. Something else is needed, namely, that a new mental operation succeed in him the simple reproduction. This new operation is in its turn an expression: the expression of the reproduction; the historical description, exposition or representation. There is this difference, then, between the man of taste and the historian: the first merely reproduces in his spirit the work of art; the second, after having reproduced it, represents it historically, or applies those categories by which, as we know, history is differentiated from pure art. Artistic and literary history is therefore a historical work of art founded upon one or more works of art.

The name "artistic" or "literary" critic is used in various senses: sometimes it is applied to the scholar who devotes his services to literature; sometimes to the historian who reveals the works of art of the past in their reality; more often to both. By critic is sometimes understood in a more restricted sense he who judges and describes contemporary literary works, and by historian, he who treats of those less recent. These are linguistic uses and empirical distinctions, which may be neglected; because the true difference lies between the scholar, the man of taste and the historian of art. These words designate three successive stages of work, each one independent relatively to the one that follows, but not to that which precedes. As we have seen, a man may be a mere scholar, and possess little capacity for understanding works of art; he may even both be learned and possess taste, yet be unable to portray them by writing a page of artistic and literary history. But the true and complete historian, while containing in himself both the scholar and the man of taste as necessary pre-requisites, must add to their qualities the gift of historical comprehension and representation.

The theory of artistic and literary historical method presents problems and difficulties, some common to the theory of historical method in general, others peculiar to it, because derived from the concept of art itself.

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History is commonly divided into human history, natural history, and the mixture of both. Without! examining here the question of the solidity of this distinction, it is clear that artistic and literary history belongs in any case to the first, since it concerns a spiritual activity, that is to say, an activity proper to man. And since this activity is its subject, the absurdity of propounding the historical problem of the origin of art becomes at once evident. We should note that by this formula many different things have in turn been included on many different occasions. Origin has often meant nature or character of the artistic fact, in which case an attempt was made to deal with a real scientific or philosophic problem, the very problem in fact which our treatise has attempted to solve. At other times, by origin has been understood the ideal genesis, the search for the reason of art, the deduction of the artistic fact from a first principle containing in itself both spirit and nature. This is also a philosophical problem, complementary to the preceding, coinciding indeed with it, although it has sometimes been strangely interpreted and solved by means of an arbitrary and semi-imaginary metaphysic. But when the object was to discover further exactly in what way the artistic function was historically formed, the result has been the absurdity which we have mentioned. If expression be the first form of consciousness, how can we look for the historical origin of what is not a product of nature and is presupposed by human history? How can we assign a historical genesis to a thing which is a category by means of which all historical processes and facts are understood? The absurdity has arisen from the comparison with human institutions, which have been formed in the course of history, and have disappeared or may disappear in its course. Between the æsthetic fact and a human institution (such as monogamic marriage or the fief) there exists a difference comparable with that between simple and compound bodies in chemistry. It is impossible to indicate the formation of the former, otherwise they would not be[Pg 133] simple, and if this be discovered, they cease to be simple and become compound.

The problem of the origin of art, historically understood, is only justified when it is proposed to investigate, not the formation of the artistic category, but where and when art has appeared for the first time (appeared, that is to say, in a striking manner), at what point or in what region of the globe and at what point or epoch of its history; when, that is to say, not the origin of art, but its earliest or primitive history is the object of research. This problem forms one with that of the appearance of human civilization on the earth. Data for its solution are certainly wanting, but there yet remains the abstract possibility of a solution, and certainly tentative and hypothetical solutions abound.

Every representation of human history has the concept of progress as foundation. But by progress must not be understood the imaginary law of progress which is supposed to lead the generations of man with irresistible force to some unknown destiny, according to a providential plan which we can divine and then understand logically. A supposed law of this sort is the negation of history itself, of that accidentality, that empiricity, that contingency, which distinguish concrete fact from abstraction. And for the same reason, progress has nothing to do with the so-called law of evolution, which, if it mean that reality evolves (and it is only reality in so far as it evolves or becomes), cannot be called a law, and if it be given as a law, becomes identical with the law of progress in the sense just described. The progress of which we speak here is nothing but the very concept of human activity, which, working upon the material supplied to it by nature, conquers its obstacles and bends it to its own ends.

Such conception of progress, that is to say, of human activity applied to a given material, is the point of view of the historian of humanity. No one but a mere collector of unrelated facts, a mere antiquary or inconsequent annalist, can put together the smallest narrative of[Pg 134] human doings unless he have a determined point of view, that is to say, a personal conviction of his own regarding the facts whose history he has undertaken to relate. No one can start from the confused and discordant mass of crude facts and arrive at the historical work of art save by means of this apperception, which makes it possible to carve a definite representation in that rough and formless mass. The historian of a practical action should know what is economy and what is morality; the historian of mathematics, what is mathematics; the historian of botany, what is botany; the historian of philosophy, what is philosophy. If he does not really know these things, he must at least have the illusion of knowing them; otherwise he will not even be able to delude himself into believing that he is writing history.

We cannot here expand the demonstration of the necessity and inevitability of this subjective criterion in every narrative of human affairs (which is compatible with the utmost objectivity, impartiality and scrupulousness in dealing with data of fact and indeed forms a constitutive element in these virtues), in every narrative of human doings and happenings. It suffices to read any book of history to discover at once the point of view of the author, if he be a historian worthy of the name and know his own business. There are liberal and reactionary, rationalist and catholic historians, who deal with political or social history; for the history of philosophy there are metaphysical, empirical, sceptical, idealist and spiritualist historians. Purely historical historians do not and cannot exist. Were Thucydides and Polybius, Livy and Tacitus, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Giannone and Voltaire, wholly without moral and political views; and, in our time, was Guizot or Thiers, Macaulay or Balbo, Ranke or Mommsen? And in the history of philosophy, from Hegel, who was the first to raise it to a great height, to Ritter, Zeller, Cousin, Lewes and our Spaventa, was there one who did not possess his conception of progress and his criterion of judgement? Is there one single work of any value on the history of[Pg 135] Æsthetic which has not been written from this or that point of view, with this or that bias (Hegelian or Herbartian), from a sensationalist or from an eclectic or some other point of view? If the historian is to escape from the inevitable necessity of taking a side, he must become a political or scientific eunuch; and history is not an occupation for eunuchs. Such would at most be of use in compiling those great tomes of not useless erudition, elumbis atque fracta, which are called, not without reason, monkish.

If, then, a concept of progress, a point of view, a criterion, be inevitable, the best to be done is not to try and escape from it, but to obtain the best possible. Every one tends to this end when he forms his own convictions, seriously and laboriously. Historians who profess to wish to interrogate the facts without adding anything of their own to them are not to be trusted. This is at best the result of ingenuousness and illusion on their part: they will always add something of their own, if they be truly historians, even without knowing it, or they will only believe that they have avoided doing so because they have conveyed it only by hints, which is the most insinuating, penetrative and effective of methods.

Artistic and literary history cannot dispense with the criterion of progress any more easily than other history. We cannot show what a given work of art is, save by proceeding from a conception of art, in order to fix the artistic problem which the author of such work of art had to solve, and by determining whether or no he has solved it, or by how much and in what way he has failed to do so. But it is important to note that the criterion of progress assumes a different form in artistic and literary history to that which it assumes (or is believed to assume) in the history of science.

It is customary to represent the whole history of knowledge by one single line of progress and regress. Science is the universal, and its problems are arranged in one single vast system or comprehensive problem.[Pg 136] All thinkers labour upon the same problem as to the nature of reality and of knowledge: contemplative Indians and Greek philosophers, Christians and Mohammedans, bare heads and turbaned heads, wigged heads and college-capped heads (as Heine said); and future generations will weary themselves with it, as ours has done. It would take too long to inquire here if this be true or not of science. But it is certainly not true of art; art is intuition, and intuition is individuality, and individuality does not repeat itself. To conceive of the history of the artistic production of the human race as developed along a single line of progress and regress would therefore be altogether erroneous.

At the most, and working to some extent with generalizations and abstractions, it may be asserted that the history of æsthetic productions shows progressive cycles, but each cycle with its own problem and each progressive only in respect to that problem. When many are at work in a general way upon the same subject, without succeeding in giving to it the suitable form, yet drawing always more near to it, there is said to be progress, and when appears the man who gives it definite form, the cycle is said to be complete, and progress is ended. A typical example of this would here be the progress in the elaboration of the mode of using the subject-matter of chivalry, during the Italian Renaissance, from Pulci to Ariosto (using this as an example and excusing excessive simplification). Nothing but repetition and imitation, diminution or exaggeration, a spoiling of what had already been done, in short decadence could be the result of employing that same material after Ariosto. The epigoni of Ariosto prove this. Progress begins with the beginning of a new cycle. Cervantes, with his more open and conscious irony, is an instance of this. In what did the general decadence of Italian literature at the end of the sixteenth century consist? Simply in having nothing more to say and in repeating and exaggerating motives already discovered. If the Italians of this period had even been able to express their own decadence, they would not[Pg 137] have been altogether failures, but would have anticipated the literary movement of the Risorgimento. Where the matter is not the same, a progressive cycle does not exist. Shakespeare does not represent an advance on Dante, nor Goethe upon Shakespeare. Dante, however, represents an advance on the visionaries of the Middle Ages, Shakespeare on the Elizabethan dramatists, Goethe, with Werther and the first part of Faust, on the writers of the Sturm und Drang period. This mode of presenting the history of poetry and art contains, however, as we have remarked, something of the abstract, of the merely practical, and is without strict philosophical value. Not only is the art of savages not inferior, as art, to that of civilized peoples, if it be correlative to the impressions of the savage; but every individual, indeed every moment of the spiritual life of an individual, has its artistic world; none of these worlds can be compared with any other in respect of artistic value.

Many have sinned and continue to sin against this special form of the criterion of progress in artistic and literary history. Some, for instance, talk of the infancy of Italian art in Giotto, and of its maturity in Raphæl or in Titian; as though Giotto were not complete and absolutely perfect, granted the material of feeling with which his mind was furnished. He was certainly incapable of drawing a figure like Raphæl, or of colouring it like Titian; but was Raphæl or Titian capable of creating the Marriage of Saint Francis with Poverty or the Death of Saint Francis? The spirit of Giotto had not felt the attraction of the body beautiful, which the Renaissance studied and raised to a place of honour; the spirits of Raphæl and of Titian were no longer interested in certain movements of ardour and of tenderness with which the man of the fourteenth century was in love. How, then, can a comparison be made, where there is no comparative term?

The celebrated divisions of the history of art into an oriental period, representing a lack of equilibrium between idea and form, the latter dominating, a classical[Pg 138] representing an equilibrium between idea and form, a romantic representing a new lack of equilibrium between idea and form, the former dominating, suffer from the same defect. The same is true of the division into oriental art, representing imperfection of form; classical, perfection of form; romantic or modern, perfection of content and of form. Thus classic and romantic have also received, among their many other meanings, that of progressive or regressive periods, in respect to the realization of some alleged artistic ideal of all humanity.

There is no such thing, then, as an æsthetic progress of humanity. However, by æsthetic progress is sometimes meant, not what the two words coupled together really signify, but the ever-increasing accumulation of our historical knowledge, which makes us able to sympathize with all the artistic products of all peoples and of all times, or, as they say, makes our taste more catholic. The difference appears very great if the eighteenth century, so incapable of escaping from itself, be compared with our own time, which enjoys alike Greek and Roman art, now better understood, Byzantine, mediæval, Arabic and Renaissance art, the art of the Cinquecento, baroque art, and the art of the eighteenth century. Egyptian, Babylonian, Etruscan, and even prehistoric art are more profoundly studied every day. Certainly, the difference between the savage and civilized man does not lie in the human faculties. The savage has speech, intellect, religion and morality in common with civilized man, and is a complete man. The only difference lies in this, that civilized man penetrates and dominates a larger portion of the universe with his theoretic and practical activity. We cannot claim to be more spiritually alert than, for example, the contemporaries of Pericles; but no one can deny that we are richer than they—rich with their riches and with those of how many other peoples and generations besides our own?

By æsthetic progress is also meant, in another sense, which is also improper, the greater abundance of artistic intuitions and the smaller number of imperfect or inferior[Pg 139] works which one epoch produces in respect to another. Thus it may be said that there was æsthetic progress, an artistic awakening in Italy, at the end of the thirteenth or of the fifteenth century.

Finally, æsthetic progress is talked of in a third sense, with an eye to the refinement and complications of soul-states exhibited in the works of art of the most civilized peoples, as compared with those of less civilized peoples, barbarians and savages. But in this case the progress is of the comprehensive psycho-social conditions, not of the artistic activity, to which the material is indifferent.

These are the most important points to note concerning the method of artistic and literary history.

