Our treatise may appear to be somewhat meagre, when compared with the
great volumes usually consecrated to Aesthetic. But it will not seem so,
when it is observed that these volumes, as regards nine-tenths of their
contents, are full of matter which does not appertain to Aesthetic, such
as definitions, either psychical or metaphysical, of pseudo-aesthetic
concepts (of the sublime, the comic, the tragic, the humorous, etc.), or
of the exposition of the supposed Zoology, Botany, and Mineralogy of
Aesthetic, and of universal history judged from the aesthetic
standpoint. The whole history of concrete art and literature has also
been dragged into those Aesthetics and generally mangled; they contain
judgments upon Homer and Dante, upon Ariosto and Shakespeare, upon
Beethoven and Rossini, Michelangelo and Raphael. When all this has been
deducted from them, our treatise will no longer be held to be too
meagre, but, on the contrary, far more copious than ordinary treatises,
for these either omit altogether, or hardly touch at all, the greater
part of the difficult problems proper to Aesthetic, which we have felt
it to be our duty to study.
[Sidenote] _Identity of Linguistic and Aesthetic._
Aesthetic, then, as the science of expression, has been here studied by
us from every point of view. But there yet remains to justify the
sub-title, which we have joined to the title of our book, _General
Linguistic_, and to state and make clear the thesis that the science of
art is that of language.
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