Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/133

 120 CEITICAL NOTICES : Guyau has very little indeed to say that does not meet more or less with his antagonist's cordial assent and acquiescence. His book consists in the main of criticisms directed against the view, originally propounded in the germ by Schiller, and put into more definite form by Mr. Herbert Spencer, which identifies the assthetic sentiment with the exercise of the play-instinct on its passive side, in matters not immediately connected with life- serving func- tion. In opposition to this idea, M. Guyau contends that the beautiful does not conflict with utility, desire, and the needs of the system. It has its roots, on the contrary, deep down in the very vitals of human life ; it springs from the real, the essential, the normal, the necessary. There is, says our critic, a certain aesthetic value in large respiration, in free action, in flowing motion, in food, in perfume, in the reproductive instinct, in all that constitutes the core and essence of organic life itself. More than that : art bases its existence ultimately on these deepest and truest foundations of our nature ; and because it does so, in spite of pessimistic ideas to the contrary, it will not decay before the face of modern science and the modern Americanised utilitarian sentiment. All this and much more like it is pleasantly urged in very clear and limpid French, with marked grace of expression and play of fancy, and with all its author's well-known charm of style and manner. But many parts of his book have literary rather than scientific or philosophical merit, and the writer often substitutes vague declamation or artistic prettinesses for the rigorous conciseness of psychological thought. When M. Guyau goes deep enough to be scientific, it is not hard to see wherein lies the difference between himself and his English compeers. Our evolutionary and physiologically-minded thinkers, having to probe for the first time to the very base of the matter, have been busying themselves for the most part, and of necessity, with the beggarly elements of aesthetic feeling : they have had to deal rather with its simplest and earliest raw mani- festations its prime factors than with the complex emotions roused in cultivated minds by highly-evolved works of art. Their French critic does but once more constructively fling in their faces the taunt long ago flung at Locke, of forgetting everything but children and savages. Only, he objects it with the utmost polite- ness and suavity of manner, rather by implication than by direct reference. On the whole, I am not inclined to quarrel with his contention that we have all left out of consideration many aspects of aesthetic sentiment. The truth is, all early work at any line of investigation must necessarily be very crude, vague and im- perfect ; it must require endless modification and guarding of statements ; it must undergo perpetual revision, both to bring it into nearer harmony with ascertained fact, and to close the door against possible misapprehensions or distortions of meaning. Now for Mr. Spencer I cannot speak, further than to 'say that the treatment of ^Esthetics in the Principles of Psychology is confined