[130]. I find that I have here negligently ascribed to Bergson a metaphor which belongs to Croce, who at this point says the same thing as Bergson, though he gives it a different name. In Æsthetics as Science of Expression (English translation, p. 66) we read: “The world of which as a rule we have intuition [Bergson could not have used that word here] is a small thing.... ‘Here is a man, here is a horse, this is heavy, this is hard, this pleases me,’ etc. It is a medley of light and colour, which could not pictorially attain to any more sincere expression than a haphazard splash of colour, from among which would with difficulty stand out a few special distinctive traits. This and nothing else is what we possess in our ordinary life; this is the basis of our ordinary action. It is the index of a book. The labels tied to things take the place of things themselves.”
[131]. H. Bergson, Le Rire. For a clear, concise, and sympathetic exposition of Bergson’s standpoint, though without special reference to art, see Karin Stephen, The Misuse of Mind.
[132]. This may seem to cast a critical reflection on Croce. Let me, therefore, hasten to add that it is merely the personal impression that Croce, for all his virtuous aspirations after the concrete, tends to fall into verbal abstraction. He so often reminds one of that old lady who used to find (for she died during the Great War) such spiritual consolation in “that blessed word Mesopotamia.” This refers, however, to the earlier more than to the later Croce.
[133]. H. Rickert, System der Philosophie, vol. I (1921).
[134]. Before Baumgarten this distinction seems to have been recognised, though too vaguely and inconsistently, by Hutcheson, who is so often regarded as the real founder of modern æsthetics. W. R. Scott (Francis Hutcheson, p. 216) points out these two principles in Hutcheson’s work, “the Internal Senses, as derived from Reflection, representing the attitude of the ‘Spectator’ or observer in a picture gallery while, on the other hand, as deduced from εὐέργεια find a parallel in the artist’s own consciousness of success in his work, thus the former might be called static and the latter dynamic consciousness, or, in the special case of Morality, the first applies primarily to approval of the acts of others, the second to each individual’s approval of his own conduct.”
[135]. This would probably be recognised even by those moralists who, like Hutcheson, in their anxiety to make clear an important relationship, have spoken ambiguously. “Probably Hutcheson’s real thought,” remarks F. C. Sharp (Mind, 1921, p. 42), “is that the moral emotion, while possessing many important affinities with the æsthetic, is in the last resort different in content.”
[136]. Schopenhauer long ago pointed out that a picture should be looked at as a royal personage is approached, in silence, until the moment it pleases to speak to you, for, if you speak first (and how many critics one knows who “speak first”!), you expose yourself to hear nothing but the sound of your own voice. In other words, it is a spontaneous and “mystical” experience.
[137]. It is through Plotinus, also, that we realise how æsthetics is on the same plane, if not one, with mysticism. For by his insistence on Contemplation, which is æsthetics, we learn to understand what is meant when it is said, as it often is, that mysticism is Contemplation. (On this point, and on the early evolutions of Christian Mysticism, see Dom Cuthbert Butler, Western Mysticism (1922).)
[138]. Really, however, Plotinus was here a Neo-Aristotelian rather than a Neo-Platonist, for Aristotle (Ethics, book X, chap. 6) had put the claim of the Contemplative life higher even than Plato and almost forestalled Plotinus. But as Aristotle was himself here a Platonist that does not much matter.
[139]. See Inge, Philosophy of Plotinus, p. 179. In a fine passage (quoted by Bridges in his Spirit of Man) Plotinus represents contemplation as the great function of Nature herself, content, in a sort of self-consciousness, to do nothing more than perfect that fair and bright vision. This “metaphysical Narcissism,” as Palante might call it, accords with the conception of various later thinkers, like Schopenhauer, and like Gaultier, who however, seldom refers to Plotinus.