CRITIQUE OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENT 179 



atom of hydrogen seems to do; a tragedy doesn't achieve its own 

 form, as a well-fed horse does, given normal conditions. ^ The 

 element of environment is present in all these cases, of course, but 

 nature's ways seem relatively uniform and stable compared to the 

 varieties of which human personalities, societies, and artistic 

 traditions are capable. 



Thus, uniformities in the arts must be attributed to universals 

 which operate, not so much on chemical and biological, but 

 rather on psychological and social — i.e., cultural — levels. They 

 must be understood in terms of the common world of physical 

 and human nature which both the artist and his public share: 

 paintings of horses produced in Flanders, Italy, and Spain have 

 traits in common because the horses in those countries do; changes 

 have been rung on the sonnet form by poets in many languages 

 because of the possibilities it offers for discipline, compactness, 

 and intense expression of a single idea (either through variations 

 on a theme, as is customary in Shakespeare, or through thesis and 

 anti-thesis of some kind) ; tragedy and comedy are universal forms 

 in the arts because they are such in life. Nevertheless, to compare 

 the development of tragedy in Athens to the growth of a plant is 

 to tell only half the truth: between the seed of life and the flower 

 of art come the consciousness of the poet and of his audience, as well 

 as the complex forces of language, symbolism, and culture gener- 

 ally. The analogy between the manner in which the 'idea' of 

 a horse is realized in Man O'War, and that of tragedy, in Oedipus 

 Rex, is real enough, but very rough indeed; Taine's analyses of 

 the latter process were suggestive, but grossly oversimplified. ^ 



One consequence of this difference is that analyses of universals 

 in the arts, though intimately related to similar analyses in humanistic 

 sciences like history, psychology, and sociology, operate on different levels 

 of complexity. For example, the psychologist gains insights from the 

 poet; and the generalizations used by the critic of art, if suffi- 

 ciently 'clear' and 'appropriate', may be included in propositions 

 which, to some limited extent and in certain special ways, may, 

 like those of the scientist, be verified and used for purposes of pre- 

 diction; we are not suggesting an antagonism between the truths 

 of science and art. But compare the 'Oedipus complex' theory of 

 Freud and Sophocles' tragedy: both have a kind of 'concrete 

 universality', which helps account for their respective values, and 

 surely they help illuminate one another. "^ In Taine's language, the 

 same 'master faculty' and 'dominant idea' is involved in both, and, 



