Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/80

66 things through sense symbols, and Christianity assumed a hostile attitude to the whole region of pictorial art. Erigena sums up the outcome in his theory, that man has no right to take delight in the visible creation, save as one has already learned of the perfections of God and then goes to nature as showing forth his praises. An interesting comparison of Dante and Shakespeare makes the transition from the mediaeval to the modern consciousness. Dante with his subordination of this world to the next, with his allegorical element resting upon the subordination of perceptible forms to a hierarchy of ethical interpretations, completes the mediaeval position. Shakespeare gives us the net result of the immense spiritual value added to life through Christianity, but without the supernatural machinery so superbly manipulated by Dante.

The origins of modern aesthetic Mr. Bosanquet finds in the mingling of two streams — criticism and metaphysic. Criticism from Sidney and Scaliger to Lessing and Winckelmann, furnished aesthetic philosophy with its data; metaphysic from Descartes to Kant with postulate and problem. At first each of these streams worked in entire independence, therefore, during this time, there is no true aesthetic. Each side had both to adjust itself to theories and problem bequeathed from antiquity, and to absorb the great practical wealth of the immediate past. Since, as Mr. Bosanquet remarks, pre-Kantian aesthetic is not the generating cause of later aesthetic theory, but only an external attribute of the movement which was such cause, I omit his discussion of the metaphysic. In the chapter upon the data of modern aesthetic, we have a pretty full statement of the influence of the growth of philology and archaeology upon aesthetic, as well as something concerning the distinctively critical writers. Although Corneille, Voltaire, Burke, and Gottsched, besides minor critics, as well as Lessing and Winckelmann, are taken up, I cannot but feel that, upon the whole, this chapter is the most deficient of any in the book. Nothing is said of the early Italian writers, although they were not only the first to reintroduce Aristotelian canons and methods, but to write specific critical treatises. It is now well enough established that the true source of the Elizabethan criticism is in Italy. Diderot has hardly more than a passing remark, while of Rousseau the saying of Amiel that "nobody has had more influence on the nineteenth century" is quoted, but the extended discussion such a statement calls for, is conspicuously absent. The proper notice of the Italian writers would, I feel sure, have supplied the thread of continuity which seems to be snapped at this point; while Rousseau, here as in his social speculation, is the connecting link between the popular and practical tendencies of the eighteenth century, and the distinctly reflective treatment of the nineteenth. Only an academic superstition seems to me to account for giving to Lessing a more important place than belongs to Rousseau.