Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/348

332 Science seeks the general in the particular, proceeding by means of abstraction; art, on the other hand, creates concrete pictures, as a means of embodying the general. Now, figures and events fill the whole world; the former space, the latter time. Thus we get our first division of the arts: (1) those which deal with figures; and (2) those whose sphere is events.

To the former belong, as one group, ornamentation of surface, decorative painting, and painting in the narrower sense; in another group are tectonics, sculpture, and architecture. To the latter belong two corresponding groups: music, lyric, and epic, on the one hand; and orchestration, drama, and opera, on the other.

A cross classification may also be made. The first group of each of the above divisions may be put together as inductive, the second as deductive. The inductive arts say: "So are things in reality, but you see that in them lives and moves something universal." The deductive say: "The universal is not the common reality, but it exists; it can win shape and life; it can be embodied." The former are characterized by the infinite manifoldness of their combinations of elements; the latter are characterized by the fact that not the particular but the whole rules. Thus, instead of the old names 'idealistic' and 'realistic,' are substituted 'inductive' and 'deductive' as more intelligible, and as giving a truer key to the interpretation of any work of art.

Evolutionists urge that human societies have gradually prescribed or proscribed certain acts. Men obeyed chiefs at first from fear, not because their commands seemed reasonable. In time this constraint produced moral tendencies hereditarily transmissible, which men followed spontaneously, and could not resist without remorse. This theory, however, has many difficulties. It assumes the transmission of acquired characteristics, a principle still under dispute. Especially, it supposes that moral progress is the effect of true biological modifications, depending upon organs in the brain which arise or decay by exercise, selection, and heredity. As this biological change is slow, the theory cannot explain the rapidity of moral advancement or