Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/78

64 the ancients the emphasis was laid upon the formal or logical traits: upon rhythm, symmetry, harmony, in short, upon the general formula of unity in variety. The modern way of looking at it thinks rather of meaning, of expressiveness, "the utterance of all that life contains." The contrast gives not only the conditions for a complete definition, but suggests the lines for the historical discussion. The resulting definition is that beauty is characteristic or individual expressiveness for the imagination, subject to the conditions of expressiveness within the same medium. The historical record evidently consists in tracing the steps by which the more formal conception of the ancients was broadened to include, under the notion of characteristic, material which both the ancient theory and practice would have excluded as beyond the range of the beautiful. Because of this method Mr. Bosanquet devotes much attention to the aesthetics of the ugly and the sublime, as they gradually emerge in historic reflection, since the consideration of these topics marks a widening horizon in conceiving of beauty. The important problem of the relation of beauty to the feeling of pleasure Mr. Bosanquet disposes of, by saying that we must have some generic conception of what beauty is before we have any differentia for marking off aesthetic pleasure from any other kind of pleasure; as such differentia he suggests "pleasure in the nature of a feeling or presentation, as distinct from pleasure in its momentary stimulation of the organism." The equally important question of the limitation of beauty to art to the exclusion of nature is disposed of by showing that the beauty of art does not exclude that of nature; any natural product in so far as it is viewed as beautiful becomes, for the time being at least, artistic. "Nature for æsthetic theory means that province of art in which every man is his own artist."

Mr. Bosanquet, as it seems to me, shows good judgment in making his discussion of ancient theory turn about the fact which has perplexed every student of ancient thought, the seeming paradox that the Hellenic nation, the most artistic in the world in its practice, should in its theory, as seen in Plato and Aristotle, either have taken a hostile attitude to art or adopted a theory — that of imitation — which reduces the meaning of art to a minimum. According to Mr. Bosanquet this attitude is due to a subordination, among the Greeks, of strictly aesthetic considerations to metaphysical and moralistic assumptions. The metaphysical assumption, almost inevitable to the period of transition from artistic