CRITIQUE OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENT 187 



pretations which traditions place on nature by means of their 

 elaborate structures of symbol and myth. One of the profound 

 changes in psychology has been a full realization of the extent to 

 which these uses and interpretations may be motivated by man's 

 unconscious — in Jung, his 'racial' unconscious. Thus, Taine's 

 Master Faculty has been driven underground, so to speak, to 

 dwell with the Freudian Id. 



We are also more consistently and persistently pluralistic than 

 Taine; perhaps he would find us 'eclectic' and damn us to the 

 same Hell with Victor Cousin and 'The True, the Good, and the 

 Beautiful'. The relational concept of substance and universals 

 makes it incumbent on today's critic to view his subject from many 

 angles, to be aware of its many contexts (the 'perspectivism' 

 advocated by Wellek and Warren). Only thus does he approach 

 the full being of the work of art itself; rather, it is in the multi- 

 plicity of these possible relationships that the being of the work of 

 art consists. This is the artist's version of human freedom: a rich- 

 ness of possibilities of human experience, disciplined and con- 

 trolled, however, by the principles of organization contained in 

 the works of art themselves and in their physical and social en- 

 vironments. These principles are true, substantial 'ideals', but 

 they have no existence outside the men who cherish them and 

 embody them in art: they are no more, and no less, concrete and 

 universal than the 'archetypal patterns' of human experience 

 and the forms of things which those patterns presuppose. 34 



Unfortunately, even today, we are perhaps more ready to 

 accept the inevitability of relativity and hypothesis in the sciences 

 than in literature and the arts. Aesthetic tastes, once formed, tend 

 to become matters of habit and to assume a legislative certainty 

 not so readily granted to scientific laws, since the scientist some- 

 times seems better geared for novelty. But that is a matter for 

 education: both in the sciences and the arts, there are general 

 truths subject to an infinite number of possible modifications and 

 refinements; therein lies the adventure. In the latter, as in the 

 former, the category of potentiality implies a need for constant 

 experimentation, developing new patterns of relationships and 

 new forms of experience, within whatever ultimate limits the 

 nature of things may set. 



Nor, finally, is this a spirit which Taine would have found alien. 

 In one of his more Romantic moments he wrote: 'Literature 

 which depicts the particular reality instead of depicting the ideal 



