to glance at the relation of general aesthetics to the special
problems of Fine Art. It is evident that the definition of the
aims and methods of art, both as a whole and in its several
forms, involving as it does special technical knowledge, may
with advantage be treated apart from a general theory. (See
FINE ARTS.) At the same time the study of art raises larger
problems which require to be dealt with to some extent by this
theory. We may instance the group of problems which have
to do with the relation of art to ``beauty'' in its narrower
sense, such as the function of the painful and of the ugly in
art, the meaning of artistic imitation and truth to nature,
of idealization, and the nature of artistic illusion; also
the question of the didactic and of the moral function of
art. Even more special problems of art, such as the effect
of the tragic, the nature of musical expression, can only be
adequately treated in the light of a general aesthetic theory.
In conclusion, it may be pointed out that the psychological
theorist has of late been busy in an outlying region of
art-lore, inquiring into the nature of the artistic impulse and
temperament, and into the processes of imaginative creation.
These inquiries have been carried out to some extent in connexion
with studies of the origin of art, and of the relation of art
to the social environment. Their importance for aesthetics
lies in the circumstance that they are fitted to throw light
upon the aesthetic consciousness as it is developed in those
who are not only in a special sense cultivators of it, but
represent in a peculiar manner the ideas and the aims of art.38
HISTORY OF THEORIES In the following summary of the most
important contributions to aesthetic doctrine, only such
writings will be recognized as contribute to a general conception
of aesthetic objects or experience. These include the more
systematic treatment of the subject in philosophic works as
well as the more thoughtful kind of discussion of principles
to be met with in writings on art by critics and others.
Greek Speculations.---Ancient Greece supolies us with
the first important contributions to aesthetic theory,
though these are scarcely, in quality or in quantity, what
one might nave expected from a people which had so high an
appreciation of beauty and so strong a bent for philosophic
speculation. The first Greek thinker of whose views on the
subject we really know something is Socrates. We learn from
Xenophon's account of him that he regarded the beautiful as
coincident with the good, and both of them are resolvable
into the useful. Every beautiful object is so called because
it serves came rational end, whether the security or the
gratification of man. Socrates appears to have attached
little importance to the immediate gratification which a
beauriful object affords to perception and contemplation,
but to have emphasized rather its power of furthering the
more necessary ends of life. The really valuable point in
his doctrine is the relativity of beauty. Unlike Plato,
he recognized no self-beauty (auto to kalon) existing
absolutely and out of all relation to a percipient mind.
Plato.
Of the views of Plato on the subject, it is hardly less difficult
to gain a clear conception from the Dialogues, than it is in
the case of ethical good. In some of these, various definitions
of the beautiful are rejected as inadequate by the Platonic
Socrates. At the same time we may conclude that Plato's mind
leaned decidedly to the conception of an absolute beauty,
which took its place in his scheme of ideas or self-exisiing
forms. This true beauty is nothing discoverable as an
attribute in another thing, for these nre only beautiful things,
not the beautiful itself. Love (Eros) produces aspiration
towards this pure idea. Elsewhere the soul's intuition of the
self-beautiful is said to be a reminiscence of its prenatal
existence. As to the precise forms in which the idea of beauty
reveals itself, Plato is not very decided. His theory of an
absolute beauty does not easily adjust itself to the notion
of its contributing merely a variety of sensuous pleasure,
to which he appears to lean in some dialogues. He tends
to identify the self-beautiful with the conceptions of the
true and the good, and thus there arose the Platonic formula
kalokagathia. So far as his writings embody the notion of
any common element in beautiful objects, it is proportion,
harmony or unity among their parts. He emphasizes unity in
its simplest aspect as seen in evenness of line and purity of
colour. He recognizes in places the beauty of the mind, and
seems to think that the highest beauty of proportion is to
be found in the union of a beautiful mind with a beautiful
body. He had but a poor opinion of art, regarding it as a
trick of imitation (mimesis) which takes us another step
farther from the luminous sphere of rational intuition into
the shadowy region of the semblances of sense. Accordingly,
in his scheme for an ideal republic, he provided for the most
inexorable censorship of poets, &c., so as to make art as far
as possible an instrument of moral and political training.
Aristotle.
Aristotle proceeded to a more serious investigation of the
aesthetic phenomena so as to develop by scientific analysis
certain principles of beauty and art. In his treatises on
poetry and rhetoric he gives us, along with a theory of these
arts, certain general principles of beauty; and scattered among
his other writings we find many valuable suggestions on the same
subject. He seeks (in the Metaphysics) to distinguish the
good and the beautiful by saying that the former is always in
action (`en praxei) whereas the latter may exist in motionless
things as well (`en akinetois.) At the same time he had
as a Greek to allow that though essentially different things
the good might under certain conditions be called beautiful.