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A glance over the path traversed will show that we have completed the entire programme of our treatise. We have studied the nature of intuitive or expressive knowledge, which is the æsthetic or artistic fact (I. and II.), and described the other form of knowledge, the intellectual, and the successive complications of these forms (III.); it thus became possible for us to criticize all erroneous æsthetic theories arising from the confusion between the various forms and from the illicit transference of the characteristics of one form to another (IV.), noting at the same time the opposite errors to be found in the theory of intellectual knowledge and of historiography (V.). Passing on to examine the relations between the æsthetic activity and the other activities of the spirit, no longer theoretic but practical, we indicated the true character of the practical activity and the place which it occupies in respect to the theoretic activity: hence the criticism of the intrusion into æsthetic theory of practical concepts (VI.); we have distinguished the two forms of the practical activity, as economic and ethical (VII.), reaching the conclusion that there are no other forms of the spirit beyond the four which we have analyzed; hence (VIII.) the criticism of every mystical or imaginative Æsthetic. And since there are no other spiritual forms co-ordinate with these, so there are no original subdivisions of the four established, and in particular of Æsthetic. From this arises the impossibility[Pg 141] of classes of expressions and the criticism of Rhetoric, that is, of ornate expression distinct from simple expression, and of other similar distinctions and subdistinctions (IX.) But by the law of the unity of the spirit, the æsthetic fact is also a practical fact, and as such, occasions pleasure and pain. This led us to study f the feelings of value in general, and those of æsthetic value or of the beautiful in particular (X.), to criticize æsthetic hedonism in all its various manifestations and complications (XI.), and to expel from the system of Æsthetic the long series of psychological concepts which had been introduced into it (XII.). Proceeding from æsthetic production to the facts of reproduction, we began by investigating the external fixing of the æsthetic expression, for the purpose of reproduction. This is called the physically beautiful, whether natural or artificial (XIII.). We derived from this distinction the criticism of the errors which arise from confounding the physical with the æsthetic side of facts (XIV.). We determined the meaning of artistic technique, or that technique which is at the service of reproduction, thus criticizing the divisions, limits and classifications of the individual arts, and establishing the relations of art, economy and morality (XV.). Since the existence of physical objects does not suffice to stimulate æsthetic reproduction to the full, and since, in order to obtain it, we must recall the conditions in which the stimulus first operated, we have also studied the function of historical erudition, directed toward re-establishing the communication between the imagination and the works of the past, and to serve as the basis of the æsthetic judgement (XVI.). We have concluded our treatise by showing how the reproduction thus obtained is afterwards elaborated by the categories of thought, that is to say, by an examination of the method of literary and artistic history (XVII.).

The æsthetic fact has in short been considered both in itself and in its relations with the other spiritual activities, with the feelings of pleasure and pain, with what are called[Pg 142] physical facts, with memory and with historical treatment. It has passed before us as subject until it became object, that is to say, from the moment of its birth until it becomes gradually changed for the spirit into subject-matter of history.

Our treatise may appear to be somewhat meagre when externally compared with the great volumes usually dedicated to Æsthetic. But it will not seem so when we perceive that those volumes are nine-tenths full of matter that is not pertinent, such as definitions, psychological or metaphysical, of pseudo-æsthetic concepts (the sublime, the comic, the tragic, the humorous, etc.), or of the exposition of the supposed Zoology, Botany and Mineralogy of Æsthetic, and of universal history æsthetically judged; that the whole history of concrete art and literature has also been dragged into those Æsthetics and generally mangled, and that they contain judgements upon Homer and Dante, Ariosto and Shakespeare, Beethoven and Rossini, Michæl Angelo and Raphæl. When all this has been deducted from them, we flatter ourselves that our treatise will no longer be held to be too meagre, but, on the contrary, far richer than ordinary treatises, which either omit altogether, or hardly touch at all, the greater part of the difficult problems proper to Æsthetic which we have felt it to be our duty to study.

But although Æsthetic as science of expression has been studied by us in its every aspect, it remains to justify the sub-title which we have added to the title of our book, General Linguistic, to state and make clear the thesis that the science of art and that of language, Æsthetic and Linguistic, conceived as true sciences, are not two distinct things, but one thing only. Not that there is a special Linguistic; but the much-sought-for science of language, general Linguistic, in so far as what it contains is reducible to philosophy, is nothing but Æsthetic. Whoever studies general Linguistic, that is to say, philosophical Linguistic, studies æsthetic problems, and vice versa. Philosophy of language and philosophy of art are the same thing.

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Were Linguistic really a different science from Æsthetic it would not have for its object expression, which is the essentially æsthetic fact; that is to say, we must deny that language is expression. But an emission of sounds which expresses nothing is not language. Language is sound articulated, circumscribed and organized for the purposes of expression. If, on the other hand, linguistic were a special science in respect to Æsthetic, it would necessarily have for its object a special class of expressions. But the non-existence of classes of expression is a point which we have already demonstrated.

The problems which Linguistic tries to solve, and the errors in which Linguistic has been and is involved, are the same that respectively occupy and complicate Æsthetic. If it be not always easy, it is on the other hand always possible to reduce the philosophic questions of Linguistic to their æsthetic formula.

The disputes themselves as to the nature of the one find their parallel in those as to the nature of the other. Thus it has been disputed whether Linguistic be a historical or a scientific discipline, and, the scientific having been distinguished from the historical, it has been asked whether it belong to the order of the natural or of the psychological sciences, understanding by these latter empirical Psychology as well as the Sciences of the spirit. The same has happened with Æsthetic, which some have looked upon as a natural science (confusing the æsthetic and the physical sense of the word expression). Others have looked upon it as a psychological science (confusing expression in its universality with the empirical classification of expressions). Others again, denying the very possibility of a science of such a subject, change it into a simple collection of historical facts; not one of these attaining to the consciousness of Æsthetic as a science of activity or of value, a science of the spirit.

Linguistic expression, or speech, has often seemed to be a fact of interjection, which belongs to the so-called physical expressions of the feelings, common alike to men and animals. But it was soon perceived that an abyss[Pg 144] yawns between the "Ah!" which is a physical reflex of pain and a word; as also between that "Ah!" of pain and the "Ah!" employed as a word. The theory of the interjection being abandoned (jocosely termed the "Ah! Ah!" theory by German linguists), the theory of association or convention appeared. This is liable to the same objection which destroyed æsthetic associationism in general: speech is unity, not multiplicity of images, and multiplicity does not explain, but indeed presupposes the expression to be explained. A variant of linguistic associationism is the imitative, that is to say, the theory of onomatopœia, which the same philologists deride under the name of the "bow-wow" theory, from the imitation of the dog's bark, which, according to the onomatopœists, must have given its name to the dog.

The most usual theory of our times as regards language (apart from mere crass naturalism) consists of a sort of eclecticism or mixture of the various theories to which we have referred. It is assumed that language is in part the product of interjections and in part of onomatopœia and convention. This doctrine is altogether worthy of the philosophical decadence of the second half of the nineteenth century.

We must here note an error into which have fallen those very philologists who have best discerned the activistic nature of language, when they maintain that although language was originally a spiritual creation, yet that it afterwards increased by association. But the distinction does not hold, for origin in this case cannot mean anything but nature or character; and if language be spiritual creation, it must always be creation; if it be association, it must have been so from the beginning. The error has arisen from having failed to grasp the general principle of Æsthetic, known to us: that expressions already produced must descend to the rank of impressions before they can give rise to new impressions. When we utter new words we generally transform the old ones, varying or enlarging their meaning; but this process is not associative, it is creative, although the[Pg 145] creation has for material the impressions, not of the hypothetical primitive man, but of man who has lived long ages in society, and who has, so to say, stored so many things in his psychic organism, and among them so much language.

The question of the distinction between the æsthetic and the intellectual fact appears in Linguistic as that of the relations between Grammar and Logic. This problem has been solved in two partially true ways: the inseparability and the separability of Logic and Grammar. But the complete solution is this: if the logical form be inseparable from the grammatical (æsthetic), the grammatical is separable from the logical.

If we look at a picture which for instance portrays a man walking on a country road we may say: "This picture represents a fact of movement, which, if conceived as voluntary, is called action; and since every movement implies a material object, and every action a being that acts, this picture also represents a material object or being. But this movement takes place in a definite place, which is a piece of a definite heavenly body (the Earth), and precisely of a piece of it which is called terra-firma, and more precisely of a part of it that is wooded and covered with grass, which is called country, cut naturally or artificially into a form called road. Now, there is only one example of that star, which is called Earth: the earth is an individual. But terra-firma, country, road are genera or universals, because there are other terra-firmas, other countries, other roads." And it would be possible to continue for a while with similar considerations. By substituting a phrase for the picture that we have imagined, for example one to this effect: "Peter is walking on a country road," and by making the same remarks, we obtain the concepts of verb (motion or action), of noun (material object or agent), of proper noun, of common noun; and so on.

What have we done in both cases? Neither more nor less than submit to logical elaboration what first presented itself only æsthetically; that is to say, we have[Pg 146] destroyed the æsthetic for the logical. But since in general Æsthetic error begins when we wish to return from the logical to the æsthetic and ask what is the expression of motion, action, matter, being, of the general, of the individual, etc.; so in the case of language, error begins when motion or action are called verb, being or matter, noun or substantive, and when linguistic categories, or parts of speech, are made of all these, noun and verb and so on. The theory of the parts of speech is really identical with that of artistic and literary kinds, already criticized in our Æsthetic.

It is false to say that the verb or noun is expressed in definite words, truly distinguishable from others. Expression is an indivisible whole. Noun and verb do not exist in it, but are abstractions made by us, destroying the sole linguistic reality, which is the sentence. This last is to be understood, not in the way common to grammars, but as an organism expressive of a complete meaning, which includes alike the simplest exclamation and a great poem. This sounds paradoxical, but is nevertheless the simplest truth.

And since in Æsthetic the artistic productions of certain peoples have been looked upon as imperfect, owing to the error above mentioned, because the supposed kinds have seemed not yet to have been discriminated, or to be in part wanting; so in Linguistic, the theory of the parts of speech has caused the analogous error of judging languages as formed and unformed, according to whether there appear in them or no some of those supposed parts of speech; for example, the verb.

Linguistic also discovered the irreducible individuality of the æsthetic fact, when it affirmed that the word is what is really spoken, and that two truly identical words do not exist. Thus were synonyms and homonyms destroyed, and thus was shown the impossibility of really translating one word into another, from so-called dialect into so-called language, or from the so-called mother-tongue into the so-called foreign tongue.

But the attempt to classify languages ill agrees with[Pg 147] this just view. Languages have no reality beyond the propositions and complexes of propositions really written and pronounced by given peoples at definite periods; that is to say, they have no existence outside the works of art (whether little or great, oral or written, soon forgotten or long remembered, does not matter) in which they exist concretely. And what is the art of a given people but the whole of its artistic products? What is the character of an art (for example of Greek art or Provençal literature) but the whole physiognomy of those products? And how can such a question be answered, save by narrating in its particulars the history of the literature, that is to say, of the language in its actuality?

It may be thought that this argument, although possessing validity as against many of the usual classifications of languages, yet is without any as regards that queen of classifications, the historico-genealogical, that glory of comparative philology. And this it certainly is; but why? Precisely because that historico-genealogical method is not a mere classification. He who writes history does not classify, and the philologists themselves have hastened to say that languages which can be arranged in historical series (those whose series have hitherto been traced) are not distinct and separate species but a single whole of facts in the various phases of its development.

Language has sometimes been regarded as a voluntary or arbitrary act. But at others the impossibility of creating language artificially, by an act of will, has been clearly seen. "Tu, Caesar, civitatem dare potes homini, verbo non potes" was once said to a Roman Emperor. And the æsthetic (and therefore theoretic as opposed to practical) nature of expression supplies the method of discovering the scientific error which lies in the conception of a (normative) Grammar, establishing the rules of correct speech. Good sense has always rebelled against this error. An example of such rebellion is the "So much the worse for grammar" attributed to Monsieur de Voltaire. But the impossibility of a normative grammar is also[Pg 148] recognized by those who teach it, when they confess that to write well cannot be learned by rules, that there are no rules without exceptions, and that the study of Grammar should be conducted practically, by reading and examples, which should form the literary taste. The scientific reason of this impossibility lies in the principle that we have demonstrated: that a technique of the theoretical amounts to a contradiction in terms. And what could a (normative) grammar be, but precisely a technique of linguistic expression, that is to say of a theoretic fact?

The case in which Grammar is understood merely as an empirical discipline, that is to say, as a collection of schemes useful for learning languages, without any claim whatever to philosophic truth, is quite different. Even the abstractions of the parts of speech are in this case both admissible and useful. And we must tolerate as merely didascalic many books entitled "Treatises of Linguistic," where we generally find a little of everything, from the description of the vocal apparatus and of the artificial machines (phonographs) which can imitate it, to summaries of the most important I results obtained by Indo-European, Semitic, Coptic, Chinese, or other philologies; from philosophical generalizations as to the origin or nature of language, to advice on format, calligraphy and the arrangement of notes relating to philological work. But this mass of notions, here administered in a fragmentary and incomplete manner about language in its essence, about language as expression, resolves itself into notions of Æsthetic. Nothing exists outside Æsthetic, which gives knowledge of the nature of language, and empirical Grammar, which is a pedagogic expedient, save the History of languages in their living reality, that is to say, the history of concrete literary productions, which is substantially identical with the History of literature.

