96 ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM 



*one can hate "ethnic groups" just as venomously as real or 

 imaginary races'. ^"^ 



Some Critical Conclusions 



The problems raised by 'type' analysis, of which the 'race' 

 concept is one example, will be discussed in greater detail in 

 Part Three (Chapter XI); only a few, brief concluding remarks 

 need detain us here. Leo Spitzer propounds an etymology for 

 'race' which suggests a kind of interest in 'relations' similar to 

 Taine's. He traces the word to the Latin 'ratio' or 'rationes', 

 which was used in the Thomistic tradition in the sense of 'type'; 

 'species', 'idea', and 'ratio' were used as synonyms, in the same 

 sense as the French 'raison d'etre'. ^s However, 'ratio' is more 

 generally used today in the mathematical sense of a 'fixed rela- 

 tion', and there seems to be more of that meaning than of the 

 older scholastic sense in Taine's discussions. If we recall that Taine 

 was studying facts and their relations, Race might be taken as 

 indicating the internal relations of an organism, as against milieu, 

 which would indicate its external relations. Thus, we can perhaps 

 replace Taine's hazy notions of 'blood' by more precise genetic 

 analysis and still retain his essential idea. 



As to the temptation to set up hierarchies of superior and inferior 

 'types', some such process seems inevitable, ?/ criticism is used in 

 a sense which includes the fact of judgment. Thus, if there is 

 superiority and inferiority in art; if there have been great artists 

 and art-producing nations and epochs (we find it hard to deny 

 that this is so); and if one of the functions of criticism is to evaluate 

 and understand such greatness — if all these propositions are true, 

 then we must probably seek the explanation of this fact in some 

 relation of art to life. To assert some 'aristocratic' principle, in art as 

 in life, is not to deny the validity of democracy, but to insist rather 

 on democracy's need for intelligent self-criticism. 



The causes which contribute to the production of great art 

 must surely spring either (i) from the native endowments of 

 people, or (2) from the conditions under which they live, or, since 

 both of these are artificial abstractions from a total situation, 

 (3) most probably from some combination of the two. Thus, it is 

 true that the civilization and art of Greece, for example, was great 

 during one period of its history, and the historian is justified in 

 attempting to discovery 'reasons' for that greatness. It may be 

 possible, for example, to prove some sort of relationship between 



