i84 SCIENCE AND AESTHETIC JUDGMENT 



However, two preliminary observations must be made concern- 

 ing Taine's uses of psychology in arriving at his aesthetic judg- 

 ments. First, writing at an early stage in the development of that 

 science, he was subject to the limitations inherent in his situation 

 as a pioneer; hence his grossly oversimplified use of the faculty 

 principle, his habit of finding hallucinations and madmen in 

 unlikely places, and so forth. Primarily interested in the problem 

 of knowledge, he tends to treat the aesthetic experience as a kind 

 of scientific knowing, as a process of intellectual analysis. Thus, the 

 fact that he never completed the second half of his psychological 

 treatise. On Will, may be both a cause and an eflfect of this overly 

 intellectual preoccupation, as a result of which his criticism, like 

 his psychology, tends towards the abstract and the static. 22 



Second, because of his interest in history, he was more interested 

 in reconstructing the artist's experiences and the artist's world than 

 in analyzing his own personal experiences with the works of art. 

 The least one can say concerning this preference is that, though 

 Taine was saved by the solidity of his knowledge and the power of 

 his historical imagination, the former is necessarily more conjec- 

 tural and remote than the latter; as a result, in the service of less 

 gifted and sensitive scholars, the historical method could lead to 

 superficiality and irrelevance — just as abuse of the 'new criticism's' 

 method of close reading and analysis of structures of meaning could 

 lead to another form of pedantry. Since Taine was consciously 

 using literature and art, in part, to document history and make 

 it come alive as a vital experience, it is no accident that his scales 

 of value stress permanence (and, secondarily, development) in 

 Time, and treat more purely aesthetic experiences, like those of 

 style and subtleties of design, as incidental and derived. But the 

 proof of the pudding is still in the eating, and in Taine's works, 

 at least, the historical method produced some nourishing and 

 tasty critical dishes. 



Another basic criticism of Taine's scales of value in the arts is 

 that they tend to stress unity and simplicity. That other alternatives 

 are possible is evident from a recent essay by Charles Lalo,^^ 

 who also approaches the problem of criticism scientifically: thus, 

 he seeks to proceed Trom Facts to Values', by a method for which 

 he suggests the name 'aesthanalysis',24 and he advocates 'The 

 Experimental Method' and 'The Comparative Method'. 25 But 

 his hierarchy emerges as the precise opposite of Taine's in its emphasis 

 on complexity: 'To proceed from facts to their aesthetic values is to 



