Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/328

272 from the ruins of Herculaneum. Philodemus, the author of this treatise, seems to have been the critical opponent of Neoptolemus of Parium, from whom the poet Horace borrowed most of his Ars Poetica; and it is against Horace's conception of poetry as intended "to teach or to please or to do both together" that Philodemus' argument is chiefly directed. Mr Ananda Coomaraswamy, in some of the essays of his Dance of Siva, has attempted to point out similar anticipations in the early philosophy of India, but the evidence he musters is not clear; and in any event it would seem that China, without the logical gift of the Hindu, applied the spiritual message of Buddhism to criticism of the arts in a special way of her own. What was accomplished by Buddhism after centuries of life on Chinese soil may be judged from this Discourse on Poetry, which seems to be wholly unknown to Western scholars. The more formal Confucian standards of criticism may not be wholly absent. But here, in the most definite manner, poetry is given its rightful place among the spiritual activities of man's life and conceived as something to be judged by spiritual rather than mechanical standards. Poetry is distinguished from learning, from philosophy and science, from propaganda, from rhetoric: it deals with fundamental human passions, with "the music of joys and sighs," and not primarily with "the reasons of things," with "books," with "opinions," or with "words." Its essential nature is that of "spiritual intuition." Of the two Chinese characters which have been thus rendered the translator says:

"Miao, which I have translated 'spiritual,' denotes some quality that is magically delicate or subtle beyond description; the two halves that make up the character are 'girl' and 'young'; and its peculiar transcendental meaning has been emphasized by Buddhists and Taoists. Wu, which I have rendered 'intuition,' is the faculty by which we sense or feel or know, but the Buddhists have given it a special significance, as describing the faculty that can comprehend the Divine Doctrine, and transcends mere mundane reasoning."

From this it is obvious that for Yen Yü the word "intuition," like the Jhāna of Indian Buddhism or the ecstasy of neo-Platonism, has a mystical significance quite different from the logical concept given to it by Croce, for whom intuition is merely the first stage of that