difficult reading; and it is probably due to this circumstance that the mass of information which it contains is, comparatively speaking, even now unfamiliar. But what the Laocoon has lost in balance and literary finish it has gained in originality and force. Ain't this a hell of a book! CHAPTER VII DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHIC (OR PLATONIC) CRITICISM BY COUSIN HALF a century later Cousin followed Lessing with a 'regular and complete theory of Beauty and Art': and it is significant that this complete account is not the philosophy of Aristotle, but on that upon based The contrast presented by a comparison of Cousin's work with that of Lessing is very instructive. Lessing begins with the study of a single work of art, Cousin with the principle of beauty. The method of Lessing is that of Aristotle, and like Aristotle he depends for the support of his conclusions upon examples taken from the existing works of artists and poets. Cousin is a disciple of Plato and Descartes: his method is idealistic-that is, philosophic in the one sense in which he admits the application of the term. The results which he obtains are less exact, less practical than those of Lessing, but they have a wider application and a more permanent validity. The series of lectures entitled Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien, were originally delivered in 1818; they were published from pupils' notes in 1836, and by the author himself in 1853. In the treatise which thus assumed its present literary form, Cousin ranges the results of a study, at once wide and exact, of ancient and modern philosophy under the three principles of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. In thus making the study of the beautiful an integral part of philosophy, he claims that he is re-writing a chapter forgotten or omitted since the time of Plato and Aristotle. Locke and Condillac, he says, have not left a single page upon beauty.' Diderot was, in the words of Voltaire, a head in which everything fermented without coming to maturity'; for he was ignorant of the principle of the ideal. Both the Scotch School, as represented by Hutcheson and Reid, and Kant found a place for the beautiful in their systems; but while they considered it as manifested in the soul and in nature, they did not even approach the difficult question of the reproduc tion of the beautiful by the genius of man.' It is strange that Cousin should make no mention of the work of Addison or Lessing in this connection. It is scarcely credible, having in view the large space occupied by the imagination in Cousin's theory of art, and in particular certain passages which seem to be an adaptation of what Addison wrote on the power of the imagination, that he should have been ignorant of the nature of his work. On the other hand, Cousin's penetration was such If that if he had studied the Spectator with any degree of attention, he must have recognized the essential difference between Addison and the crowd of pseudo-classical critics of the seventeenth century. The explanation seems to lie in the fact that Addison had already specialized that aspect of the subject which deals with the criticism of Literature. this surmise be true-if, that is to say, Cousin's failure to recognize Addison's work be due to the fact that he considers beauty as a part of philosophy— the circumstance supports the conclusion at which I have already arrived, that in Addison we have the first writer since Aristotle who was able to distinguish criticism from philosophy on the one hand, and from science on the other: the first genuine critic of literature, and the founder of literary criticism as such. The omission of Lessing must be referred similarly to the fact that he, though in a less degree, specialized criticism on its artistic side. In other words, Cousin fails to recognize the fact that criticism had already become a separate and distinct field of intellectual inquiry.' For the rest, from his standpoint and within the limits of his design—' to offer at least an outlinesketch of a regular and complete theory of Beauty and Art '-Cousin's account is admirably conceived and executed. In the short space of four chapters he formulates and (within these limits) answers the 1 He refers incidentally to Lessing in leçon ix., and to Addison in an earlier passage. four all-important questions upon the solution of which the certainty, and consequently the value, of criticism depends. These questions are: I. What is subjective beauty, or faculties to which we owe our idea tiful? what are the of the beau II. What is objective beauty, or what is it that makes a person, an action, a thought, or a thing · beautiful? III. What is art, or how is the beautiful reproduced? IV. What separates the Fine Arts, or what are the means, and therefore the aims, which respectively belong to the several arts? Cousin at the very outset applies the central principle of his spiritual philosophy to distinguish the idea of beauty from any conception of the beautiful based upon the evidence of the senses. If the idea of beauty has been conveyed to us by the senses it must be reducible into the agreeable; for the senses cannot tell us that a thing is beautiful but only that it is agreeable. But the idea of beauty cannot be so reduced. In the first place, experience shows that beauty and agreeableness are not interchangeable; for it does not always follow that a thing which is agreeable is beautiful. In the second, of the five senses two only, hearing and sight, can arouse the idea of beauty. Indeed, 'sensation not only does not |