He further distinguished the beautiful from the fit, and in
a passage of the Politics set beauty above the useful and
necessary. He helped to determine another characteristic
of the beautiful, the absence of all lust or desire in the
pleasure it bestows. The universal elements of beauty,
again, Aristotle finds (in the Metaphysics) to be order
(taxis), symmetry and definiteness or determinateness (to
orismenon). In the Poetics he adds another essential,
namely, a certain magnitude; it being desirable for a
synoptic view of the whole that the object should not be too
large, while clearness of perception requires that it should
not be too small. Aristotle's views on art are an immense
advance on those of Plato. He distinctly recognized (in the
Politics and elsewhere) that its aim is immediate pleasure,
as distinct from utility, which is the end of the mechanical
arts. He took a higher view of artistic imitation than Plato,
holding that so far from being an unworthy trick, it implied
knowledge and discovery, that its objects not only comprised
particular things which happen to most, but contemplated
what is probable and what necessarily exists. The celebrated
passage in the Poetics, where he declares poetry to be
more philosophical and serious a matter (spoudaiteron)
than philosophy, brings out the advance of Aristotle on his
predecessor. He gives us no complete classification of the fine
arts, and it is doubtful how far his principles, e.g. his
celebrated idea of a purification of the passions by tragedy,
are to be taken as applicable to other than the poetic art.
Plotinus.
Of the later Greek and Roman writers the Neo-Platonist Plotinus
deserves to be mentioned. According to him, objective reason
(nous) as self-moving, becomes the formative influence which
reduces dead matter to form. Matter when thus formed becomes
a notion (logos), and its form is beauty. Objects are
ugly so far as they are unacted upon by reason, and therefore
formless. The creative reason is absolute beauty, and is
called the more than beautiful. There are three degrees
or stages of manifested beauty: that of human reason, which
is the highest; of the human soul, which is less perfect
through its connexion with a material body; and of real
objects, which is the lowest manifestation of all. As to
the precise forms of beauty, he supposed, in opposition to
Aristotle, that a single thing not divisible into parts might
be beautiful through its unity and simplicity. He gives a
high place to the beauty of colours in which material darkness
is overpowered by light and warmth. In reference to artistic
beauty he said that when the artist has notions as models for
his creations, these may become more beautiful than natural
objects. This is clearly a step away from Plato's doctrine
towards our modern conception of artistic idealization.
German writers. (a) Systematic treatises; Baumgarten.
2. German Writers.---We may pass by the few thoughts on the
subject to be found among medieval writers and turn to modern
theories, beginning with those of German writers as the most
numerous and most elaborately set forth. The best of the
Germans who attempted to develop an aesthetic theory as part
of a system of philosophy was Baumgarten (Aesthetica) .
Adopting the Leibnitz-Wolffian theory of knowledge, he sought
to complete it by setting over against the clear scientific
or ``logical'' knowledge of the understanding, the confused
knowledge of the senses, to which (as we have seen) he gave the
name ``aesthetic.'' Beauty with him thus corresponds with perfect
sense-knowledge. Baumgarten is clearly an intellectualist in
aesthetics, reducing taste to an intellectual act and ignoring
the element of feeling. The details of his aesthetics are mostly
unimportant. Arguing from Leibnitz's theory of the world
as the best possible, Baumgarten concluded that nature is
the highest embodiment of beauty, and that art must seek its
supreme function in the strictest possible imitation of nature.
Kant.
The next important treatment of aesthetics by a philosopher
is that of Kant. He deals with the ``Judgment of Taste''
in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (J. H. Bernard's
translation 1892), which treatise supplements the two
better-known critiques (vide KANT), and by investigating
the conditions of the validity of feeling mediates between
then respective subjects, cognition and desire (volition).
He takes an imoortant step in denying objective existence to
beauty. Aesthetic value for him is fitness to please as
object of pure contemplation. This aesthetic satisfaction is
more than mere agreeableness, since it must be disinterested
and free--that is to say, from all concern about the
real existence of the object, and about our dependence on
it. He appears to concede a certain formal objectivity to
beauty in his doctrine of an appearance of purposiveness
(Zweckmassigkeit) in the beautiful object, this being
defined as its harmony with the cognative faculties involved
in an aesthetic judgment (imagination and understanding); a
harmony the consciousness of which underlies our aesthetic
pleasure. Yet this part of his doctrine is very imperfectly
developed. While beauty thus ceases with Kant to have
objective validity and remains valid only for the contemplator,
he claims for it universal subjective validity, since the
object we pronounce to be beautiful is fitted to please all
men. We know that this must be so from reflecting on the
disinterestedness of our pleasure, on its entire independence
of personal inclination. Kant insists that the aesthetic
judgment is always, in logical phrase, an ``individual'' i.e.
