Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/122

 M. CARRI^RE, &STHET1K, 111 ethical point of view, certainly artists are not in the same fortunate case. We need not go far to find the maxim of " art for the sake of art " treated as a slightly immoral paradox. To quote it in the original French is usually considered an aggravation of the offence against ethics implied in the statement of it. More than ever instructive is it, therefore, to find a German writer who, as we shall see, cannot be accused of neglecting or undervaluing the ethical side of things, treating this formula in effect as a postulate of aesthetic science and of all actual artistic work. Beauty, Prof. Carriere says, is its own end and must be loved for its own sake (i. 264). " No other demand, therefore, may be made of art than that its work shall be beautiful. He who would turn aside the work of the artist for other ends and make it serviceable to other aims takes away the freedom of art and lowers that to a means which fulfils its destination only as an end for itself." The security in the statement of this position and the consistency with which it is taken as a basis throughout can only be explained by the habit of considering art in the light of philosophical principles. From the philosophical point of view it becomes clear at once that in whatever sense truth and virtue are ends in themselves, in the same sense beauty also is an end in itself. The character of aesthetic contemplation most generally recog- nised is " disinterestedness". This character has been made use of in psychology to distinguish aesthetic pleasures from mere impressions of sense and the pleasures of "the aesthetic senses" from those that have not the aesthetic character because they are not capable of being shared. Prof. Carriere, while not omitting to bring this out clearly, suggests further application of the cha- racter of disinterestedness in the distinctions he draws between the artistic modes of expression and those that are related to them but are of a mixed character. An example of this kind of application is given in the course of a discussion of the relations of poetry to the artistic modes of prose (ii. 501-4), which follows an account of the separation of verse as the language of art from prose as the language of science. When poetry and philosophy (which at first included science) were as yet undistinguished, their common organ of expression was verse ; afterwards, when the desire was felt to describe in detail objective facts of history and of nature, prose, the language of daily life, was elaborated into a new organ of expression adapted to this new purpose. As knowledge returns to unity, as more and more laws come to be grouped under a single law, it again becomes possible to make science the material of poetry, to express truth in the rhythmical form of emotional speech. Not only is this so, but all along the relations of poetry and science are closer than those of science and the other arts. Thus the writing of history, for example, is susceptible of an artistic form comparable to that of epic poetry. And the dialogues of Plato, so far as living persons are represented in them having individual