64 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 



stances, it must suffice for him to see whether he has 

 sincerely tested his particular wisdom (iSia ^poV^o-i?) by what 

 he can perceive of universal wisdom (KOLVTJ (frpovvjcns) whether, 

 in fact, the views he promulgates seem to him concordant with 

 the tenor of the best thought of the age in which he lives, 

 and with the lessons of the past which he has tried to 

 appropriate. Then let him take courage and deliver his 

 opinions to the world with such reserve and courtesy as he 

 commands with the expectation, too, of having them severely 

 tried, and being sent himself to school again to study fresh 

 conclusions, and to finger strenuously for the fiftieth time 

 some Gordian knot. 



Criticism, in brief, requires of a man the combined qualities 

 of Conservatism and Radicalism, of patience and audacity, of 

 humility and self-confidence, of severe respect for the past, 

 and of an honest desire to forecast the future. In so far as 

 he sincerely attempts to live in the whole, and to submit his 

 personal perceptions to the test of what he can perceive of 

 the world-current, the critic may fail through inadequacy of 

 powers, but he shall not be liable to the reproach of vanity 

 or the condemnation passed on wordy rhetoricians. 



Is there then a prospect, it may be asked, of criticism 

 becoming a science? The answer to this question depends 

 on what we mean by science. It is clear that any branch of 

 knowledge which has to do with creations of the human mind 

 cannot be classed with the exact or mathematical sciences. 

 It is also clear that criticism, implying as it does judgment, 

 cannot be classed with such a science as geology, which does 

 not pretend to judge, but catalogues, maps out, and attempts 

 to trace the evolution of the material substances composing 

 the earth's crust. Still it might, perhaps, be expected that 

 criticism should become a science in the same sense as that 

 in which we call Ethics and Political Economy sciences ; 

 that is to say, a department of systematised and co-ordinated 

 knowledge. From this point of view one of its branches 