The same error of taking the physical for the æsthetic, from which the search for the elementary forms of the beautiful originates, is made by those who go in search[Pg 149] of elementary linguistic facts, decorating with that name the divisions of the longer series of physical sounds into shorter series. Syllables, vowels and consonants, and the series of syllables called words, all these elements of speech, which give no definite sense when taken alone, must be called not facts of language, but mere sounds, or rather sounds abstracted and classified physically.

Another error of the same sort is that of roots, to which the most distinguished philologists now accord but small value. Having confused physical with linguistic or expressive facts, and considering that the simple precedes the complex in the order of ideas, they necessarily ended by thinking that the smallest physical facts indicated the simplest linguistic facts. Hence the imaginary necessity that the most ancient primitive languages had a monosyllabic character, and that historical research must always lead to the discovery of monosyllabic roots. But (to follow up the imaginary hypothesis) the first expression that the first man conceived may have had not a phonetic but a mimetic physical reflex; may have been externalized not in a sound but in a gesture. And assuming that it was externalized in a sound, there is no reason to suppose that sound to have been monosyllabic rather than polysyllabic. Philologists readily blame their own ignorance and impotence, when they do not always succeed in reducing polysyllabism to monosyllabism, and rely upon the future to accomplish the reduction. But their faith is without foundation, and their blame of themselves is an act of humility arising from an erroneous presumption.

For the rest, the limits of syllables, as those of words, are altogether arbitrary, and distinguished somehow or other by empirical use. Primitive speech, or the speech of uneducated man, is a continuum, unaccompanied by any consciousness of divisions of the discourse into words or syllables, imaginary beings created by schools. No true law of Linguistic can be founded on such divisions. Proof of this is to be found in the confession of linguists,[Pg 150] that there are no truly phonetic laws of the hiatus, of cacophony, of diæresis or synæresis, but merely laws of taste and convenience; that is to say, æsthetic laws. And what are laws of words which are not at the same time laws of style?

Finally, the search for a model language, or for a method of reducing linguistic usage to unity, arises from the superstition of a rationalistic measure of the beautiful, from that concept which we have called false æsthetic absoluteness. In Italy we call this the question of the unity of the language.

Language is perpetual creation. What has been linguistically expressed is not repeated, save by reproduction of what has already been produced. The ever-new impressions give rise to continuous changes of sound and meaning, that is, to ever-new expressions. To seek the model language, then, is to seek the immobility of motion. Everyone speaks and should speak according to the echoes which things arouse in his soul, that is, according to his impressions. It is not without reason that the most convinced supporter of any one of the solutions of the problem of the unity of language (whether by adopting a standard Italian approximating to Latin, or to fourteenth-century usage, or to the Florentine dialect) feels repugnance in applying his theory, when he is speaking to communicate his thoughts and to make himself understood. The reason is that he feels that in substituting the Latin, fourteenth-century Italian, or Florentine word for that of different origin, but which answers to his natural impressions, he would be falsifying the genuine form of truth. He would become a vain listener to himself instead of a speaker, a pedant in place of a serious man, an actor instead of a sincere person. To write according to a theory is not really to write: at the most, it is making literature.

The question of the unity of language is always reappearing, because, stated as it is, it is insoluble, being based upon a false conception of what language is. Language is not an arsenal of arms already made, and[Pg 151] it is not a vocabulary, a collection of abstractions, or a cemetery of corpses more or less well embalmed.

Our dismissal of the question of the model language, or of the unity of the language, may seem somewhat abrupt, and yet we would not wish to appear otherwise than respectful towards the long line of literary men who have debated this question in Italy for centuries. But those ardent debates were fundamentally concerned with debates of æstheticity, not of æsthetic science, of literature rather than of literary theory, of effective speaking and writing, not of linguistic science. Their error consisted in transforming the manifestation of a need into a scientific thesis, the desirability, for example, of easier mutual understanding among a people divided by dialects into the philosophic demand for a single, ideal language. Such a search was as absurd as that other search for a universal language, a language possessing the immobility of the concept and of abstraction. The social need for a better understanding of one another cannot be satisfied save by the spread of education becoming general, by the increase of communications, and by the interchange of thought among men.

These scattered observations must suffice to show that all the scientific problems of Linguistic are the same as those of Æsthetic, and that the truths and errors of the one are the truths and errors of the other. If Linguistic and Æsthetic appear to be two different sciences, this arises from the fact that people think of the former as grammar, or as a mixture between philosophy and grammar, that is, an arbitrary mnemonic schematism or a pedagogic medley, and not of a rational science and a pure philosophy of speaking. Grammar, or something not unconnected with grammar, also introduces into the mind the prejudice that the reality of language lies in isolated and combinable words, not in living discourse, in the expressive organisms, rationally indivisible.

Those linguists or philologists, philosophically endowed, who have penetrated deepest into the problems of language, find themselves (to employ a trite but[Pg 152] effective simile) like workmen piercing a tunnel: at a certain point they must hear the voices of their companions, the philosophers of Æsthetic, who have been at work on the other side. At a certain stage of scientific elaboration, Linguistic, in so far as it is philosophy, must merge itself in Æsthetic: and this indeed it does without leaving a residue.

[Pg 153]

[Pg 154]
[Pg 155]

The question whether Æsthetic is to be considered as an ancient or a modern science has on several occasions been a matter of controversy; whether, that is to say, it arose for the first time in the eighteenth century, or had previously arisen in the Græco-Roman world. This is a question, not only of facts, but of criteria, as is easily to be understood: whether one answers it in this way or that depends upon one's idea of that science, an idea afterwards adopted as a standard or criterion.[1]

Our view is that Æsthetic is the science of the expressive (representative or imaginative) activity. In our opinion, therefore, it does not appear until a precise concept is formulated of imagination, representation or expression, or in whatever other manner we prefer to name that attitude of the spirit, which is theoretical but not intellectual, a producer of knowledge, but of the individual, not of the universal. Outside this point of view, we for our part are not able to discover anything but deviations and errors.

These deviations can lead in various directions. Following the distinctions and terminology of an eminent Italian philosopher[2] in an analogous case, we shall be[Pg 156] inclined to say that they arise either from excess or from defect. The deviation from defect would be that which denies the existence of a special æsthetic and imaginative activity, or, which amounts to the same thing, denies its autonomy, and thus mutilates the reality of the spirit. Deviation by excess is that which substitutes for it or imposes upon it another activity, altogether undiscoverable in the experience of the interior life, a mysterious activity which does not really exist. Both these deviations, as can be deduced from the theoretical part of this work, take various forms. The first, that due to defect, may be: (a) purely hedonistic, in so far as it considers and accepts art as a simple fact of sensuous pleasure; (b) rigoristic-hedonistic, in so far as, looking upon it in the same way, it declares it to be irreconcilable with the highest life of man; (c) hedonistic-moralistic or pedagogic, in so far as it consents to a compromise, and while still considering art to be a fact of sense, declares that it need not be harmful, indeed that it may render some service to morality, provided always that it is submissive and obedient.[3] The forms of the second deviation (which we shall call "mystical") are not determinable a priori, for they belong to feeling and imagination in their infinite variety and shades of meaning.[4]

The Græco-Roman world presents all these fundamental forms of deviation: pure hedonism, moralism or pedagogism, mysticism, and together with them the most solemn and celebrated rigoristic negation of art which has ever been made. It also exhibits attempts at the theory of expression or pure imagination; but nothing more than approaches and attempts. Hence, since we must now take sides in the controversy as to whether Æsthetic is an ancient or modern science, we cannot but place ourselves upon the side of those who affirm its modernity.

A rapid glance at the theories of antiquity will suffice to justify what we have said. We say rapid, because to enter into minute particulars, collecting all the scattered[Pg 157] observations of ancient writers upon art, would be to do again what has been done many times and sometimes very well. Further, those ideas, propositions and theories have passed into the common patrimony of knowledge, together with what else remains of the classical world. It is therefore more advisable here than in any other part of this history merely to indicate the general lines of development.

Art, the artistic faculty, only became a philosophical problem in Greece after the sophistical movement and as a consequence of the Socratic dialectic. The historians of literature generally point to the origins of Greek Æsthetic in the first appearance of criticism and reflection upon poetical works, painting and sculpture; in the judgements pronounced on the occasion of poetical competitions, in the observations that were made as to the methods of the different artists, in the analogies between painting and poetry as expressed in the sayings attributed to Simonides and Sophocles; or, finally, in the appearance of that word which served to group together the various arts and to indicate in a certain way their relationship—the word mimesis or mimetic (μίμησις)—which oscillates between the meaning of "imitation" and that of "representation." Others make the origin of Æsthetic go back to the polemics which were conducted by the first naturalistic and moralistic philosophers against the tales, fantasies and morals of poets, and to the interpretations of the hidden meaning (υπόνοια), or, as the moderns call it, allegory, employed to defend the good name of Homer and of the other poets; finally, to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, as Plato was afterwards to call it.[5] But, to tell the truth, none of these reflections, observations and arguments implied a true and proper philosophical discussion of the nature of art. Nor was the sophistical movement favourable to its appearance. For although attention was at that time certainly given to internal psychical facts, yet these were conceived as mere phenomena of opinion[Pg 158] and feeling, of pleasure and pain, of illusion, whim or caprice. And where there is no true and no false, no good and no evil, there can be no question of beautiful and ugly, nor of a difference between the true and the beautiful or between the beautiful and the good. The most one has in that case is the general problem of the irrational and the rational, but not that of the nature of art, which assumes the difference between rational and irrational, material and spiritual, mere fact and value, to have been already stated and grasped. If, then, the sophistical period was the necessary antecedent to the discoveries of Socrates, the æsthetic problem could only arise after Socrates. And it did indeed arise with Plato, author of the first, or indeed of the only really great negation of art of which there remains documentary proof in the history of ideas.

Is art, mimesis, a rational or an irrational fact? Does it belong to the noble region of the soul, where philosophy and virtue are found, or does it dwell in that base lower sphere, with sensuality and crude passionality? This is the question asked by Plato,[6] who thus states the problem of Æsthetic for the first time. The sophist Gorgias was able to note, with his sceptical acuteness, that tragic representation is a deception, which (strangely enough) turns out to the honour both of him who deceives and of him who is deceived, in which it is shameful not to know how to deceive oneself and not to let oneself be deceived.[7] With that remark he could rest content. That was for him a fact like another. But Plato, the philosopher, was bound to solve the problem: if it were a deception, then down with tragedy and the rest of mimetic productions: down with them among the other things to be despised, among the animal qualities of man. But if it were not deception, what was it? What place did art occupy among the lofty activities of philosophy and of good action?

The answer that he gave is well known. Mimetic does not realize the ideas, that is to say the truth of things,[Pg 159] but reproduces natural or artificial things, which are pale shadows of them; it is a diminution of a diminution, a third-hand work. Art, then, does not belong to the lofty and rational region of the soul (του λογιστικοϋ ἐν ψυχή) but to the sensual; it is not a strengthening but a corruption of the mind (λώβη τής διάνοιας); it can serve only sensual pleasure, which troubles and obscures. For this reason, mimetic, poetry and poets, must be excluded from the perfect Republic.

Plato is the most consistent example of those who do not succeed in discovering any other form of knowledge but the intellectual. It was correctly observed by him that imitation stops at natural things, at the image (το φάντασμα), and does not reach the concept, logical truth (άλήθεια), of which poets and painters are altogether ignorant. But his error consisted in believing that there is no other form of truth below the intellectual; that there is nothing but sensuality and passionality outside or prior to the intellect, that which discovers the ideas. Certainly, the fine æsthetic sense of Plato did not echo that depreciatory judgement of art; he himself declared that he would have been very glad to have been shown how to justify art and to place it among the forms of the spirit. But since none was able to give him this assistance, and since art with its appearance that yet lacks reality was repugnant to his ethical consciousness, and reason compelled him (ό λόγος ήρει) to banish it and place it with its peers, he resolutely obeyed his conscience and his reason.[8]

Others were not troubled with these scruples, and although art was always looked upon as a mere thing of pleasure among the later hedonistic schools of various sorts, among rhetoricians and worldly people the duty of combating or of abolishing it was not felt. Nevertheless, this opposite extreme was also not calculated to meet with the endorsement of public opinion, for the latter, if tender towards art, is no less tender towards rationality and morality. For this reason both rationalists and moralists, compelled to recognize the force of[Pg 160] such a condemnation as Plato's, sought for a compromise, a half measure. Away with the sensual and with art: certainly. But can we expel the sensual and the pleasurable without more ado? Can fragile human nature nourish itself exclusively with the strong food of philosophy and morality? Can we obtain observance of the true and of the good from the young and from the people, without allowing them at the same time some amusement? And has not man himself always something of the child, has he not always something of the people in him, is he not to be treated with the same precautions? Is there not a risk that the over-bent bow will break?—These considerations prepared the way for the justification of art, for they showed that if it were not rational in itself, it could on the other hand serve a rational end. Hence the search for the external end of art, which takes the place of the search for the essence or internal end. When art had been lowered to the level of a simple pleasurable illusion, an inebriation of the senses, it was necessary to subordinate the practical action of producing such an illusion and inebriation, like any other action, to the moral end. Art, being deprived of any dignity of its own, was obliged to assume a reflected or secondhand dignity. Thus the moralistic and pedagogic theory was constructed upon a hedonistic basis. The artist, who, for the pure hedonist, was comparable to a hetaira, became for the moralist a pedagogue. Hetaira and pedagogue, these are the symbols of the two conceptions of art that were disseminated in antiquity, and the second was grafted upon the first.

