OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 101 



inent literary and art critics, such as Carlyle, Ruskin, 

 Matthew Arnold, and William Morris. Apart from 

 these, but agreeing with them in his lively interest in 

 social problems, stands the lonely figure of Herbert 

 Spencer : he alone made a serious attempt to elaborate 

 a reasoned philosophical creed, to formulate and solve 

 tlie World-problem. In the course of his various and 

 laborious expositions he was led also to deal with 

 sesthetical questions. But apart from marking his 54. 



Spencer and 



adherence to the play-theory of art, his psychological tJJ^^P'^y^ 

 analysis does not contain anything very suggestive or 

 original. He has no idea of the Beautiful as constitut- 

 ing a World-problem, such as it appeared to Plato in 

 antiquity and again to Schelling in Germany, such also 

 as it is declaring itself in spite of the absence of 

 any special love for method and system, in literary and 

 art criticism in the modern literatures of France and 

 England. Of Spencer, Signor Benedetto Croce, the latest 

 historian of Esthetics, says : " If one desires to deter- 

 mine somehow the philosophical position of Spencer, 

 one is obliged to say that he oscillates between sensation- 

 alism and moralism, and has never any idea of art in its 

 character as art." ^ 



This quotation reminds me that, in dealing with the 55. 



Psychology 



philosophical problem of the Beautiful, no mention has of Esthetics 



r r r jj„(j Ethics. 



been made, so far, of the psychological treatment of 

 the subject and, only indirectly, of the connection of 

 -Esthetics and Ethics. Yet these two sides of the ques- 

 tion are probably those which receive, at the present 



1 B. Croce, 'Esthetique' (1904), p. 389. 



