[100]. Dr. C. S. Myers has touched on this point in Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. II, part II, chap. IV; also “The Taste-Names of Primitive Peoples,” British Journal of Psychology, June, 1904.
[101]. Dr. Georg von Gizycki, Die Philosophie Shaftesbury’s (1876); and the same author’s Die Ethik David Hume’s (1878).
[102]. It should be added that Croce is himself moving in this direction, and in, for instance, Il Carattere di Totalità della Espressione Artistica (1917), he recognises the universality of art.
[103]. Stanley Hall remarks in criticising Kant’s moral æsthetics: “The beauty of virtue is only seen in contemplating it and the act of doing it has no beauty to the doer at the moment.” (G. Stanley Hall, “Why Kant is Passing,” American Journal of Psychology, July, 1912.)
[104]. See article on Arbuckle by W. R. Scott in Mind, April, 1899.
[105]. See a helpful paper by M. F. Libby, “Influence of the Idea of Æsthetic Proportion on the Ethics of Shaftesbury,” American Journal of Psychology, May-October, 1901.
[106]. We find fallacious criticism of the “moral sense” down to almost recent times, in, for instance, McDougall’s Social Psychology, even though McDougall, by his insistence on the instinctive basis of morality, was himself carrying on the tradition of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. But McDougall also dragged in “some prescribed code of conduct,” though he neglected to mention who is to “prescribe” it.
[107]. See W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson: His Life, Teaching and Position in the History of Philosophy. (1900.)
[108]. It is noteworthy, however, that the æsthetic view of morals has had advocates, not only among the more latitudinarian Protestants, but in Catholicism. A few years ago the Reverend Dr. Kolbe published a book on The Art of Life, designed to show that just as the sculptor works with hammer and chisel to shape a block of marble into a form of beauty, so Man, by the power of grace, the illumination of faith, and the instrument of prayer, works to transform his soul. But this simile of the sculptor, which has appealed so strongly alike to Christian and anti-Christian moralists, proceeds, whether or not they knew it, from Plotinus, who, in his famous chapter on Beauty, bids us note the sculptor. “He cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a living face has grown upon his work. So do you also cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, make all one glow of beauty, and never cease chiselling your statue until the godlike splendour shines on you from it, and the perfect goodness stands, surely, in the stainless shrine.”
[109]. “They who pitched the goal of their aspiration so high knew that the paths leading up to it were rough and steep and long,” remarks A. W. Benn (The Greek Philosophers, 1914, p. 57); “they said ‘the beautiful is hard’—hard to judge, hard to win, hard to keep.”