178 SCIENCE AND AESTHETIC JUDGMENT 



to natural necessities, but as laws and worlds unto themselves; 

 for writing of their 'special logics' and 'inner necessities', which — 

 as in certain kinds of ornamental and abstract art, for example — 

 make their significant relations, indeed, relatively analytic, i.e., 

 internal. 



Thus, the intention of the artist (even more than the powers of 

 nature, which set roughly determinate but stretchable bounds to 

 our explorations of hydrogen and horses) has been to limit the 

 world into which he invites us. He has used a particular language 

 and artistic form; he has placed a frame around his picture; above 

 all, he has so organized his materials that they constitute a unity 

 of some kind. One of the tests of a great work of art is its tendency 

 to approach the virtually infinite riches of nature, so that there 

 seems to be literally no end to the number of interpretations and 

 criticisms of which it is susceptible. Yet the work of art also has an 

 initial timelessness as an object of contemplation (such as Keats 

 celebrated in his 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'), associated with its 

 formal character and certain typical modes of organization, and 

 giving a special quality to aesthetic experiences. People and horses 

 grow old and die; they are usually in motion, so that we may have 

 to pose them for the painter; but, granted that we have a definitive 

 text and a means of preserving objets d'art against the ravages of 

 time, the latter remain fixed, 'eternal', providing what Robert 

 Frost has called 'a momentary stay against confusion'. 2 



However, this may be perhaps more the poet's dream than his 

 achievement: as Professor Dewey has emphasized, our experience 

 of a work of art always takes place in time, and varies from time to 

 time J It is rather out of changing emphases (constantly shifting, 

 in both experience and criticism, from the particular to the 

 general, from the concrete to the universal, and back again) that 

 we derive standards for criticism and terms for discussing styles 

 and other classifications. Despite this complexity, which is an 

 application of the general principle of polarity, we may para- 

 phrase what Cohen has said of 'type analysis' in the social 

 sciences'^: criticism which refers to universals may have its weak- 

 nesses and fall short of the ideal, but it seems to be inevitable. 



Aesthetic Types Mediated by Culture 



Related to this initial paradox of 'unity in variety' is the fact 

 that, though the universal or type may act as an efficient cause in 

 the arts, it does so only indirectly. A sonnet doesn't make itself, as an 



