i82 SCIENCE AND AESTHETIC JUDGMENT 



work of art, i.e., what relatiofis does the critic analyzed Wellek and 

 Warren indicate that a poem is 'a potential cause of experience', 

 and refuse to characterize that potentiahty as either real or mental 

 or ideal; however, such a metaphysical lack, though serious, is not 

 fatal, if it is replaced by an analysis of the actual relations of which 

 the language of substance is an abstraction and a name, i.e., those 

 which are to be found in the experience of art itself Hence, our 

 critical universals must be sought in the complex sets of relations 

 which constitute the various aesthetic experiences.'^^ 



An adequate development of these relations is obviously beyond 

 the scope of this study, since it would constitute a complete 

 aesthetic system. Later writers, however, have gone far beyond 

 Taine in this direction, including Charles Lalo^^; John Dewey, in 

 his Art as Experience] and Stephen C. Pepper, in his Aesthetic 

 Quality: A Contextualist Theory of Beauty. 



In very brief summary, these experience-relations must include 

 both those of the artist and of the spectator-critic, each to his 

 own environment and to the work of art; and every experience 

 implies a 'Live Creature', an environment (biological and cul- 

 tural 'matrixes'), and their complex interactions. A universal like 

 'tragedy', therefore, must stand for a set of uniformities or 

 'invariant' sequences in one or more of these sets of relations. 



How these sets of relations are in turn related to one another 

 will, in part, be determined by the conception of the nature of art 

 which governs the analysis: 



(i) If art is considered as imitation of reality, its universals may 

 be sought in interactions of artist and critic with reality (organized 

 as scientific and humanistic knowledge and classified by Taine 

 under the headings of Race, Environment, and Time) and with 

 works of art; and the universals thus discovered in each of these 

 areas will be expected to correspond. Thus, the artist's horse and 

 the scientist's horse will each refer, in its own fashion, to the same 

 essential facts, in both their concretenesses and their typicalities. 



(2) If art is considered primarily as expression of personality, 

 its universals may be sought in relations more internal (not com- 

 pletely so, since experience always involves external relations) to 

 the experiences of the artist and the critic; and, since privacy and 

 uniqueness may be stressed, there will be less expectation of 

 correspondence between the two. The focus will be in psychology 

 (Taine's Master Faculty). 



(3) Finally, if art is considered primarily as a means of 



