The method that must govern researches on the beautiful and art is, as in the investigation of the true, to commence by psychology.—Faculties of the soul that unite in the perception of the beautiful.—The senses give only the agreeable; reason alone gives the idea of the beautiful.—Refutation of empiricism, that confounds the agreeable and the beautiful.—Pre-eminence of reason.—Sentiment of the beautiful; different from sensation and desire.—Distinction between the sentiment of the beautiful and that of the sublime.—Imagination.—Influence of sentiment on imagination.—Influence of imagination on sentiment.—Theory of taste.
Let us recall in a few words the results at which we have arrived.
Two exclusive schools are opposed to each other in the eighteenth century; we have combated both, and each by the other. To empiricism we have opposed the insufficiency of sensation, and its own inevitable necessity to idealism. We have admitted, with Locke and Condillac, in regard to the origin of knowledge, particular and contingent ideas, which we owe to the senses and consciousness; and above the senses and consciousness, the direct sources of all particular ideas, we have recognized, with Reid and Kant, a special faculty, different from sensation and consciousness, but developed with them,—reason, the lofty source of universal and necessary truths. We have established, against Kant, the absolute authority of reason, and the truths which it discovers. Then, the truths that reason revealed to us have themselves revealed to us their eternal principle,—God. Finally, this rational spiritualism, which is both the faith of the human race and the doctrine of the greatest minds of antiquity and modern times, we have carefully distinguished from a chimerical and dangerous mysticism. Thus the necessity of experience and the necessity of reason, the necessity of a real and infinite being which is the first and last foundation of truth, a severe distinction between spiritualism and mysticism, are the great principles which we have been able to gather from the first part of this course.
The second part, the study of the beautiful, will give us the same results elucidated and aggrandized by a new application.
It was the eighteenth century that introduced, or rather brought back into philosophy, investigations on the beautiful and art, so familiar to Plato and Aristotle, but which scholasticism had not entertained, to which our great philosophy of the seventeenth century had remained almost a stranger.[96] One comprehends that it did not belong to the empirical school to revive this noble part of philosophic science. Locke and Condillac did not leave a chapter, not even a single page, on the beautiful. Their followers treated beauty with the same disdain; not knowing very well how to explain it in their system, they found it more convenient not to perceive it at all. Diderot, it is true, had an enthusiasm for beauty and art, but enthusiasm was never so ill placed. Diderot had genius; but, as Voltaire said of him, his was a head in which every thing fermented without coming to maturity. He scattered here and there a mass of ingenious and often contradictory perceptions; he has no principles; he abandons himself to the impression of the moment; he knows not what the ideal is; he delights in a kind of nature, at once common and mannered, such as one might expect from the author of the Interprétation de la Nature, the Père de Famille, the Neveu de Rameau, and Jacques le Fataliste. Diderot is a fatalist in art as well as in philosophy; he belongs to his times and his school, with a grain of poetry, sensibility, and imagination.[97] It was worthy of the Scotch[98] school and Kant[99] to give a place to the beautiful in their doctrine. They considered it in the soul and in nature; but they did not even touch the difficult question of the reproduction of the beautiful by the genius of man. We will try to embrace this great subject in its whole extent, and we are about to offer at least a sketch of a regular and complete theory of beauty and art.
Let us begin by establishing well the method that must preside over these investigations.
One can study the beautiful in two ways:—either out of us, in itself and in the objects, whatever they may be, that bear its impress; or in the mind of man, in the faculties that attain it, in the ideas or sentiments that it excites in us. Now, the true method, which must now be familiar to you, makes setting out from man to arrive at things a law for us. Therefore psychological analysis will here again be our point of departure, and the study of the state of the soul in presence of the beautiful will prepare us for that of the beautiful considered in itself and its objects.
Let us interrogate the soul in the presence of beauty.
Is it not an incontestable fact that before certain objects, under very different circumstances, we pronounce the following judgment:—This object is beautiful? This affirmation is not always explicit. Sometimes it manifests itself only by a cry of admiration; sometimes it silently rises in the mind that scarcely has a consciousness of it. The forms of this phenomenon vary, but the phenomenon is attested by the most common and most certain observation, and all languages bear witness of it.
Although sensible objects, with most men, oftenest provoke the judgment of the beautiful, they do not alone possess this advantage; the domain of beauty is more extensive than the domain of the physical world exposed to our view; it has no bounds but those of entire nature, and of the soul and genius of man. Before an heroic action, by the remembrance of a great sacrifice; even by the thought of the most abstract truths firmly united with each other in a system admirable at once for its simplicity and its productiveness; finally, before objects of another order, before the works of art, this same phenomenon is produced in us. We recognize in all these objects, however different, a common quality in regard to which our judgment is pronounced, and this quality we call beauty.