Even before Plato's peremptory negation had directed thought to this way of issue, the literary criticism of Aristophanes was already full of the pedagogic idea: "What schoolmasters are to children, poets are to young men" (τοΐς ήβώσιν δὲ ποιηταί), he says in a celebrated verse[9] But we can find traces of it in Plato himself (in the dialogues in which he seems to withdraw from the too rigid conclusions of the Republic) and in[Pg 161] Aristotle, both in the Politics, where he determines the use of music in education, and perhaps in the Poetics, where he speaks obscurely of a tragical catharsis; although as regards this latter, it is not to be altogether denied that he may have had a sort of glimpse of the modern idea of the liberating power of art.[10] Later on, the pedagogic theory takes a form that was much affected by the Stoics. Strabo develops and defends this at great length, in the introduction to his geographical work, where he combats Eratosthenes, who has made poetry consist in mere pleasure without any notion of teaching. Strabo, on the contrary, maintained the opinion of the ancients, that it was "a first philosophy (φιλοσοφίαν τινα πρωτήν), which educated young men for life, and created customs, affections and actions, by means of pleasure." Therefore, he said, poetry has always been a part of education; one cannot be a good poet unless one is a good man (άνδρα άγαθόν). Legislators and founders of cities were the first to employ fables to admonish and to terrify: then this duty, which must be performed for women and children and even for adults, passed to the poets. We caress and dominate the multitude with fiction and with falsehood.[11] "The poets tell many lies" (πολλά ψεύδονται άοιδοί) is a hemistich recorded by Plutarch, who describes minutely in one of his lesser works how the poets should be read to youths.[12] For him too poetry is a preparation for philosophy; it is a disguised philosophy, and therefore delights us in the same way as do fish and meat at feasts, so prepared as not to seem to be fish and meat; it is philosophy softened with fables, like the vine that grows close to the mandragora, and produces a wine that is the giver of sweet slumbers. It is not possible to pass from dense darkness to sunlight; one should first accustom the eyes to moderate light. Philosophers, in order to exhort and instruct, take their examples from true things; poets[Pg 162] aim at a like result, when they create fictions and fables.[13] Lucretius, in Roman literature, gives us the well-known comparison of the boys for whom the doctors "prius or as pocula circum Contingunt mellis dulci flavoque liquore," in order to administer the bitter wormwood.[14] Horace, in certain verses of the Epistle to the Pisones which have become proverbial (perhaps his source for them was the Greek of Neoptolemus of Paros?), offers both views (that of art as courtesan and of art as pedagogue) in his "Aut prodesse volunt aut deledare poetae ... omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci."[15]

Thus looked at, the office of the poet was confounded with that of the orator, for he too was a practical man aiming at practical effects; hence there arose discussions as to whether Virgil was to be considered as a poet or as an orator ("Virgilius poeta an orator?"). To both was assigned the triple end of delectare, movere, docere; in any case this tripartition was very empirical, for we clearly perceive that the delectare is here a means-and the docere a simple part of the movere: to move in the direction of the good, and therefore, among other goods, towards that of instruction. In like manner, it was said of the orator and poet (recording the meretricious basis of their task, and with a metaphor significant in its naïveté) that they were bound to avail themselves of the allurements (lenocinium) of form.

The mystical view, which considers art as a special mode of self-beatification, of entering into relation with the Absolute, with the Summum Bonum, with the ultimate root of things, appeared only in late antiquity, almost at the entrance to the Middle Ages. Its representative is the founder of the neo-Platonic school, Plotinus.

It is strange that Plato should be usually selected as the founder and head of this æsthetic tendency, and that for this very reason to him should be attributed the honour of being the father of Æsthetic. But how could he, who had expounded with such great limpidity and[Pg 163] clearness the reasons for which he was not able to accord to art a high place among the activities of the spirit, be credited with having accorded to it one of the highest places, equal, if not superior, to philosophy itself? This misunderstanding has evidently arisen out of the enthusiastic effusions about the Beautiful that we read in the Gorgias, the Philebus, the Phædrus, the Symposium, and other Platonic dialogues. It is well to dissipate it by declaring that the Beauty of which Plato discourses has nothing to do with art or with artistic beauty.

The search for the meaning and scientific content of the word "beautiful" could not but early attract the attention of the subtle and elegant Greek dialecticians. Indeed, we find Socrates engaged in discussing this question in one of the discourses that have been preserved for us by Xenophon; and we find him disposed to stop for the moment at the conclusion that the beautiful is that which is convenient and which answers to the end desired, or at the other conclusion that it is that which one loves[16] Plato too examines this sort of problem and proposes various sorts of solutions or attempts at solutions of it. He sometimes speaks of a beauty that dwells not only in bodies, but also in laws, in actions, in the sciences; sometimes he seems to conjoin and almost to identify it with the true, the good and the divine; now he returns to the view of Socrates and confuses it with the useful; now he distinguishes between a beautiful in itself (καλά καθ' αυτά) and a relatively beautiful (πρός τι καλά); or he makes true beauty consist in pure pleasure (ήδονη καθαρά), free from all shadow of pain; or he places it in measure and proportion (μετριότης καί ξνμμετρία); or talks of colours and sounds as possessing a beauty in themselves.[17] It was impossible to find an independent dominion for the beautiful, if the artistic or mimetic activity were deserted. This explains his wandering among so many different conceptions, among which it is just possible to say that the identification of[Pg 164] the Beautiful with the Good prevails. Nothing better describes this uncertainty than the dialogue of the Hippias maior (which, if it be not Plato's, is Platonic). He here wishes to find out not what things are beautiful things, but what the beautiful is; that is to say, what it is that makes beautiful, not only a beautiful virgin, but also a beautiful mare, a beautiful lyre, a beautiful pot with two graceful ears of clay. Hippias and Socrates himself propose in turn the most various solutions; but the latter ends by confuting them all. "That which makes things beautiful is the gold that is added to them by way of ornament." No: gold only embellishes where it is fitting (πρέπων): for instance, a pot should have a wooden rather than a golden handle. "That is beautiful which cannot seem ugly to any one." But it is not a question of seeming: the question is to define what the beautiful is, whether it seems so or not. It is the fitting which makes things seem to be beautiful. But in that case, the fitting (which makes them appear, not be) is one thing, and the beautiful another. "The beautiful is what leads to the end, that is to say, the useful (χρήσιμον)." But if that were so, then evil would also be beautiful, because the useful leads also to the evil. "The beautiful is the helpful, that which leads to the good (ωφέλιμον)." But in this case, the good would not be beautiful nor the beautiful good; for the cause is not the effect, and the effect is not the cause. "The beautiful is that which delights the sight and hearing." But this fails to persuade for three reasons: firstly, because beautiful studies and laws are beautiful, which have nothing to do with the eye or with the ear; secondly, because we cannot discover a reason for limiting the beautiful to those senses, while excluding the pleasure of eating and smelling, and the extremely vivid pleasures of sex; thirdly, because, if the foundation of the beautiful were visibility, it would not be audibility, and if it were audibility it would not be visibility; hence that which constitutes the beautiful cannot dwell in either of the two qualities. And the question which has been repeated[Pg 165] so insistently in the course of the dialogue: what is the beautiful? (τί εστι το καλόν;) remains unanswered.[18]

Later writers also conducted inquiries into the beautiful, and we possess the titles of several treatises upon the theme, which have been lost. Aristotle shows himself changeable and uncertain upon the point. In the scanty references which he makes to it, he at one time confounds the beautiful with the good, defining it as that which is both good and pleasing;[19] at another he notes that the good consists of action (εν πράξει) and the beautiful also in things that are immoveable (εν τοΐς άκινήτοις), drawing from this the argument that mathematics should be studied in order to determine its characters, order, symmetry and limit;[20] sometimes he places it in bigness and in order (εν μεγεθει καί τάξει);[21] at others he was led to look upon it as something apparently indefinable.[22] Antiquity also established canons of beautiful things, such as that attributed to Polycletus on the proportions of the human body. And Cicero said of the beauty of bodies that they were "quaedam apta figura membrorum cum coloris quadam suavitate."[23] All these affirmations, even when they are not mere empirical observations, or verbal glosses and substitutions, meet with unsurmountable obstacles.

In any case, not only is the conception of the beautiful, taken as a whole, identified with art in none of them; but sometimes art and beauty, mimesis and pleasing or displeasing material of mimesis, are clearly distinguished. Aristotle notes in his Poetics that it pleases us to see the most faithful images of things that are repugnant to us in reality, such, for instance, as the most contemptible forms of animals, or corpses (τάς εικόνας τάς μάλιστα ήκριβωμενας χαίρομεν θεωρουντες).[24] Plutarch demonstrates at length that works of art please us not as beautiful but as resembling (ούχ ως καλόν, άλλ,' ως ομοιον); he affirms that[Pg 166] if the artist beautified things that are ugly in nature he would be offending against fitness and resemblance (το πρεπον και το eίκός); and he proclaims the principle that the beautiful is one thing and beautiful imitation another (oύ yaρ εστι ταυτό, το καλον και καλως τι μιμεισθαι). Paintings of horrible events are pleasing, such as Medea slaying her sons by Timomachus, Orestes the matricide by Theon, and the Pretended madness of Ulysses by Parrhasius; and if the grunting of a pig, the grating of a machine, the noise of the winds and the tumult of the sea are unpleasing, they pleased on the contrary in the case of Parmenon, who imitated the pig perfectly, and in Theodorus, who was not less expert in rendering the grating of machines.[25] If the ancients had really wanted to place the beautiful and art in relation, a secondary and partial connexion of the two conceptions was to hand in the shape of the category of the relatively as distinguished from the absolutely beautiful. But where the word καλόν or pulchrum is applied to artistic productions in the writings of literary critics, it does not seem to be more than a linguistic usage, as we find, for instance, in the case of Plutarch's beautiful imitation, or also in the terminology of the rhetoricians, who sometimes called elegance and adornment of discourse beauty of elocution (το τής φράσεως κάλλος).

It is only with Plotinus that the two divided territories are united and the beautiful and art are fused into a single concept, not by means of a beneficial absorption of the equivocal Platonic conception of beauty into the unequivocal conception of art, but by absorption of the clear into the confused, of imitative art in the so-called beautiful. And thus we reach an altogether new view: the beautiful and art are now both alike melted into a mystical passion and elevation of the spirit.

Beauty, observes Plotinus, resides chiefly in things visible; but it is also to be found in things audible, such as verbal and musical compositions, and it is not lacking in things supersensible, such as works, offices, actions,[Pg 167] habits, sciences and virtues. What is it that makes beautiful sensible and supersensible things alike? Not, he answers, the symmetry of their parts among themselves, and with the whole (συμμετρία των μερών προς αλληλα και προς το ολον) and their colour (ενχροια), according to one of the definitions most in vogue, which we have quoted above in the words of Cicero; because there are proportions in things ugly, and there are things that are simply beautiful without any relation of proportion: beauty, then, is one thing and symmetry another.[26] The beautiful is what we welcome as akin to our own nature; the ugly is what repels us as our opposite, and the affinity of beautiful things with our souls that perceive them has its origin in the Idea, which produces both. That is beautiful which is formed; the ugly is what is unformed, that is to say, something which is capable of receiving form, but does not receive it or is not entirely dominated by it. A beautiful body is such, because of its communion (κοινωνία) with the Divine; beauty is the Divine, the Idea, shining through; and matter is beautiful, not in itself, but only when it is illuminated by the Idea. Light and fire, which are nearest to this state, shed beauty upon visible things, as the most spiritual among bodies. But the soul must purify itself, in order to perceive the beautiful, and make the power of the Idea that lies in it efficacious. Moderation, strength, prudence, and every other virtue, what else are they, according to the oracle, but purification? Thus there opens another eye in the soul, beside that of sensible beauty, which permits it to contemplate divine Beauty coincident with the Good, which is the supreme condition of beatitude.[27] Art enters into such contemplation, because beauty, in things made by man, comes from the mind. Compare two blocks of stone, the one placed beside the other: one rough and crude, the other reduced to the statue of a god or of a man, for example of a Grace or of a Muse, or of a human being of such a shape, as art has collected from many particular beauties. The beauty of a block of this shape[Pg 168] does not consist in its being of stone, but in the form that art has been able to give to it (παρά του ειδους o ενηκεν η τέχνη); and when the form is fully impressed upon it, the thing of art is more beautiful than any other natural thing. Hence he who despised the arts (Plato), because they imitated nature, was wrong; whereas the truth is, in the first place, that nature itself imitates the idea, and then that the arts do not simply limit themselves to imitating what the eyes see, but go back to those reasons or ideas from which nature itself is derived (ώς ούχ απλώς το όρώμενον μεμούνται, αλλ' άνατρέχουσιν επι τούς λόγους έξ ων η φύσις). Art therefore does not belong to nature, but adds beauty where it is wanting in nature: Phidias did not represent Jove because he had seen him, but such as he would appear if he wished to reveal himself to mortal eyes.[28] The beauty of natural things is the archetype existing in the soul, the sole source of natural beauty.[29]

