[*] “This story of the Cenci is indeed eminently fearful and monstrous: anything like a dry exhibition of it on the stage would be insupportable. The person who would treat such a subject must increase the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the events.” From Shelley’s preface. The producers, however, were of the contrary opinion.
[*] It is true that in mechanics one might draw up a formidable list of names and say “Opposed to all these appeared a certain Einstein”, but the cases are not parallel. A scientific advance is different from a change of fashion, and no new facts nor any new hypothesis—no Michelson-Morley experiment, nor any widened purview—led up to the separate value theory of art. Although historians of æsthetics are sometimes pleased to present their facts as though they represented a progress from cruder to more refined opinion, from ignorance to wisdom, there is no sound basis for the procedure. Aristotle was at least as clearly and fully aware of the relevant facts and as adequate in his explanations as any later inquirers. Æsthetics in fact has hardly yet reached the scientific stage, in which succeeding investigators can start where their predecessors left off.
[†] An Essay on Style. The final paragraph.
[*] See Chapters XVI, XVIII and XXXI.
[†] Clive Bell, Art, p. 49.
[†] A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, p. 5.
[†] Eyeless Sight, p. 22.
[†] Dedalus, or Science and the Future, by J. B. S. Haldane.
[*] Compare Chapter XXXIV where the ways in which emotive factors interfere with thought are considered.
[†] Cf. Piéron, Thought and the Brain, Chapter I.