CRITIQUE OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENT i8i 



including such overarching concepts as 'romantic' and 'classic', 

 'tragedy' and 'comedy'. The organic principle serves as a constant 

 reminder that such a separation is necessarily artificial, but in 

 actual critical analysis distinctions between content and form 

 (plot and development, theme and treatment) seem hard to avoid. 



The Metaphysical Issue: A Relational Analysis 



However, despite these important differences between type 

 analysis in the sciences and the arts, concreteness and universality 

 are widely invoked criteria of aesthetic judgment, paralleling 

 their use to define the ideal goal of science, i^ They may also lead 

 to a definition of art itself, as in Taine: 



'The end of a work of art is to manifest some essential or salient 

 character, consequently some important idea, clearer and more 

 completely than is attainable from real objects. Art accomplishes 

 this end by employing a group of connected parts, the relation- 

 ships of which it systematically modifies. In the three imitative 

 arts of sculpture, painting, and poetry, these groups correspond to 

 real objects.' i'* 



But to say of the artist that he manifests 'essential character' (the 

 universal) is not to distinguish him sufl^ciently from the scientist, 

 whose formula or law seeks the same goal. Taine makes it clear 

 elsewhere (especially in the section on 'The Converging Degree of 

 Effects' in The Ideal in Art) that the artist works in special ways his 

 wonders to perform: he gives us an actual illusion of reality, using 

 his art to force on us, in Coleridge's words, 'that willing suspension 

 of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith'. i^ As 

 Taine put it in one of his letters, referring to Rembrandt's paint- 

 ings and Shakespeare's plays: 'This is poignant, it is life itself, but 

 condensed, assembled. . . . Art is a general idea becoming as particular 

 as possible.'' '^^ In other words, art is a universal become concrete. ^'^ 



The general manner in which these criteria are invoked by 

 Taine to establish scales of value for the arts has been indicated 

 in the preceding chapter; but our analysis of this process may be 

 completed through consideration of some of the specific problems 

 raised by the issues of Substance and the Absolute, already 

 treated in their applications to the sciences (Chapter XI). What 

 is the metaphysical status of universals in the arts? 



As has been shown, the tendency today is to replace the concept 

 of substance by that of functional relations. What, then, is the 