This affirmation of Plotinus and of neo-Platonism is the first true and proper affirmation of mystical Æsthetic, destined to such high fortunes in modern times, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century. But the attempts at a true Æsthetic, excluding certain luminous but incidental observations to be found even in Plato: for instance, that the poet should weave fables, not arguments (μύθους άλλ' ού λόγους),[30] go back to Aristotle and are altogether independent of his few and feeble speculations as to the beautiful. Aristotle by no means agreed with the Platonic condemnation; he felt (as indeed Plato himself had suspected) that such a result could not be altogether true, and that some aspect of the problem must have been neglected. When in his turn he attempted to find a solution, he found himself in more advantageous conditions than his great predecessor, since he had already overcome the obstacle that arose from the Platonic doctrine of ideas, a hypostasis of concepts and abstractions. The ideas were for him[Pg 169] simply concepts, and reality presented itself in a far more lively manner, not as a diminution of ideas, but as a synthesis of matter and form, it was thus much more easy for him to recognize the rationality of mimesis in his general philosophical doctrine and to assign to it its right place; and indeed it seems generally clear to Aristotle that mimesis, being proper to man by nature, is contemplation or theoretic activity; although he sometimes seems to forget this (as when he confuses imitation with the case of boys, who acquire their first knowledge by following an example[31]), and although his system, which admits practical sciences and poietic activities (distinguished from the practical as leaving a material object behind them), disturbed the firm and constant consideration of artistic mimesis and poetry as a theoretical activity. But if it is a theoretical activity, by what characteristic is poetry distinguished both from scientific knowledge and from historical knowledge? This is the way Aristotle states the problem concerning the nature of art, and this is the true and only way of stating it. Even we moderns ask ourselves in what way art is distinguished from history and from science, and what this artistic form can be, which has the ideality of science and the concreteness and individuality of history. Poetry, answers Aristotle, differs from history, because, while the latter draws things that have happened (τα γενόμενα), poetry draws things that may possibly happen (οια αν γένοιτο), and differs from science, because, although it regards the universal and not the particular (τα καθ' εκαστον) like history, it does not regard it in the same way as science, but in a certain measure, which the philosopher indicates by the word rather (μαλλον τα καθόλου). The point then is to establish the precise meaning of the possible, the rather and the historical particular. But no sooner does Aristotle attempt to determine the meaning of these words, than he falls into contradictions and fallacies. That universal of poetry, which is the possible, seems to identify itself for him with the probable or the necessary (τα[Pg 170] κατά το είκος η το άναγκαΐον), and the particular of history is not explained at all, except by giving instances: "that which Alcibiades did and what happened to him."[32] Aristotle, in fact, after having made so good a beginning in the discovery of the purely imaginative, proper to poetry, remains half-way, perplexed and uncertain. Thus he sometimes makes the truth of imitation consist in a certain learning and syllogizing that takes place when we look at imitations, by which we recognize that "this is that," that a copy answers to the original;[33] or, worse, he loses the grains of truth that he has found and forgets that poetry has for its content the possible, admitting, not only that it may also depict the impossible (το αδύνατον), and even the absurd (το άτοπον), seeing that both are credible and that they do not injure the end of art, but even that we must prefer impossible probabilities to incredible possibilities.[34] Art, since it has to do even with the impossible and absurd, will not therefore have in it anything of the rational, but in accordance with the Platonic theory it will be an imitation of the appearance in which empty sense indulges itself; that is to say, a thing of pleasure. Aristotle does not attain to this result, because he does not attain to any clear and precise result in this part of the subject, but it is one of the results that can be deduced from what he has said, or that, at any rate he is not able to exclude. This means that he did not fulfil his tacitly assumed task, and that although he re-examined the problem with marvellous acuteness after Plato, he failed truly to rid himself of the Platonic definition, by substituting a firmly-established one of his own.

But the field of investigation toward which Aristotle had turned was generally neglected in antiquity: the very Poetics of Aristotle does not seem to have been widely known or influential. Ancient psychology knew fancy or imagination as a faculty midway between sense and intellect, but always as conservative and reproductive of sensuous impressions or conveying conceptions to the[Pg 171] senses, never properly as a productive autonomous activity. That faculty was rarely and with little result placed in relation with the problem of art. Several historians of Æsthetic attach singular importance to certain passages in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana by the elder Philostratus, in which they believe that they discover a correction of the theory of mimesis and the first affirmation in history of the conception of imaginative creation. Phidias and Praxiteles (says the extract in question) did not need to go to heaven to see the gods, in order to be able to depict them in their works, as would have been necessary according to the theory of imitation. Imagination, without any need of models, made them able to do what they did: imagination, which is a wiser agent than simple imitation (φαντασία ... σοφωτόρα μιμήσεως δημιουργός), and gives form, like the other, not only to what has been seen, but also to what has never been seen, imagining it on the basis of existing things and in that way creating Jupiters and Minervas.[35] However, the imagination of which Philostratus speaks here is not something different from the Aristotelian mimesis, which, as has been noted, was concerned not only with real things but also and chiefly with possible things. And had not Socrates observed (in the dialogue with the painter Parrhasius, preserved for us by Xenophon) that painters work by collecting what they need to form their figures from several bodies (εκ πολλων συνάγοντες τα εξ εκάστου καλλιστα)?[36] And was not the anecdote of Zeuxis, who was supposed to have taken the best of five Crotonian maidens in order to paint his Helen, and other anecdotes of a like sort, sufficiently widespread in antiquity? And had not Cicero eloquently explained, some years before Philostratus, how Phidias, when he was carving Jupiter, did not copy anything real, but kept his looks fixed upon "species pulcritudinis eximia quaedam," which he had in his soul and which directed his art and his hand?[37] Nor can it be said that Philostratus opened[Pg 172] the way to Plotinus, for whom the superior or intellectual imagination (νοητή), or eye of supersensible beauty, when it is not a new designation for beautiful imitation, is mystical intuition.

The vagueness of the concept of mimesis reached its apex in those writers who gave it as a general title to any sort of work that had nature for its object, employing the Aristotelian phrase to affirm that "omnis ars naturae imitatio est,"[38] or saying, like the painter Eupompus when he blamed his servile imitators, that "natura est imitanda, non artifex."[39] And those who wished to escape this vagueness did not know how to do so, save by conceiving the activity of imitation as the practical producer of duplicates of natural objects, a prejudice bora in the bosom of the pictorial and plastic arts, against which Philostratus perhaps intended to argue, in common with the other advocates of imagination.

The speculations upon language had a close connexion with those upon the nature of art begun by the sophists, for whom it became a matter for wonder that sounds could signify colours or things inaudible; that is to say, speech presented itself as a problem.[40] It was then discussed whether language was by nature (φύσει or by convention νόμω). By nature was sometimes understood mental necessity, and by convention what we should call a merely natural fact, psychological mechanism or sensationalism. In that sense of the terms, language would have been better called φύσει than νόμω. But at other times the distinction led to the question whether language answers to objective or logical truth and to the real relations between things (όρθότης των ονομάτων); and in this case, those would seem to be nearer the truth who proclaimed it to be conventional or arbitrary in respect to logical truth: νόμω or θέσει, and not φύσει Two different questions were consequently being treated[Pg 173] together, and both were confusedly and equivocally discussed. They find their monument in the obscure Cratylus of Plato, which seems to fluctuate between different solutions. Nor did the later affirmation that the word is a sign (σημείον) of the thought solve anything, for it still remained to be shown in what way the sign was to be understood, whether φύσει or νόμω. Aristotle, who looked upon words as imitations (μιμηματα), in the same way as poetry,[41] made an observation of first-rate importance: in addition to the enunciative propositions, which express the (logically) true or false, there are others which do not express either the (logically) true or false, as for example the expressions of aspirations and of desires (εύχή), which therefore belong, not to logical exposition, but to poetical and rhetorical exposition.[42] And in another place we find him affirming in opposition to Bryson (who had said that a base thing remained such with whatever word it were designated) that base things can be expressed both with words that place them beneath the eye in all their crudity, and with other words which surround them with a veil.[43] All this might have led to the separation of the linguistic faculty from the properly logical, and to its consideration in union with the poetical and artistic faculty; but here too the attempt stopped half-way. The Aristotelian logic assumed a verbal and formalistic character, which became more and more accentuated as time went on and formed an obstacle to the distinction between the two theoretical forms. Nevertheless, Epicurus asserted that the diversity of names designating the same thing with various peoples was due, not to convention and caprice, but to the fact that the impressions produced by things were different in each one of them.[44] And the Stoics, although they connected language with thought (διάνοια) and not with imagination, seem to have had a suspicion of the non-logical nature of language, for they interposed between thought and sound a certain something which was indicated[Pg 174] in Greek by the word λεκτόν, and by the words effatum or dicibile in Latin. But we are not sure what they really meant, and whether that vague concept were intended by them to distinguish the linguistic representation from the abstract concept (which would bring them into touch with the modern view), or the meaning of sound in general.[45]

We cannot collect any other germ of truth from the ancient writers. A philosophical Grammar, like a philosophical Poetics, remained unattainable in antiquity.

Almost all the developments of ancient Æsthetic were continued by tradition or reappeared by spontaneous generation in the course of the Middle Ages. Neo-Platonic mysticism continued, entrusted to the care of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (De cœlesti hierarchia, De ecclesiastica hierarchia, De divinis nominibus, etc.), to the translations of these works made by John Scotus Eriugena, and to the divulgations of the Spanish Jews (Avicebron). The Christian God took the place of the Summum Bonum or Idea: God, wisdom, goodness, supreme beauty, source of beautiful things in nature, which are a ladder to the contemplation of the Creator. But these speculations continued to recede further and further from the consideration of art, with which Plotinus had connected them; and the empty definitions of the beautiful by Cicero and other ancient writers were often repeated. Saint Augustine defined beauty in general as unity (omnis pulchritudinis forma unitas est,) and that of the body as congruentia partium cum quadam colons suavitate, and the old distinction between something that is beautiful in itself and relative beauty reappeared in a book of his, which has been lost, entitled De pulchro et apto; the very name shows that he reasserted the old distinction between the beautiful in itself and the relatively beautiful, quoniam apte accommodaretur alicui. Elsewhere he notes that an image is called beautiful si perfecte implei illud cujus imago est, et coaequatur ei.[1]

[Pg 176]

Thomas Aquinas varied but little from him in positing three requisites for beauty: integrity or perfection, due proportion, and clearness; following Aristotle, he distinguished the beautiful from the good, defining the first as that which pleases in the mere contemplation of it (pulcrum ... id cujus ipsa apprehensio placet); he referred to the beauty that even base things possess if well imitated, and applied the doctrine of imitation to the beauty of the Second Person of the Trinity (in quantum est imago expressa Patris).[2] If it were wished to discover references to the hedonistic conception of art, it would be possible to do this, with a little goodwill, in some of the sayings of jongleurs and troubadours. Æsthetic rigorism, the total negation of art for religion or for divine and human science, shows itself in Tertullian and among certain Fathers of the Church, at the entrance to the Middle Ages; at their conclusion, in a certain crude scholastic spirit, for example in Cecco d' Ascoli, who proclaimed against Dante: "I leave trifles behind me and return to the true; fables are always unpleasing to me," and later, in the reactionary Savonarola. But the narcotic theory of pedagogic or moralistic art prevailed over every other. It had contributed to send to sleep the æsthetic doubts and inquiries of the ancients, and was well suited to a period of relative decadence of culture. This was all the more the case, seeing that it accorded well with the moral and religious ideas of the Middle Ages, and afforded a justification not only for the new art of Christian inspiration, but also for the surviving works of classical and pagan art.

The allegorical interpretation was again a means of salvation for these last. The De continentia Virgiliana of Fulgentius (sixth century) is a curious monument to this fact. This work made Virgil compatible with the Middle Ages and opened his way to that great reputation[Pg 177] which he was destined to attain, as the "gentle sage who knew all things." Even John of Salisbury says of the Roman poet, that "sub imagine fabularum totius philosophiae exprimit veritatem."[3] The process of interpretation became fixed in the doctrine of the four meanings, literal, allegorical, moral and anagogic, which Dante afterwards transferred to vernacular poetry. It would be easy to accumulate quotations from mediæval writers, repeating in all keys the theory that art inculcates the truths of morality and of faith and constrains hearts to Christian piety, beginning with those well-known verses of Theodulf: "In quorum dictis (that is to say, in the utterances of the poets) quamquam sint frivola multa, Plurima sub falso tegmine vera latent," and so on, until we reach the doctrines and opinions of our own great men, Dante and Boccaccio. For Dante, poetry "nihil aliud est quam fictio rhethorica in musicaque posita."[4] The poet should have a "reasoning" in his verses "under a cloak of figure or of rhetorical colour"; and it would be a shameful thing for him, if, "when asked, he were not able to divest his words of such a garment, in such a way as to show that they possessed a true meaning."[5] Readers sometimes stop at the external vesture alone, and this indeed suffices for those who, like the vulgar, do not succeed in penetrating the hidden meaning. Poetry will say to the vulgar, which does not understand "its argument," what a song of Dante's says at its conclusion, "At least behold how beautiful I am": if you are not able to obtain instruction from me, at least enjoy me as a pleasing thing. Many, indeed, "their beauty more than their goodness will delight," in poems, unless they are assisted by commentaries in the nature of the Convivio, "a light which will allow every shade of meaning to reach them."[6] Poetry was the "gay science," "un fingimiento" (as the Spanish poet the Marquis of Santillana wrote) "de cosas utiles, cubiertas ó veladas con[Pg 178] muy fermosa cobertura, compuestas, distinguidas é scandidas, por cierto cuento, pessoé medida."[7]

It would not then be correct to say that the Middle Ages simply identified art with theology and with philosophy. Indeed it sharply distinguished the one from the other, defining art and poetry, like Dante, with the words fictio rhethorica, "figure" and "rhetorical colour," "cloak," "beauty," or like Santillana with those of fingimiento or fermosa cobertura. This pleasing falsity was justified from the practical point of view, very much in the same way as sexual union and love were justified and sanctified in matrimony. This did not exclude, indeed it implied, that the perfect state was certainly celibacy—that is to say, pure science, free from admixture of art.

