Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/434

420 with peculiar difficulties, arising from the vague and indefinable character of the human feelings, which can not be described directly or accurately analyzed; it can be approached only by the way of wide comparison and illustration. The first step taken by the author is to classify the emotions common to poetry and the fine arts; and in this we find at the outset that the lines are hazy and discernible only by the aid of acquired faculties. Next to be studied are the aids to emotional qualities, the common end of which is the evoking of emotions of the pleasurable kind. The conditions of treatment under which they are brought into effect are representative force, concreteness and objectivity, personification, harmony, ideality, novelty and variety, plot, and refinement. The qualities themselves are designated as strength or sublimity, beauty, feeling or pathos, humor, wit, and melody; of which melody and feeling are perhaps the least ambiguous, while most of the others are liable to complications that make scientific precision in the language of criticism very difficult. Under the first head are brought the contrasted emotions of love, tender feeling, and sociability, on the one hand, and irascibility, malevolence, and antipathy on the other. It may seem paradoxical to enumerate the emotions of the latter category among the promotives of pleasure, but an analysis of the best literary works will show that these darker aspects of feeling are as essential as the shadows in a picture. Feeling includes the varieties of love, friendship, patriotism, compassion, religion, personified feeling, and sorrow or pathos; humor, the group of qualities centering in the ludicrous. When place is given to all these qualities, there still remains a region of effects not fully accounted for—beauty; the sense qualities; utility, which can hardly be divorced from the special emotions, but stands to a certain degree remote from any one interest; and imitation, which lends itself to further the special qualities, but has also an independent charm. Next to the minute and methodical treatment of the emotional qualities, the chief peculiarity of the present work is the line-by-line method of examining passages with a view to assigning merits and defects. These passages occupy a considerable proportion of the space, and are representative, both of the rhetorical qualities which they illustrate, and of the classical authors of all times, including the best-known contemporary authors of the literary nations. This feature, while completing the value of the book for study, makes it also attractive for leisurely reading.

with the presumption that man aspires after and must have some theory of himself, of the universe in which he lives, and of life, duty, and destiny in it, the author disposes of all the ancient theories—intuitional systems, he calls them—as vague and not competent to stand the test of a truly philosophical criticism. But the stream of thought and light that poured through antiquity, gathering strength from the various ethnic sources by which it was fed, was transmuted "into the learning and wisdom of the Christian era, such as they have been." Exactly how much the knowledge or culture of the present time has been indebted to either of the ancient systems, or how much to those of the Christian centuries alone, it would be difficult and perhaps unimportant to specify. "The one most certain thing of all is that the knowledge of nature, the insight into any true theory of this universe, or into any true wisdom in the conduct of life in this world, or into any assurance of life hereafter, that has been gained within the last five hundred years, is of more worth and value to mankind than all the rest put together." The modern speculations of philosophical theists are declared to have been too much biased by preconceived notions concerning biblical revelation, by influences growing out of reverence for Christian beliefs and popular opinion, or by subjection to an established church, to be of the value that they should be. The class of writers of which Voltaire may be taken as a representative—being mainly literary and iconoclastic—have failed to present a statement of universal philosophy or a conception of the Deity that need detain much the critical thinker of this century. Scientific methods deal