INTRODUCTORY 35 



find concentrated into a brief statement, into a simple 

 formula or a few symbols, a wide range of human emotions 

 and feelings ? Is it not because the poet or the artist has 

 expressed for us in his representation the true relationship 

 between a variety of emotions, which we, in a long course 

 of experience, have been consciously or unconsciously 

 classifying? Does not the beauty of the artist's work lie 

 for us in the accuracy with which his symbols resume 

 innumerable facts of our past emotional experience ? The 

 aesthetic judgment pronounces for or against the inter- 

 pretation of the creative imagination according as that 

 interpretation embodies or contradicts the phenomena of 

 life, which we ourselves have observed.^ It is only 

 satisfied when the artist's formula contradicts none of the 

 emotional phenomena which it is intended to resume. 

 If this account of the aesthetic judgment be at all a true 

 one, the reader will have remarked how exactly parallel 

 it is to the scientific judgment.^ But there is really more 

 than mere parallelism between the two. The laws of 

 science are, as we have seen, products of the creative 

 imagination. They are the mental interpretations — the 

 formulae under which we resume wide ranges of phenomena, 

 the results of observation on the part of ourselves or of 

 our fellow-men. The scientific interpretation of phenomena, 

 the scientific account of the universe, is therefore the only 

 one which can permanently satisfy the aesthetic judgment, 

 for it is the only one which can never be entirely contra- 

 dicted by our observation and experience. It is necessary 

 to strongly emphasise this side of science, for we are 

 frequently told that the growth of science is destroying 

 the beauty and poetry of life. It is undoubtedly rendering 

 many of the old interpretations of life meaningless, because 

 it demonstrates that they are false to the facts which they 

 profess to describe. It does not follow from this, however, 



1 How important a part length and variety of emotional experience play 

 in the determination of the cesthetic judgment is easily noted by investigating 

 the favourite authors and pictures of a few friends of diverse ages and 

 conditions. 



2 The curious reader may be referred to Wordsworth's " General View of 

 Poetry" in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 1S15. 