The only tendency that had no true and proper representatives was the sound scientific tendency. The Poetics of Aristotle itself was hardly known or rather it was ill-known, from the Latin translation that a German of the name of Hermann made, not earlier than 1256, of the paraphrase or commentary of Averroes. Perhaps the best of the mediæval investigations into language is that supplied by Dante's De vulgari eloquentia, where the word is, however, still looked upon as a sign ("rationale signum et sensuale ... natura sensuale quidem, in quantum sonus est, rationale vero in quantum aliquid significare videtur ad piacitum").[8] The study of the expressive, æsthetic, linguistic faculty would, however, have found an appropriate occasion and a point of departure in the secular debate between nominalism and realism, which could not avoid touching to some extent the relations between the word and the flesh, thought and language. Duns Scotus wrote a treatise De modis significandi seu (the addition is due perhaps to the editors) grammatica speculativa.[9] Abelard had defined sensation as confusa conceptio, and imaginatio as a faculty that preserved[Pg 179] sensations; the intellect renders discursive what is intuitive in the preceding stage, and we have finally the perfection of knowledge in the intuitive knowledge of the discursive. We find the same importance attached to intuitive knowledge, perception, of the individual or species specialissima, in Duns Scotus, together with the progressive denominations of the different sorts of knowledge as confusæ, indistinctæ and distinctæ. We shall see this terminology reappear, big with consequences, at the very commencement of modern Æsthetic.[10]

It may be said that the literary and artistic doctrines and opinions of the Middle Ages have, with few exceptions, a value rather for the history of culture than for the general history of science. The like observation holds good of the Renaissance, for here, too, the circle of the ideas of antiquity was not overstepped. Culture increases; original sources are studied; the ancient writers are translated and commented upon; many treatises are written and henceforth printed upon poetry and the arts, grammars, rhetorics, dialogues, and dissertations upon the beautiful: the proportions have increased, the world has become bigger; but truly original ideas do not yet show themselves in the domain of æsthetic science. The mystical tradition is refreshed and strengthened by the renewed cult of Plato: Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Cattani, Leon Battista Alberti, in the fifteenth century, and Pietro Bembo, Mario Equicola, Castiglione, Nobili, Betussi, and very many others in the following century, wrote upon the Beautiful and upon Love. Among the most noteworthy productions of the sort, a crossing of the mediæval and classical currents, is the book of the Dialogues of Love (1535), composed in Italian by the Spanish Jew Leo, and translated into all the cultured languages of the time.[11] The three parts into which it is divided treat of the nature and essence, of the universality, and of the origin of love; and it is demonstrated that[Pg 180] every beautiful thing is good, but not every good thing is beautiful; that beauty is a grace which dilates the soul and moves it to love, and that knowledge of lesser beauties leads to that of higher spiritual beauties. The author gave the name of "Philography" to these and similar affirmations and effusions of which the book is composed. Equicola's[12] work is also interesting, because it contains historical accounts of those who wrote upon the subject before he did so himself. The same intuition was versified and sighed forth by the Petrarchists in their sonnets and ballads, while others, rebellious and mocking, derided it in comedies, verses in terza rima and parodies of all sorts. Some mathematicians, reincarnations of Pythagoras, set to work to determine beauty by exact relations: for instance Leonardo's friend, Luca Paciolo, in the De divina proportione (1509), in which he laid down the pretended æsthetic law of the golden section.[13] And side by side with these new Pythagoreans were those who revived the canon of Polycletus as to the beauty of the human body, especially of the female body, such as Firenzuola, Franco, Luigini, and Dolce. Michæl Angelo fixed an empirical canon for painting in general, when he stated that the means of giving movement and grace to figures[14] consisted in the observance of a certain arithmetical relation. Others, such as Fulvio Pellegrino Morato, investigated the symbolism or meaning of colours. The Platonists generally placed beauty in the soul, the Aristotelians rather in the physical qualities. The Averroist, Agostino Nifo, amid much chatter and many inconclusive remarks, demonstrated the existence of the beautiful in nature by describing the supremely beautiful body of Joan of Aragon, Princess of Tagliacozzo, to whom the book is dedicated.[15] Torquato Tasso, in the "Mintumo,"[16] imitated the uncertainties of[Pg 181] the Hippias of Plato, not without making a free use of the speculations of Plotinus. A chapter of the Poetica of Campanella possesses greater importance, where he describes the good as signum boni and the ugly as signum mali, understanding by good the three prime forces of Power, Wisdom and Love. Although Campanella was still tied to the Platonic idea of the beautiful, the conception of a sign or symbol, here introduced by him, represents progress. By this means he succeeded in perceiving that material things or external facts are neither beautiful nor ugly in themselves. "Mandricard called the wounds in the bodies of his friends the Moors beautiful, for they were large and gave evidence of the great strength of Roland who dealt them; Saint Augustine called the gashes and the dislocations in the body of Saint Vincent beautiful, because they were evidence of his endurance, but they were on the other hand ugly in so far as they were signs of the cruelty of the tyrant Dacianus and of his executioners. It is beautiful to die fighting, said Virgil, for it is the sign of a strong soul. The pet dog of his mistress will seem beautiful to the lover, and doctors call even urine and fæces beautiful, when they indicate health. Everything is both beautiful and ugly" (quapropter nihil est quod non sit pulcrum simul et turpe).[17] In such observations as these we have not a mere state of mystical exaltation, but to some extent a movement in the direction of analysis.

Nothing better serves to demonstrate that the Renaissance did not pass beyond the confines of ancient æsthetic thought than the fact that notwithstanding the renewed acquaintance with the thought of Aristotle, the pedagogic theory of art not only persisted and triumphed, but was transplanted bodily into the text of Aristotle, where its interpreters read it with a certainty that we have to make efforts to achieve. Certainly, a Robortelli (1548) or a Castelvetro (1570) stopped short at the simple, purely hedonistic solution, giving simple pleasure as the[Pg 182] end of art: poetry, says Castelvetro, "was discovered solely for the purpose of delighting and of recreating ... the souls of the rude multitude and of the common people."[18] And here and there some were able to free themselves from both the pleasure theory and that of the didactic end; but the majority, such as Segni, Maggi, Vettori,[19] were for the docere delectando. Scaliger (1561) declared that mimesis or imitation was "finis medius ad illum ultimum qui est docendi cum delectatione," and believing himself to be altogether in agreement with Aristotle as to this, he continued, "docet affectus poeta per actiones, ut bonos amplectamur atque imitemur ad agendum, malos aspernemur ad abstinendum."[20] Piccolomini (1575) observed that "It must not be thought that so many excellent poets and artists, ancient and modern, would have devoted such care and diligence to this most noble study, had they not known and believed that in so doing they were aiding human life," and if "they had not thought that we were to be instructed, directed, and well established by it."[21] The "truth preserved in soft verses, which attracts and persuades the most reluctant" (Tasso),[22] with the comparison from Lucretius attached, is the conception that even Campanella repeats. Poetry is for him "Rhetorica quaedam figurata, quasi magica, quae exempla ministrat ad suadendum bonum et dissuadendum malum delectabiliter iis qui simplici verum et bonum audire nolunt, aut non possunt aut nesciunt."[23] Thus returned the comparison of poetry with oratory; according to Segni they only differ because the first occupies a more lofty situation: "for since imitation representing itself in act by means of poetry, in mighty, chosen words,[Pg 183] in metaphors, images, and indeed the whole of figured speech, which is to be found more in poetry than in the art of oratory, the metrical qualities that are also required in verse, the subjects of which it treats, which have something of the great and delightful, make it appear most beautiful and worthy of being held all the greater marvel."[24] "Three most noble arts" (wrote Tassoni in 1620, and he repeated common opinion), "History, Poetics, and Oratory, come under the heading of Politics and depend upon it; the first of these has reference to the instruction of princes and gentlemen, the second of the people, the third of those who give counsel in public trials or defend private ones that come up for judgment."[25]

According to these views, the tragical catharsis was regarded as designed in general to demonstrate the instability of fortune, or to terrify by example, or to proclaim the triumph of justice, or to render the spectators insensible to the strokes of fortune, owing to their familiarity with suffering. The pedagogic theory, thus renewed and sustained by the authority of the ancients, was popularized in France, Spain, England and Germany, together with all the Italian poetic doctrines of the Renaissance. The French writers of the period of Louis XIV. are altogether penetrated with it. "Cette science agréable qui mêle la gravité des préceptes avec la douceur du langage," is what La Ménardière calls poetry (1640), in the same way as Le Bossu (1675), for whom "le premier but du poète est d'instruire,"[26] as Homer taught, when he wrote two interesting didactic manuals relating to military and political events: the Iliad and the Odyssey.

This pedagogic theory has therefore been reasonably described by all the modern critics in concert, as if by antonomasia, as the Poetics of the Renaissance. It must, however, always be understood that it did not appear[Pg 184] for the first time in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, but that it was prevalent and generally accepted at that time. It may even be remarked, as has already been acutely done,[27] that the Renaissance naturally did not distinguish the didactic kind of poetry from the other kinds, since for it every kind of poetry was didactic. But the Renaissance was not a real Renaissance, save when and where it continued the interrupted spiritual work of antiquity, and in this sense it would perhaps be more just to describe as its Poetics, or rather, as the important element in its Poetics, not the repetition of the pedagogic theory of antiquity and of the Middle Ages, but the resumption, which also took place, of the discussions upon the possible, the probable (verisimile, εικός) of Aristotle, on the reasons of Plato's condemnation and on the procedure of the artist who creates by imagining.

It is in such discussions that is to be found the true contribution of that epoch, not to learning, but to the formation of the science of Æsthetic. The ground was prepared and enriched through the work of the interpreters and commentators of Aristotle and of the new writers on Poetics, especially the Italians, and it was also enriched with some seed that was destined to sprout and to become a vigorous plant in the future. The study of Plato also contributed not a little to call attention to the function of the idea, or of the universal, in poetry. What meaning was to be attached to the statement that poetry should aim at the universal and history at the particular? What was the meaning of the proposition that poetry should proceed according to probability? What could that certain idea consist of, which Raphæl said that he followed in his painting?

Girolamo Fracastoro was among the first to ask himself this question seriously, in the dialogue Naugerius, sive De poetica (1555). He disdainfully rejected the thesis that the end of poetry is pleasure: far be from us,[Pg 185] he exclaimed, so bad an opinion of the poets, who the ancients said were the inventors of all the good arts. Nor did the end of instruction seem to him to be acceptable, which is the task, not of poetry, but of other faculties, such as geography, history, agronomy, philosophy. The poet's task is to represent or to imitate, and he differs from the historian, not in the matter, but in the manner of representation. The others imitate the particular, the poet the universal: the others are like the painters of portraits, the poet produces things as he contemplates the universal and most beautiful idea of them: the others say only what they need to say for their purposes, the poet that he may say everything beautifully and fully.

