intermediate between sense and reason, and adapted to distinguish unity in variety, concord in the manifold, the true, the beautiful and the good in their substantial identity. Hutcheson maintains that from this sense springs the pleasure we take in art, in imitation and in the likeness between copy and original: the last a relative, as distinct from an absolute, beauty.1 This view on the whole predominated in England during the eighteenth century and was adopted by Adam Smith as well as by Reid, head of the Scottish school. Much more thoroughly and with much greater philo- Leibniz. sophical vigour Leibniz opened the door to that crowd Petites perceptions of psychic facts from which Cartesianism recoiled in and confused knowledge. horror. In his conception of the real, governed by the law of continuity (natura non facit saltus), presenting an uninterrupted scale of existence from the lowest beings to God, imagination, taste, wit and the like found ample room for shelter. The facts now called æsthetic were identified by Leibniz with Descartes' confused cognition, which might be clear without being distinct: scholastic terms borrowed, it would appear, from Duns Scotus, whose works were reprinted and widely read in the seventeenth century.2 In his De cognitione, veritate et ideis (1684), after dividing cognitio into obscura vel clara, the clara into confusa vel distincta, and the distincta into adaequata vel inadaequata, Leibniz remarks that while painters and other artists are able to judge works of art very fairly they can give no reason for their decisions, and if questioned as to the reason of their condemnation of any work of art, they reply it lacks a je ne sais quoi: (“at iudicii sui rationem reddere saepe non posse, et quaerenti dicere, se in re, quae displicet, desiderare nescio quid").3 They do possess, in fact, clear cognition, but confused and not distinct; what we should call to-day imaginative, not ratiocinative, consciousness: and indeed the latter does not exist in the case of art. There are things impossible to define : 1 Enquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, London, 1723. 3 Opera philosophica (ed. Erdmann), p. 78. 2 See above, p. 179. Intellectual on ne les fait connaître que par des exemples, et, au reste, "2 3 It might seem that by according claritas and denying ism of Leibniz. distinctio to æsthetic facts Leibniz recognized that their peculiar character is neither sensuous nor intellectual. He might seem to have distinguished them by their "claritas" from pleasure or sense-motions, and from intellect by their lack of "distinctio." I distinctio." But the lex continui" and the Leibnitian intellectualism forbid this interpretation. In this case obscurity and clarity are quantitative degrees of one single consciousness, distinct or intellectual, towards which both converge and with which in the extreme case they unite. To admit that artists judge with confused perceptions, says: "Le but principal de l'histoire, aussi bien que de la 1 Nouveaux Essais, ii, ch. 22. exemples, et puis de montrer le vice d'une manière qui en donne l'aversion et qui porte ou serve à l'éviter.” 1 The "claritas" attributed to æsthetic fact is not specifically different from, but rather a partial anticipation of, the "distinctio" of intellect. Undoubtedly this distinction of degree marks a great advance: but careful analysis shows that Leibniz does not differ fundamentally from those who, by inventing the new words and empirical distinctions examined above, called attention to the peculiarities of æsthetic facts. We find the same invincible intellectualism in the Speculation speculations on language greatly in vogue at the time, on language. When critics of the Renaissance and sixteenth century tried to rise above merely empirical and practical grammar and strove to reduce grammatical science to a systematic form, they fell into logicism and described grammatical forms by such terms as pleonastic, improper, metaphorical or elliptic. Thus Julius Caesar Scaliger (1540); thus, too, the most learned of all, Francisco Sanchez (Sanctius or Sanzio), called Brocense, who, in his Minerva (1587), asserts that names are attached to things by reason, exclusive of interjections which are not parts of speech but merely sounds expressive of joy or sorrow; he denies the existence of heterogeneous and heteroclitic words, and works out a system of syntax by means of four figures of construction, proclaiming the principle "doctrinam supplendi esse valde necessarium," that is to say, that grammatical diversities must be explained as ellipsis, abbreviation or omission with reference to the typical logical form.2 Gaspare Scioppio follows him exactly, abusing the old grammar with his accustomed violence and crying up the Sanctian" method, at that time still almost unknown, in his Grammatica philosophica (1628).3 Amongst critics of the seventeenth century, Jacopo Perizonio 1 Essais de Théodicée, part. ii. § 148. * Francisci Sanctii, Minerva seu de causis linguae latinae commentarius, 1587 (ed. with add. by Gaspare Scioppio, Padua, 1663); cf. bk. i. chs. 2, 9, and bk. iv. * Gasperis Sciopii, Grammatica philosophica, Milan, 1628 (Venice, 1728). P J. C. Wolff. must not be forgotten; he wrote a commentary on In order to correct the æsthetic ideas of Leibniz it was necessary to alter the very foundations of his system, the Cartesianism upon which it rested. This could not be undertaken by disciples of his own personal school, in whom we notice rather an increase of intellectualism. Giving scholastic form to the brilliant observations of the master, Johann Christian Wolff's system began with the theory of knowledge conceived as an organon" or instrument, followed by systems of natural law, ethics and politics, together constituting the "organon practical activity: the remainder was theology and metaphysics, or pneumatology and physics (doctrine of the soul and doctrine of phenomenal nature). Although Wolff distinguishes a productive imagination, ruled by the principle of sufficient reason, from the merely associative and chaotic,3 yet a science of imagination considered as a new theoretical value could find no niche in his schematism. Knowledge of a lower order, as such, 1 De dignitate, etc., bk. vi. ch. 1. 2 Locke, Essay, etc., bk. iii.; Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais, bk. iii. 3 Psychol. empirica (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1738), §§ 138-172. of belonged to Pneumatology and was incapable of possessing its own "organon": at most it could be brought under the organon already existing, which corrected and transcended it by means of logical knowledge in the same way in which Ethics treats the "facultas appetitiva inferior." As in France the poetics of Boileau corresponded with the philosophy of Descartes, so in Germany the rationalistic poetics of Gottsched1 reflect the Cartesian-Leibnitian theories of Wolff (1729). It was no doubt dimly seen that even in the inferior Demand for an organon of faculties some distinction was operative between perfect inferior and imperfect, value and non-value. A passage in a knowledge. book (1725) by the Leibnitian Bülffinger has often been quoted where he says: "Vellem existerent qui circa facultatem sentiendi, imaginandi, attendendi, abstrahendi et memoriam praestarent quod bonus ille Aristoteles, adeo hodie omnibus sordens, praestitit circa intellectum : hoc est ut in artis formam redigerent quicquid ad illas in suo usu dirigendas et iuvandas pertinet et conducit, quem ad modum Aristoteles in Organo logicam sive facultatem demonstrandi redegit in ordinem."2 But on reading the extract in its context one recognizes at once that the desired organon would have been merely a series of recipes for strengthening the memory, educating the attention, and so forth: a technique, in a word, not an æsthetic. Similar ideas had been spread in Italy by Trevisano (1708), who, by declaring that the senses might be educated through the mind, asserted the possibility of an art of feeling which should "endow manners with prudence and judgement with good taste." 3 We notice, moreover, that in his day Bülffinger was counted a depreciator of poetry, so much so that a tract against him was written in order to show that "poetry does not diminish the faculty of clear conception." 4 Bodmer and Breitinger were ready "to 1 Joh. Chr. Gottsched, Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst, Leipzig, 1729. 2 Dilucidationes philosophicae de Deo, anima humana et mundo, 1725 (Tübingen, 1768), § 268. 3 Preface to Rifless. sul gusto, ed. cit. p. 75. Borinski, Poetik d. Renaiss. p. 380 note. |