Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/79

Rh to that of reflection upon the products of art, was that artistic representation is no more than a kind of commonplace reality, related to the purposes of man precisely as everyday objects are related, except that the existence of the work of art is less complete and solid. Hence the essence of art was conceived, not as symbolic of an unseen reality behind the common object, but as merely imitative of the common object. This being premised, the moralistic assumption at once follows: to represent an immoral content is just to duplicate the instances of immorality and the temptations to it. In the region of specific aesthetic criticism the Greeks contributed, and Aristotle in particular worked out into some detail the idea already referred to that of unity in variety, or the relation of the part to the whole. The metaphysics of art has a value partly negative and partly positive; positively, Plato and Aristotle contributed the necessary basis of all aesthetics in the conception that art deals with images and not with realities. Negatively they furnished a reductio ad absurdum of the imitation theory. Plato's discussion might be summarized, "So far as this is the true explanation of art, art has not the value popularly assigned to it."

I must omit all that is said of the details of Plato and Aristotle as well as of the Græco-Roman period (although this latter well illustrates what I have said regarding Mr. Bosanquet's cultured judgment) and come to Plotinus, in whom Mr. Bosanquet finds the first important theoretical reconstruction of the Platonic conception. While Plotinus still retains the conception of a spiritual or immaterial beauty, he admits a true natural beauty produced by participation of the material thing in the reason which emanates from the divine. Thus he defines art as following not visible things directly, but rather the reasons from which visible things proceed. This same theory, by carrying beauty back of merely formal and surface traits, also broke the tradition which limited beauty to symmetry, and gave a chance for theories which made something more vital of it.

The development of Christian thought with relation to aesthetics connects itself naturally, and perhaps historically, with the. ideas of Plotinus. Corporeal objects were conceived as signs or even as counterparts of spiritual realities. Such a theory may be turned in either of two ways, according as either the likeness or the unlikeness involved in the idea of symbolism is emphasized. In the early church there was a profound sense of the unity of man with the world, of spirit with nature. The result was an increasing sense of the beauty of nature. But even at the first, there was a tendency to accompany this with a depreciation of the worth of man and his products. As time went on and the sense of the infinite value of the spiritual world deepened, this tendency grew into a belief in the impossibility of any adequate conveyance of spiritual