156 SCIENCE AND AESTHETIC JUDGMENT 



idealism or aestheticism. Recognition of the importance of 

 thought, or reason, in science need not result in a reduction of 

 reality to its ideal aspects. Thought does not have a separate 

 existence; it is rather 'men thinking' who create their versions of 

 the world — not the world itself — and men have still to submit 

 their concepts to criticism and verification before they can be 

 satisfied that their 'worlds' are real. The idealist, who constructs 

 a cosmos in his own image, may be true to certain aspects of 

 experience, but he must recognize that his version, like that of the 

 materialist, is subject to the dangers inherent in abstraction. 

 Experience can be viewed as a work of art, but the world may not 

 be such. 



Closely related to the aesthetic issue is that of value in general: 

 thus, most discussions of 'the concrete universal' can be criticized 

 as confusing criteria of truth with those of value, to the detriment 

 of objective science; especially in the social sciences, the sins 

 committed in the name of man's 'rational animality', for example, 

 have been legion. This criticism may be answered from two direc- 

 tions: first, by showing that the element of value, aesthetic and 

 pragmatic, is not absent from science — for example, in Occam's 

 Razor "78; and second, by showing that it is precisely from the ele- 

 ments of form and universality that standards of value must be 

 derived. For example, our notions of normality, health, and so 

 forth, are abstractions of relations that are found to be typical of 

 the species. 



The underlying motive of such a system as Bosanquet constructs 

 is philosophical monism, the emphasis on totality and unity. Such 

 a philosophy may often carry the synthesizing operation beyond 

 the stage warranted by present knowledge; further, it sometimes 

 fails to recognize the possibilities of pluralism and the facts of 

 discontinuity. "7 9 It need not follow, from the fact that natural 

 types have a real function, that the entire world must be one. Such 

 a grandiose conception may serve, like those of the 'individual' and 

 the 'universal' generally, as an ideal limit for scientific investiga- 

 tion, but it must perforce remain logically vague and empirically 

 unattainable. Nevertheless, whether or not this metaphysical 

 hypothesis is true need not aflfect the validity of type analysis on 

 a more modest scale: hydrogen and horse may be understood as 

 both 'concrete' and 'universal', with or without a cosmic Absolute. 



Of course, both these motives — the aesthetic and the monistic 

 — were strong in Taine. The former needs no excuse in a critic of 



