Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/229

 AEBUCKLE AND THE MOLESWORTH-SHAFTESBURY SCHOOL. 215 Esthetics, it is strange how far he was from appreciating the essentials of Art ; and even Literature seems to have appealed to him from its linguistic and Philological sides rather than the artistic. It is a strange irony of Philosophy, that Berkeley, whose letters from Italy teem with apprecia- tive references to painting and sculpture, degrades Beauty to the merest utility, 1 while Hutcheson, one of the earliest sesthetical writers, fails to show any deep understanding or sympathy with the Beauty of Art. Little as Arbuckle has written, his isolated expressions show us brief transient glimpses of his entrance into the spirit of Poetry and Art, which would have qualified him to do valuable work had he not deserted Philosophy. As it is, he leaves us a young man's fragment, and when one remembers that the un- promising title of Sermons has excluded Butler's ethical work from the majority of the histories of Philosophy, until quite recently, it is little wonder that theories disguised under the title of Hibernicuss Letters should have been hitherto unrecognised as containing a missing link of the chain of the British historical development of thought. 1 Alciphron, Dia. 3, 9. Hutcheson, Addendum to fourth edition of Inquiry.