FROM ANALYSIS TO JUDGMENT 173 



mother, or this is a statue of a horse. Not only does each work of 

 art seem 'unique', but so does each individual's experience with 

 it, a fact which accounts for Anatole France's vague definition 

 of criticism as the adventures of a soul among masterpieces. 

 Without some such adventure, the arts would indeed be dead and 

 sterile things; as would the sciences without much individual 

 observation and laboratory experiment, which are the life of 

 abstraction and theory. But as soon as an individual starts talking 

 about his experiences with works of art — and that is, after all, 

 what criticism must be — he finds himself, willy-nilly, going 

 beyond description of the work or experience under immediate 

 consideration into statements which involve universals: like the 

 scientist, he begins to translate forms into form-ulas. Thus, 

 despite the blind spots which its abuses may occasionally engender, 

 we cannot very well dispense with aesthetic theory. 



Also, in art as in nature, there are discontinuities as well as 

 continuities, and classifications are both possible and necessary. ^ 9 



To sum up: the fact that, in these and other ways, natural 

 types or universals in art present striking parallels to similar 

 concepts in science, constitutes the basic argument for a science of 

 criticism, for the possibility of going from analysis of facts to 

 judgments of aesthetic value. And the assumption of a correspon- 

 dence between the two kinds of analysis, and the 'ideal' results 

 they produce, lies at the heart of Taine's philosophy of 

 criticism. 



NOTES 



1 Cf. our Chapter I, 'Analysis Versus Judgment?' The problem of relativism 

 has been frequently encountered in previous chapters. 



2 Lectures^ First Series, p. 181. 



3 Ibid., pp. 191-192. 

 '^ Ibid., p. 193. 



5 Ibid., pp. 194-195, our italics. 



^ Ibid., p. 195-196. 



7 Cf. a recent statement of this principle by Theodore Spencer: Tt would 

 seem, in other words, that our awareness of a unit-idea (the state of cosmological 

 knowledge in Milton's day) here leads us inevitably to a judgment of value; 

 or rather, what we make as a judgment of value (the clumsiness of Milton's 

 picture) is explained by our awareness of the unit-idea. Knowledge of fact 

 and judgment of effect are part of the same complex, and the total view 

 should include both. We know that Milton had a choice to make; in terms of 