But the beauty of a poem must always be understood as relative to the class of subject of which it treats; it is the most beautiful in this class, not the supremely beautiful: one must be careful to guard against the equivocal or double meaning of this word "beauty" (æquivocatio illius verbi). A poet never utters what is false or expresses what does not exist, for his words inevitably harmonize in appearance or signification either with the opinions of men or with the universal. Nor can we accept the Platonic axiom that the poet has no knowledge of the things of which he treats; he does know them, but in his own poet's manner.[28]

While Fracastoro strives to elaborate the important passage in Aristotle touching the universal of poetry, and though somewhat vague in his treatment, keeps fairly close to the mark; Castelvetro, on the contrary, judges the Aristotelian fragment with the freedom and superior knowledge of the true critic. He recognizes that the Poetics is merely a notebook recording certain principles and methods of compiling the art, not the art fully compiled. He remarks, moreover, not without logical acumen, that Aristotle having adopted the criterion of probability or of that "which presents an appearance of[Pg 186] historic truth," should have applied his theory in the first case to history, not to poetry; for history being a "narrative according to truth of memorable human actions," and poetry a narrative according to probability of events which might possibly occur, the second cannot receive "all its radiance" from the first. Nor does it escape him that Aristotle describes two different things by the one word "imitation": (a) "following the example of another," which is "acting in exactly the same way as another without knowing the reason of such action": and (b) the imitation "demanded by poetry," which "does things in a manner totally different from that in which they have been done hitherto and proposes a new example for imitation." Nevertheless Castelvetro cannot extricate himself from the confusion between the imaginary and the historical; for he himself says "the realm of the former is generally that of certainty," but "the field of certainty is often crossed with bars of uncertainty just as the field of uncertainty is often crossed with bars of certainty." Also what can be said of this curious interpretation of the Aristotelian theory of pleasure experienced in the imitation of ugly models, that such pleasure is based on the fact that since an imitation is always imperfect, it is incapable of exciting the disgust and fear which would arise from the contemplation of real ugliness? And what of his remark that the characteristics of painting and poetry are so diverse as to be in opposition one to the other; imitation of objects giving rise to great pleasure in the former art and as great displeasure in the latter? And so on in numberless cases of bold but scarcely felicitous subtleties.[29]

In opposition to Robortelli, who asserted the identity of the probable and the false, Piccolomini held that the probable (verisimile) is inherently neither false nor true, only by accident becoming one or other.[30] Of the same mind is the Spaniard Alfonso Lopez Pinciano (1596), who says the scope of poetry "no es la mentira, que seria[Pg 187] coincider con la sophística, ni la historia que seria tomar la materia al histórico; y no siendo historia porque toca fabúlas ni mentira porque toca historia, tiene por objeto el verisimil, que todo lo abraza. De aqui resulta que es un arte superior á la metaphysica, porqué comprende mucho mas, y se extiende a lo que es y á lo que no es."[31] What may lie behind this notion of probability is still indefinite and impenetrable.

Moved by a wish to place poetry on a foundation other than the probable, Francesco Patrizzi, the anti-Aristotelian, composed his Poetica between 1555 and 1586 in refutation of all Aristotle's main doctrines. Patrizzi notes that the word "imitation" is given many meanings by the Greek philosopher, who uses it now to denote a single word, now to describe a tragedy; at times it stands for a figure of speech, at others for a fiction: whence he draws the logical conclusion (from which, however, he shrinks alarmed) "that all philosophic and other kinds of writing and speaking are poetry, since they are made of words which themselves are imitations." He observes further that, according to Aristotle, it is impossible to distinguish between poetry and history (since both are imitations), or to prove that verse is not essential to poetry, or that history, science and art are unsuitable material for it; since Aristotle in several passages says that poetry may comprise "fable, actual occurrences, belief of others, duty, the best, necessity, the possible, the probable, the credible, the incredible, the suitable" as well as "all things worldly." After these objections, some sound, others sophistical, Patrizzi comes to the conclusion that "there is no truth in the dogma that poetry is wholly imitation; and even if it be imitation at all, it belongs not to poets alone, nor is it mere imitation of any kind, but something else not mentioned by Aristotle nor pointed out by any one else, nor yet borne into the mind of man. The discovery may possibly be made in course of time, or some one may hit upon the[Pg 188] truth and bring it to light"; but up to the present "such discovery has not been made."[32]

Yet these confessions of ignorance, these endeavours, though vain, to escape from the Aristotelian circle of ideas, and the great literary controversies of the sixteenth century concerning the concept of poetic truth and the probable had their use in that they stimulated interest by directing attention to a mystery still unsolved. Thought had once more begun to move upon the æsthetic problem, and this time it was not destined to be broken off or to lose itself.

Interest in æsthetic investigation increased rapidly in the early years of the following century, owing either to the popularity acquired by certain new words or to the novel meanings given to words already familiar, which emphasized new aspects of artistic production and criticism, complicating the problem and rendering it thereby more puzzling and attractive. For example: wit, taste, imagination or fancy, feeling, and several others, which must be examined rather closely.

Wit (ingegno) differed somewhat from intellect. Free use of the word arose, if we mistake not, from its convenience in Rhetoric as conceived by antiquity; that is to say, a suave and facile mode of knowledge, as opposed to the severity of Dialectic; an "Antistrophe to Dialectic," which substituted for reasons of actual fact those of probability or fancy; enthymemes for syllogisms, examples for inductions; so much so that Zeno the Stoic figured Dialectic with her fist clenched and Rhetoric with her hand open. The empty style of the decadent Italian authors in the seventeenth century found its complete justification in this theory of rhetoric; their prose and verse, Marinesque and Achillinesque, professed to exhibit not the true but the striking, subtly conceited, curious or nice. The word wit, ingegno, was now repeated much more frequently than in the preceding century; wit was hailed as presiding genius of Rhetoric; its "vivacities" were lauded to the skies; "belli ingegni"[Pg 190] was a phrase seized upon by the French, who rendered it as "esprit" or "beaux esprits."[1] One of the most noteworthy commentators on these matters (although opposed to the literary excesses of the times), Matteo Pellegrini of Bologna (1650), defines wit as "that part of the soul which in a certain way practises, aims, and seeks to find and create the beautiful and the efficacious";[2] he considers the work of "wit" to be the "conceits" and "subtleties" noted by him in a previous pamphlet (1639).[3] Emmanuele Tesauro also descants at considerable length in his Cannochiale Aristotelico (1654) upon wit and subtleties, not alone "verbal" and "lapidary" conceits, but also "symbolic" and "figurative" (statues, stories, devices, satires, hieroglyphs, mosaics, emblems, insignia, sceptres), and even "animated agents" (pantomimes, play-scenes, masques and dances): all things which may be grouped under "polite quibbling" or rhetoric as distinct from "dialectic."

Amongst such treatises, product of their age, one written by the Spaniard Baltasar Gracian (1642) became celebrated throughout Europe.[4] Wit became in his hands the strictly inventive or artistic faculty, "genius"; génie, "genius" were now used as synonyms of wit, ingegno and esprit. In the following century Mario Pagano[5] wrote: "Wit may be taken as equivalent to the génie of the French, a word now commonly used in Italy." To return to the seventeenth century, Bouhours, a Jesuit writer of dialogues on the Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d'esprit (1687), says that "'heart' and 'wit' are greatly in fashion just now, nothing else is spoken of in polite conversation, and all discourse is at last brought round to l'esprit et le cœur."[6]

[Pg 191]

The word taste or good taste was equally widespread and fashionable, signifying the faculty of judgement brought to bear on the beautiful, distinct to some extent from intellectual power, and sometimes divided into active and passive, so that it was usual to speak of one kind of taste as "productive" or "fertile" (thus coinciding with "wit"), and of another as "sterile."

From the rough notes which we possess as to the history of the concept of taste, several meanings of the word, not all of equal importance as indications of the development of ideas, detach themselves in a somewhat confused manner. "Taste," meaning "pleasure" or "delight," was an old-established word in Italy and Spain, as is shown in such phrases as "to have a taste for, to be to one's taste"; when Lope di Vega and other Spaniards speak continually of the drama of their country as seeking to please the popular taste ("deleita el gusto"; "para darle gusto") they mean only the "pleasure" of the populace. In Italy there was a very ancient use of the word in the metaphorical sense of "judgement," either literary, scientific, or artistic; numberless examples of this use occur in writers of the sixteenth century (Ariosto, Varchi, Michæl Angelo, Tasso). To take but one of these: the lines in Orlando Furioso where it is said of the Emperor Augustus, "L' aver avuto in poesia buon gusto La proscrizione iniqua gli perdona," "For having had good taste in poetry he shall be forgiven his iniquitous proscriptions"; or the remark of Ludovico Dolce that' some person "had such exquisite taste, he sang no verses save those of Catullus and Calvus."[7] The word "taste," in the sense of a special faculty or attitude of mind, appears to have been used for the first time in Spain in the middle of the seventeenth century by Gracian,[8] the moralist and political writer already quoted. It is evidently to him that the Italian author Trevisano alludes in a preface to a book by Muratori (1708) when[Pg 192] he speaks of "Spaniards, above all others cunning in metaphor," who express themselves in "that eloquent and laconic phrase, good taste"; touching further on taste and genius he quotes, "that ingenious Spaniard," Gracian,[9] who gave the word the sense of "practical wit," enabling one to perceive the "true signification" of things; his "man of good taste" becomes in our language "a man of tact" in the affairs of life.[10]

The transference of the word to the domain of æsthetic seems to have taken place in France during the last quarter of the century. "Il y a dans l'art un point de perfection, comme de bonté ou de maturité dans la nature: celui qui le sent et qui l'aime a le goût parfait; celui qui ne le sent pas, et qui aime au deçà ou au delà, a le goût défectueux. Il y a donc un bon et un mauvais goût, et l'on dispute des goûts avec fondement," writes La Bruyère[11] (1688). As attributes or variants of taste it was usual to mention delicacy and variety or variability. Bearing its fresh critical—literary content, but not freed from the encumbrance of its earlier practical and moral significance, the word spread from France into other European countries. Thomasius introduced it into Germany in 1687;[12] and in England it becomes "good taste." In Italy it appears as early as 1696 as title of a large book written by Camillo Ettori, the Jesuit, Il buon gusto ne' componimenti rettorici.[13] The preface notes: "The expression 'good taste,' proper to those who rightly distinguish good from bad flavour in foods, is now in general use and claimed by every one as a title in connexion with literature and the humanities"; it reappears in 1708 at[Pg 193] the beginning of Muratori's[14] book already quoted: Trevisano treats of it philosophically: Salvini discusses it in his note upon the Perfetta Poesia of Muratori above mentioned, where the subject of good taste occupies several pages,[15] and finally it gives its name to the Academy of Good Taste founded at Palermo in 1718.[16] Scholars of the day who took up the discussion of the theme, recollecting some passages scattered throughout the ancient classics, placed the new concept in relation with the "tacitus quidam sensus sine ulla ratione et arte" of Cicero; and with the "indicium" which "nec magis arte traditur quam gustus aut odor" of Quintilian.[17] More particularly Montfaucon de Villars (1671)[18] wrote a book on "Delicacy"; Ettori strove to find some definition more satisfactory than those current at the time (e.g. "it is the finest invention of wit, the flower of wit and extract of beauty's self," and similar conceits);[19] Orsi made it the subject of his Considerazioni written in reply to Bouhours' book.

In Italy in the seventeenth century we find imagination or fancy placed on a pinnacle. What do you mean by talking of probability and historical truth (asks Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino in 1644), of false or true in connexion with poetry; which deals not with fiction, fact or historical probability but with primary apprehensions which assert neither truth nor falsehood? Following this line of argument, imagination takes the place of that probable, neither true nor false, advocated by some commentators of Aristotle; a theory strongly criticized by Pallavicino, here agreeing with Piccolomini, whom however he does not name, and in opposition to Castelvetro whom he explicitly mentions. He who goes to the play (continues Pallavicino) knows quite well[Pg 194] that the scenes acted on the stage are not real; although he has no belief in them yet they please him greatly. For "if poetry desired to be mistaken for truth, the end she had in view would be a he, by the laws of nature and of God doomed inevitably to perish: for a lie is nothing but an untruth uttered in the hope that it may be mistaken for truth. How then should an art so tainted be allowed to flourish in the best-regulated republics? How should it be commended and used by the very writers of Holy Scripture?" Ut pictura poësis: poetry is like painting, which is a "diligent imitation" aiming at a close copy of the features, colours, acts, nay, even the hidden motives, of the objects it represents: and it "does not pretend that fiction is truth." The sole aim of poetic tales is "to adorn our understanding with imagery, that is to say, with sumptuous, novel, marvellous and splendid appearances. And this is known to diffuse so useful an influence on mankind that humanity insists on rewarding poets with praise more glorious than is bestowed on any other men; their books are protected from the ravages of time with greater solicitude than is shown to scientific treatises or productions of any other art; in the end the names of poets are crowned with adoring veneration. See how the world thirsts for beautiful first apprehensions, although these are neither laden with science nor are they vehicles of truth."[20]

Sixty years later these ideas, although expressed by a Cardinal, seemed all too daring to Muratori, who could not bring himself to allow poets so much latitude, or to enfranchize them from their obligations to the probable. Nevertheless Muratori allows a large space to imagination, "an inferior apprehensive faculty" which, without caring whether things be false or true, confines itself to apprehending them, and "represents" the truth merely, leaving the task of "cognition" to the "superior apprehensive faculty" or intellect.[21] Even the stony heart[Pg 195] of Gravina yields to the charm of imagination: he admits it occupies a considerable place in the realm of poetry and suffers his own arid prose to describe it as "a sorceress, but beneficent," "a delirium which cures madness."[22]

Earlier than either of these, Ettori commended it to the good rhetorician, "who in order that he may awaken images" must "familiarize himself with whatever is subject to bodily feeling" and "encounter the genius of imagination, which is a sensuous faculty," to these ends using "species rather than genera (since the latter, being more universal than the former, are less sensible), individuals rather than species, effects than causes, the number of the greater rather than the number of the less."[23]

