The Natural Sciences have become in our day a sort of superstition,
allied to a certain, perhaps unconscious, hypocrisy. Not only have
chemical, physical, and physiological laboratories become a sort of
Sibylline grots, where resound the most extraordinary questions about
everything that can interest the spirit of man, but even those who
really do prosecute their researches with the old inevitable method of
internal observation, have been unable to free themselves from the
illusion that they are, on the contrary, employing _the method of the
natural sciences_.
Hippolyte Taine's Philosophy of Art represents such an illusion. He
declares that when we have studied the diverse manifestations of art in
all peoples and at all epochs, we shall then possess a complete
Aesthetic. Such an Aesthetic would be a sort of Botany applied to the
works of man. This mode of study would provide moral science with a
basis equally as sure as that which the natural sciences already
possess. Taine then proceeds to define art without regard to the natural
sciences, by analysing, like a simple mortal, what passes in the human
soul when brought face to face with a work of art. But what analysis and
what definitions!
Art, he says, is imitation, but of a sort that tries to express an
essential characteristic. Thus the principal characteristic of a lion is
to be "a great carnivore," and we observe this characteristic in all its
limbs.
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