1 86 SCIENCE AND AESTHETIC JUDGMENT 



makes much sense without the other. True, 'Romanticism' is an 

 abstraction from the quahties of many artists and works of art; 

 but neither these artists nor their works of art hved or came into 

 being in an intellectual vacuum. The sensible critic will fall victim 

 to neither type of extremism: in describing the rhythmic alterna- 

 tions of varying emphases in the history of literature and the arts, 

 he will avoid the fallacies of overly neat classifications, and of 

 laws of development which tend to distort both facts and judg- 

 ments. But he will also find himself returning, persistently and 

 with a kind of wonder, to the central truth that, in clear but some- 

 what mysterious fashion, great works of art approximate the vitality of 

 natural types in life by combining the highest degree of concreteness and 

 individuality with the highest degree of universality. 



Some Aesthetic Conclusions 



Despite the qualifications, then, made necessary by our in- 

 creased awareness of the many semantic complexities involved in 

 all communication (paralleled in recent decades by the shift in 

 criticism from 'history' to the 'text'), there is a hard core of sound- 

 ness in Taine's analytic method and in the approach to aesthetic 

 judgment developed in The Ideal in Art. His 'ideal' provides a 

 criterion which can be applied both to works of art, as has been 

 already indicated, and to critics. Thus, the best critics have usually 

 tried, each in his own fashion, to achieve a balance between 

 romantic individuality and classic generality: to be aware 

 simultaneously of the unique qualities of the work under con- 

 sideration and of larger contexts which literary, artistic, and 

 critical traditions, and biographical and historical problems, have 

 suggested. 



With minor modifications, Taine's analytic categories and 

 criteria of value can also be applied to modern art, including the 

 various schools of abstract painting. ^ 3 However, recent develop- 

 ments in philosophy, and ways of feeling characteristic of 

 'modernism', have created new emphases strange to his somewhat 

 Victorian faith in science. We have come to recognize more fully, 

 especially in the social sciences, that universals, though efficient 

 causes, cannot be separated from the ways in which they function 

 for particular men in particular societies. Thus, the 'reality' of 

 realism and the 'nature' of naturalism have taken on new dimen- 

 sions of complexity, in which the focus is on the uses which man's 

 free imagination chooses to make of his world and on the inter- 