As far back as 1578 the Spaniard Huarte had maintained that eloquence is the product of imagination rather than of intellect or reason.[24] In England Bacon (1605) ascribed science to intellect, history to memory and poetry to imagination or fancy:[25] Hobbes inquired into the procedure of poetry:[26] Addison (1712) devoted several numbers of his Spectator to analysis of the "pleasures of imagination."[27] Somewhat later, the importance of imagination was felt in Germany, where it found advocates in Bodmer, Breitinger and other writers of the Swiss school, who owed much to the influence of the Italians (Muratori, Gravina, Calepio) and the English: acting in their turn as teachers of Klopstock and the new German critical school.[28]

It was at this same period that opposition became clearly marked between those accustomed "à juger par le sentiment" and those used to "raisonner par principes."[29][Pg 196] The Frenchman, Du Bos, author of Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture (1719), upholds the theory of feeling; according to him art is simply a self-abandonment "aux impressions que les objets étrangers font sur nous," setting aside all reflective labour. He laughs at those philosophers who deny the force of imagination, and Malebranche's eloquent discourse founded on this denial draws from Du Bos the remark, "c'est à notre imagination qu'il parle contre l'abus de l'imagination." He refuses to see any intellectual nucleus in the productions of the arts, saying that art consists not in instruction but in style: nor is he too respectful towards the probable: he says he finds himself unable to set limits between it and the marvellous, and leaves to "born poets" the task of thus miraculously uniting opposites. For Du Bos there is no criterion of art save feeling, which he calls a "sixième sens," against which dispute is vain since in such matters popular opinion invariably wins the day over the dogmatic pronouncements of artists and men of letters: all the ingenious conceits of the greatest metaphysicians, though unimpeachable in themselves, will not in the slightest degree diminish the lustre of poetry or despoil it of one single attraction. Attempts to discredit Ariosto and Tasso in the eyes of Italians were as vain as those made against the Cid in France. Other people's arguments can never persuade us of the contrary of what we feel.[29] These notions were adopted by many French writers: for example Cartaut de la Villate[30] observes, "Le grand talent d'un écrivain qui veut plaire, est de tourner ses réflexions en sentiments;" and Trublet, "C'est un principe sûr, que la poésie doit être une expression de sentiment."[30] Nor were the English slow in emphasizing the concept of "emotion" in their theories of literature.

[Pg 197]

In the writings of this period imagination was often identified with wit, wit with taste, taste with feeling, and feeling with first apprehensions or imagination;[31] we have already noted that taste is sometimes critical and sometimes productive: this fusion, identification and subordination of terms apparently distinct shows how they gravitate round one single concept.

A German critic, one of the very few who have sought to penetrate the darkness surrounding the origins of modern Æsthetic, considers the concept of taste (which we owe, he thinks, to Gracian) "the most important æsthetic doctrine which remained for modern times to discover."[32] But without going so far as to say that taste is the chief doctrine of the science, and the foundation of all the rest, instead of only a particular doctrine, and without recapitulating what we have already said of Gracian's relation to the theory of taste, it is well to repeat that taste, wit, imagination, feeling, and so on, instead of new concepts scientifically grasped, were simply new words corresponding to vague impressions: at most they were problems, not concepts: apprehensions of ground still to be conquered, not yet annexed and brought into subjection. It must not be forgotten that the very men who made use of these terms could scarcely grope after the ideas they suggested without falling back into the old traditions, the only ones on which they had an intellectual grasp. To them the new words were shades, not bodies: when they tried to embrace them their arms returned empty to their own breasts.

Certainly wit differs to a certain extent from intellect. Yet Pellegrini and Tesauro, with other writers of treatises, never fail to point out that intellectual truth lies at the root of wit. Trevisano defines it as "an internal virtue of the soul which invents methods for expressing and executing its own concepts: it is recognizable now in the arrangement of things we invent, now in the clear expression of them: sometimes in cunning reconciliations of matters seemingly opposed, sometimes in tracing[Pg 198] analogies but faintly discernible." To sum up, one must not "allow the actions of wit to go unaccompanied by those of intellect," or even by those of practical morality.[33] More ingenuously Muratori says, "Wit is that virtue and active force with which the intellect is able to assemble, unite and discover the similarities, relations and reasons of things."[34] In this manner wit, after having been distinguished from intellect, eventually becomes a part or a manifestation of it. By a somewhat different path the same conclusion is reached by Alexander Pope when he counsels that wit be reined in like a mettlesome horse, and observes:

For wit and judgement often are at strife,
Though meant each other's aid like man and wife.[35]

Similar vicissitudes befell the word "taste," outcome of a metaphor (as was noted by Kant) whose effect was to stand in opposition to intellectualistic principles, as if to say that the judgement governing the choice of food destined solely for the delectation of the palate is of the same nature as that which decides opinions in matters of art.[36] Nevertheless, the very definition of this anti-intellectualistic concept contained a reference to intellect and reason; the implicit comparison with the palate was ultimately taken as signifying an anticipation of reflexion: as Voltaire wrote in the following century: "De même que la sensation du palais anticipe la réflexion."[37] Intellect and reason glimmer through all the definitions of taste belonging to this period. Mme. Dacier wrote in 1684, "Une harmonie, un accord de l'esprit et de la raison."[38] "Une raison éclairée qui, d'intelligence avec le cœur, fait toujours un juste choix parmi des choses opposées ou semblables," wrote the author of Entretiens galants.[39] According to[Pg 199] another writer quoted by Bonhours, "taste" is "a natural feeling implanted in the soul, independent of any science that can possibly be acquired"; it is practically "an instinct of right reason."[40] The same Bouhours, whilst deprecating this interpretation of one metaphor by another, says, "Taste is more nearly allied to judgement than wit."[41] The Italian Ettori thinks that it may generally be described as "judgement regulated by art,"[42] and Baruffaldi (1710) identifies it with "discernment" reduced from theory to practice.[43] De Crousaz (1715) observes: "Le bon goût nous fait d'abord estimer par sentiment ce que la raison aurait approuvé, après qu'elle se serait donné le temps de l'examiner assez pour en juger par des justes idées."[44] And somewhat prior to him Trevisano considered it "a sentiment always willing to conform to whatsoever reason accepts," and in conjunction with divine grace, a powerful help to man in revealing the true and good, no longer able to circulate freely among mankind owing to original sin. For König (1727) in Germany taste was "a power of the intellect, product of a healthy mind and acute judgement which makes one able to feel the true, good and beautiful"; and for Bodmer in 1736 (after lengthy correspondence on the subject with his Italian friend Calepio) "a practised reflexion, prompt and penetrating into the smallest details, by which intellect is able to distinguish the true from the false, the perfect from the imperfect." Calepio and Bodmer were opponents of pure feeling, and made a distinction between "taste" and "good taste."[45] Traversing the same intellectualistic path, Muratori speaks of "good taste" in "erudition" and others of "good taste in philosophy."

[Pg 200]

Perhaps those authors were wise who preferred to remain vague and to identify taste with an indefinable Something, a je ne sais quoi; a nescio quid: a new expression which expressed nothing new, but at least called attention to the problem. Bouhours (1671) discusses it at length: "Les Italiens, qui font mystère de tout, emploient en toutes rencontres leur non so che: on ne voit rien de plus commune dans leurs poètes," and quotes Tasso and others in confirmation.[45] A note upon it is found in Salvini: "This 'good taste' has but recently come to the front; it seems a vague term applicable to nothing particular, and is equivalent to the non so che, to a happy or successful turn of wit."[46] Father Feijóo, who wrote on the Razón del gusto and on El no se qué (1733), says very wisely: "En muchas producciones no solo de la naturaleza, sino del arte, y aun mas del arte que de la naturaleza, encuentran los hombres, fuera di aquellas perfecciones sujetes á su comprehension racional, otro genero de primor misterioso que, lisonjeando el gusto, atormenta el entendemento. Los sentidos le palpan, pero no le puede dissipar la razon, y así, al querer explicarle, no se encuentran voces ni conceptos que cuadren á su idea, y salimos del paso con decir que hay un non se qué, que agrada, que enamora que hechiza, sin que pueda encontrarse revelacion mas clara da este natural misterio."[47] And President Montesquieu: "Il y a quelquefois dans les personnes ou dans les choses un charme invisible, une grâce naturelle, qu'on n'a pu définir, et qu'on a été forcé d'appeler le je ne sais quoi. Il me semble que c'est un effet principalement fondé sur la surprise."[48] Some writers rebelled against the subterfuge of the je ne sais quoi, saying, rightly enough, that it was a confession of ignorance: but they knew not how to escape that ignorance without falling into confusion between taste and intellectual judgement.

[Pg 201]

If the attempt to define "wit" and "taste" usually resulted in intellectualism, it was easy to transform imagination and feeling into sensationalistic doctrines. We have seen how earnestly Pallavicino insisted on the non-intellectuality of the fantasies and inventions of the imagination. "Nothing presents itself to the admirer of the beautiful (he writes) to enable him to verify his cognition and satisfy himself that the object recognized is or is not that for which he takes it; if either by vision or by strong apprehension he is led to think it actually present by an act of judgement, his taste for beauty as beauty does not arise from such act of judgement, but from the vision or lively apprehension which might remain in ourselves even when the deception of belief was corrected"; just as happens when we are drowsy and know ourselves to be but half awake, yet are unwilling to tear ourselves from sweet dreams. For Pallavicino imagination cannot err; he assimilates it wholly to the sensations, which are incapable of truth or falsity. And if imaginative knowledge pleases, it is not because it holds a special truth (imaginative truth), but because it creates objects which "though false are pleasing": the painter makes not likenesses but images which, all resemblance apart, are pleasing to the sight: the poet awakens apprehensions "sumptuous, novel, marvellous, splendid."[49] His opinion coincides, if we mistake not, with Marino's sensationalism: "The poet should aim only at the marvellous ... he who cannot amaze his hearers is not worth a straw":[50] he applauds the oft-repeated dictum of "Gabriel Chiabrera, that Pindar of Savona, that poetry should cause the eyebrows to arch themselves."[51] But in the Treatise upon Style written later (1646) he repents of his youthful achievement and appears willing to return to the pedagogic theory: "And forasmuch as I theorized concerning poetry in the basest manner, treating it solely as a minister of that delight which the mind enjoys in the less noble operation of imagination or apprehension[Pg 202] arising from imagination; and, therefore, in consequence I somewhat relaxed the strings which bind it to the probable: I now wish to demonstrate that poetry has other functions more exalted and fruitful, while remaining in strict servitude to the probable: which office is to guide our minds in the noble exercise of judgement; thus it becomes the nurse of philosophy which it nourishes with sweet milk."[52] The Jesuit Ettori, while inculcating the use of imagination and recommending orators to go to school with the "actors," points out that imagination should fulfil the simple office of "interpreter" between intellect and truth, never assuming dominion, otherwise the orator would be treating his audience or readers "not as men, to whom intellect is proper, but as beasts whom imagination satisfies."[53]

The conception of imagination as purely sensuous shows strongly in Muratori, who is so convinced that the faculty, if left to itself, would deteriorate into a riot of dreams and intoxication, that he links it to intellect as to "an authoritative friend" who shall influence the choice and combination of images.[54] The problem of the nature of imagination had strong attraction for Muratori, and, while traducing and vilifying, he returns to it again in his Della forza della fantasia umana;[55] describing it as a material faculty essentially different from the mental or spiritual, and denying it the validity of knowledge. Although he had observed that the aim of poetry is distinct from that of science, in that the latter seeks to "know," and the former to "represent" truth,[56] he persisted in counting Poetry as an "art of delectation" subordinate to Moral Philosophy, of whom she was one of the three servants or ministers.[57] Very similarly Gravina held that along with novelty and delight in the marvellous, poetry should endow the mind of the vulgar with "truth and universal cognitions."[58]

[Pg 203]

Outside Italy the same movement was going on. Bacon, although he assigned poetry to imagination, yet considered it as something intermediary between history and science, approximating epic to history and the most lofty style, the parabolic, to science: ("poēsis parabolica inter reliquas eminet".) Elsewhere he calls poetry somnium or declares absolutely that "scientias fere non parit," and that "pro lusu potius ingenii quam pro scientia est habenda": music, painting and sculpture are voluptuous arts.[59] Addison identified the pleasures of the imagination with those produced by visible objects or the ideas to which they give rise: such pleasures are not so strong as those of the senses nor so refined as those of the intellect: he groups together the pleasures experienced respectively in comparing imitations with the objects imitated, and in sharpening by this means the faculty of observation.[60]

[Sidenote Feeling and Sensationalism.]

The sensationalism of Du Bos and other upholders of feeling appears very clearly. For Du Bos art is a pastime whose pleasantness consists in the fact that it occupies the mind without fatigue, and has affinities with the pleasure provoked by gladiatorial contests, bullfights and tourneys.[61]

For these reasons, whilst noting the importance, in the prehistory of Æsthetic, of these new words and the new views they express; and while recognizing their value as a ferment in the discussion of the æsthetic problem, taken up by thinkers of the Renaissance at the point at which it had been left by the ancients; we yet cannot discern in their apparition the true origin of our science. By these words and the discussions they aroused, the æsthetic fact clamoured even louder and more insistently for its own philosophical justification; but this it was not yet to attain either by this means or by any other.