Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/475

No. 4.] in spite of the rise and fall of its institutions. Such a society may, however, decay and die, not according to a law of physical disintegration because of external or temporal conditions, but because of the failure of the spirit. It is within the power of a society to say whether it shall be immortal or not. Society grows by the accumulation of experience and yet does not approach an inevitable dissolution. The living spirit of society discards at will the institutions which it has created for others which are more to its purpose.

Taste is the ability to judge what is beautiful or ugly, good or bad. To discover whether it is purely individual or is universal, we must investigate its origin. In such an investigation we must go back to our experience of objects, for taste without an object is inconceivable. The object is given by the senses and made into experience by thought. The unification of the subjective and the objective results in the formation of concepts. In this process thought is guided by unconscious taste, which picks out as the common element in similar objects that which is essential to their nature. Thus the beautiful finds its positive basis in its identity with the essential, and its negative basis in its faultlessness. In its subjective aspect, taste is conscious; in its objective, real. When taste has become both real and conscious we may speak of it as being correct or false, good or bad. The subjective basis of its origin is completed only when language has embodied experience in concepts. A concept is an inner picture of reality; but it is rather an artistic representation of objects as they ought to be, than a photograph of them as they are. Conscious taste differs from the unconscious in that it is governed by concepts already formed. The more developed and clear the concept, the more general and universal is the taste conditioned by it. The notion of what is necessary to the creature as a whole becomes the objective standard of taste, while the ideal image of the unity of truth and beauty becomes its subjective standard. In so far as the concrete thing harmonizes with our concept of what it ought to be, it is beautiful, and in so far as it differs from that, it is ugly. Here, truth and beauty are identical. In the union of truth, beauty and goodness, we see an ideal which is immanent in reality itself. But this is not the goal of metaphysics, which is developed by means of the cognitive, not the artistic function of thought. Thought as art and thought as knowledge regard the same object in different ways, but both strive toward the truth. Both, too, depend upon the priority of taste, as the unconscious guide to the essential in objects.

The difficulties inherent in our American legal situation are due, not so much