1 88 SCIENCE AND AESTHETIC JUDGMENT 



and the general, has an unlimited future. Each change in society 

 will renew it. In fifty years, we can have another Beyle and 

 another Balzac' ^^ Similarly, his definition of art as 'employing a 

 group of connected parts, the relationships of which it systemati- 

 cally modifies' ^^ is capable of infinite extension; as we have seen, it 

 seems applicable to the most extreme vagaries of modern art. Our 

 understanding of the 'essential character' of things has room to grow 

 in Taine's system, since he advocates a method of discovery and 

 not a set of immutable essences; and the artist's modifications give 

 him scope for using that understanding in a variety of forms and 

 styles. Thus Taine, for all his limitations as a typical product of 

 the late nineteenth century, has something to teach us in the 

 twentieth, and will probably continue to be useful in the twenty- 

 first. 



NOTES 



1 Of which Cassirer writes that they 'create' relations {Substance and Function, 

 p. 20). 



2 Natural objects also provide such 'momentary stays', but only as an 

 incidental result of the teleological aspect of their functioning, unless we 

 sentimentally ascribe value to them as 'artistic' products of God or a personified 

 Nature. Stephen Pepper ascribes the aesthetic value of types (which he defines 

 as 'systems that are intrinsic to their objects and repeatable in other objects') 

 to 'a specific delight and glow in the recognition of something familiar' 

 {Aesthetic Quality, pp. 147-150). His excellent chapter on 'Types, or Intrinsic- 

 Extrinsic Modes of Organization' concludes: 'For a type is not merely an 

 organizing tool, it has a character and a quality of its own. In excellent tech- 

 nique we identify this character with the personality of the artist, in excellent 

 achievement of function with the quality of the interests served, in excellent 

 representation with the essence of natural objects. If the fulfilment of type 

 is excellent, the gap between organization and matter organized narrows and 

 fills up, and the organization is the simple and inevitable movement of the 

 matter, and the matter just the realization of the organization. The hostility 

 between intuition of quality and analysis of relations then ceases. Discriminating 

 analysis then reveals the quality and the quality is the revelation of the 

 analysis.' {Ibid., p. 167, our italics.) 



3 Art as Experience, Chapter VII, 'The Natural History of Form'. 



4 Our Chapter XI, p. 153. 



5 Notice, however, that Coleridge writes of a poem 'proposing to itself. 

 (Our Chapter XII, p. 170.) 



6 Something like this was the central point of Cassirer's criticism in ^ur 

 Logik der Kulturwissenschaften: Fiinf Studien (in an essay on 'Nature Concepts 

 and Culture Concepts', Section 2, pp. 86-95, is devoted to a discussion of 

 Taine). Thus: 'The culture object . . . requires another sort of consideration; 

 for it is situated, so to speak, in our rear. . . . For the direction of the reflexive 



