extrinsic reality, in order to modify it by approaching it to the ideal; but he proceeds from the impression of external nature to expression, that is to say, to his ideal, and from this he passes to the natural fact, which he employs as the instrument of reproduction of the ideal fact.

theory of the

forms of the

Another consequence of the confusion between Critique of the the aesthetic and the physical fact is the theory elementary of the elementary forms of the beautiful. If beautiful. expression, if the beautiful, be indivisible, the physical fact, in which it externalizes itself, can well be divided and subdivided: for example, a painted surface, into lines and colours, groups and curves of lines, kinds of colours, and so on; a poem, into strophes, verses, feet, syllables; a piece of prose, into chapters, paragraphs, headings, periods, phrases, words, and so on. The parts thus obtained are not æsthetic facts, but smaller physical facts, cut up in an arbitrary manner. If this path were followed, and the confusion persisted in, we should end by concluding that the true forms of the beautiful are atoms.

The aesthetic law, several times promulgated, that beauty must have bulk, could be invoked against the atoms. It cannot be the imperceptibility of the too small, nor the unapprehensibility of the too large. But a bigness which depends

N

Critique of the search for the objective conditions of the beautiful.

upon perceptibility, not measurement, derives from a concept widely different from the mathematical. For what is called imperceptible and incomprehensible does not produce an impression, because it is not a real fact, but a concept: the requisite of bulk in the beautiful is thus reduced to the effective reality of the physical fact, which serves for the reproduction of the beautiful.

Continuing the search for the physical laws or for the objective conditions of the beautiful, it has been asked: To what physical facts does the beautiful correspond? To what the ugly? To what unions of tones, colours, sizes, mathematically determinable? Such inquiries are as if in Political Economy one were to seek for the laws of exchange in the physical nature of the objects exchanged. The constant infecundity of the attempt should have at once given rise to some suspicion as to its vanity. In our times, especially, has the necessity for an inductive Esthetic been often proclaimed, of an Esthetic starting from below, which should proceed like natural science and not hasten its conclusions. Inductive? But Esthetic has always been both inductive and deductive, like every philosophical science; induction and deduction cannot be separated, nor can they separately avail to characterize a true

science. But the word "inductive" was

not

here pronounced accidentally and without special intention. It was wished to imply by its use that the æsthetic fact is nothing, at bottom, but a physical fact, which should be studied by applying to it the methods proper to the physical and natural sciences. With such a presupposition and in such a faith did inductive Esthetic or Esthetic of the inferior (what pride in this modesty!) begin its labours. It has conscientiously begun by making a collection of beautiful things, for example of a great number of envelopes of various shapes and sizes, and has asked which of these give the impression of the beautiful and which of the ugly. As was to be expected, the inductive æstheticians speedily found themselves in a difficulty, for the same objects that appeared ugly in one aspect would appear beautiful in another. A yellow, coarse envelope, which would be extremely ugly for the purpose of enclosing a love-letter, is, however, just what is wanted for a writ served by process on stamped paper. This in its turn would look very bad, or seem at any rate an irony, if enclosed in a square English envelope. Such considerations of simple common sense should have sufficed to convince inductive æstheticians, that the beautiful

Astrology of
Esthetic.

has no physical existence, and cause them to
remit their vain and ridiculous quest.
But no:
they have had recourse to an expedient, as to
which we would find it difficult to say how far
it belongs to natural science. They have sent
their envelopes round from one to the other and
opened a referendum, thus striving to decide by
the votes of the majority in what consists the
beautiful and the ugly.

We will not waste time over this argument, because we should seem to be turning ourselves into narrators of comic anecdotes rather than expositors of æsthetic science and of its problems. It is an actual fact, that the inductive æstheticians have not yet discovered one single law.

He who dispenses with doctors is prone to abandon himself to charlatans. Thus it has befallen those who have believed in the natural laws of the beautiful. Artists sometimes adopt empirical canons, such as that of the proportions of the human body, or of the golden section, that is to say, of a line divided into two parts in such a manner that the less is to the greater as is the greater to the whole line (bc: ac = ac: ab). Such canons easily become their superstitions, and they attribute to such the success of their works. Thus Michael Angelo left as a precept

to his disciple Marco del Pino of Siena that "he should always make a pyramidal serpentine figure multiplied by one, two, three," a precept which did not enable Marco di Siena to emerge from that mediocrity which we can yet observe in his many works, here in Naples. Others extracted from the sayings of Michael Angelo the precept that serpentine undulating lines were the true lines of beauty. Whole volumes have been composed on these laws of beauty, on the golden section and on the undulating and serpentine lines. These should in our opinion be looked upon as the astrology of Esthetic.