Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/526

 V. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY OF ART. BY YBJO HIBN. WHEN Baumgarten 150 years ago introduced the theory of " liberal arts and beautiful thinking" as a new discipline in the literary world, he was anxious to defend in advance his JSsthetica against those who might find it infra horizontem suam. Within one generation of the time when it was thus considered necessary to apologise for a treatment of the phenomena of " sensitive knowledge," the new science had already acquired a fixed method and a rich literature. So deeply had the theories and ideas, which were first brought together under a common heading in Baumgarten's short manual, influenced contemporary thought, that the most im- portant questions of life came to be treated as aesthetic prob- lems. This glorious period, however, has in its turn been succeeded by an age which neglects speculation on art and beauty for other tasks which are regarded as far more im- portant. Such rapid changes within a few generations appear almost incomprehensible. But they can easily be explained if we take into account the intimate connexion which always exists between aesthetic speculation and prevailing currents of thought. In Mr. Bosanquet's History of ^Esthetic it has been pointed out with great clearness to what extent the prosperity of aesthetic studies was caused by the general philosophical situation. Esthetic epistemology, as set forth in Baum- garten's chapter on cognitio sensitiva, and further developed in Kant's Kritik der Urtheilskraft, described, as is well known, a form of judgment which is neither purely rational nor purely sensual. For philosophers who had to struggle with the apparently irreconcilable opposition between reason and the senses, this conception of a mediative faculty must have satisfied a most urgent need. Similarly we may suppose that the ethical observer felt himself emancipated from the narrow antagonism between body and spirit by looking at our actions with aesthetic attention. In proportion, however, as