[Sidenote Feeling and Sensationalism.]
The sensationalism of Du Bos and other upholders of feeling appears very clearly. For Du Bos art is a pastime whose pleasantness consists in the fact that it occupies the mind without fatigue, and has affinities with the pleasure provoked by gladiatorial contests, bullfights and tourneys.[61]
For these reasons, whilst noting the importance, in the prehistory of Æsthetic, of these new words and the new views they express; and while recognizing their value as a ferment in the discussion of the æsthetic problem, taken up by thinkers of the Renaissance at the point at which it had been left by the ancients; we yet cannot discern in their apparition the true origin of our science. By these words and the discussions they aroused, the æsthetic fact clamoured even louder and more insistently for its own philosophical justification; but this it was not yet to attain either by this means or by any other.
[1] E.g. Molière, Préc. ridic. sc. i, 10.
[2] I fonti dell' ingegno ridotti ad arte, Bologna, 1650.
[3] Delle acutezze che altrimenti spiriti, vivezze e concetti volgarmenti si appellano, Genova-Bologna, 1639.
[4] Agudeza y arte de ingenio, Madrid, 1642; enlarged, Huesca, 1649.
[5] Saggio del gusto e delle belle arti, 1783, ch. I, note.
[6] Ital. trans. in Orsi, Considerazioni, etc. (Modena, 1735), vol. i. dial. 1.