CHAPTER I 



SCIENCE VERSUS CRITICISM? 



Analysis Versus Judgment? 



TIAINE began his triple career as thinker, critic, and historian 

 just about a century ago — yet he seems our contemporary. 

 His grappHngs with the problem of relating scientific 

 analysis to aesthetic judgment are dramatized for us by an obvious 

 fact of his biography. Thus, the Lectures on Art, which he delivered 

 as Professor of Aesthetics and the History of Art in the £cole des 

 Beaux- Arts in Paris, were written over a period of half a decade, 

 and the two more strictly theoretical parts were separated by an 

 interval of two years. The first in the series {The Philosophy of Art, 

 based on lectures delivered during the winter of 1864) was an 

 attempt at a scientifically objective statement 'On the Nature of the 

 Work of Art', and 'On the Production of the Work of Art', and 

 stressed opposition to dogmatism and the need for sympathy for 

 all schools of art; but The Ideal in Art (based on lectures delivered 

 during the winter of 1866) seemed to contradict these earlier 

 lectures by stressing the need for judgment and setting up clearly 

 defined scales of aesthetic value in terms of 'The Degree of 

 Importance of the Character', 'The Degree of Beneficence in the 

 Character', and 'The Converging Degree of Effects'. 



It is partly on the basis of the supposed harmony or conflict 

 between these two sets of lectures that critics of Taine have 

 described his philosophy either as a unique synthesis or as an 

 unresolved dualism; the latter, usually unfavourable, charge 

 appears as a claim for a radical change of heart around the year 

 1865, or as an accusation of logical contradiction, vacillation, or 

 eclecticism.! Part of our task, therefore, must be to sketch the 

 story of Taine's intellectual development in so far as it relates to 

 this issue (Chapter II). 



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