Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/528

 514 YRJO HIEN : to arrest the growth of artistic forms whose very existence contradicts the generalisations of the old systems. And he is equally powerless to stop such violations of the supposed frontiers of the different arts, as continually occur, e.g., in modern picturesque poetry and descriptive music. It is only natural that in times so inopportune general speculations on art and beauty have been more and more abandoned in favour of detailed studies in the technicalities of art, historical researches in which works of art are con- sidered chiefly as documents bearing on culture, and ex- periments on the physiology and psychology of aesthetic perception. For art itself and its development it would perhaps be unimportant, if a science which has never been of any great positive and direct influence on artistic produc- tion should completely disappear. But from the theoretical point of view it would be matter for regret, if artistic activi- ties ceased to be considered as a whole. And so it would also be if aesthetic feelings, judgments of taste, and ideals of beauty came to be treated only in appendices to works on psychology. It is true that all these notions have irre- mediably lost their former metaphysical and philosophical importance. But in compensation art and beauty have for modern thinking acquired a social and psychological signifi- cance. To determine the part which artistic activities and aesthetic appreciation play in their relation to the other factors of individual and social life that indeed is a task which is momentous enough to be treated in a science of its own. Modern aesthetic, therefore, has still its own ends, which, if not so ambitious as those of the former, speculative, science of beauty, are nevertheless of no small importance. These ends, however, can no longer be attained by the procedure of the old aesthetic systems. As the problems have changed with changing conditions, so too the methods must be brought into line with general scientific development. Historical and psychological investigation must replace the dialectic treatment of the subject. Art can no longer be deduced from general, philosophical and metaphysical principles ; it must be studied -by the methods of inductive psychology as a human activity. Beauty cannot be considered as a semi-transcendental reality ; it must be interpreted as an object of human longing and a source of human enjoyment. In aesthetic proper, as well as in the philosophy of art, every research must start, not from theoretical assumptions, but from the psychological and sociological data of the aesthetic life. Such a procedure, however, is encumbered with difficulties,