ARBUCKLE AND THE MOLESWOBTH-SHAFTESBURY SCHOOL. 209 for Shaftesbury's more hedonistic term, " relish". " Taste " is a natural capacity, but susceptible of cultivation, and even requiring it. Here he parts company with Hutcheson, who, sometimes in his earlier works, speaks as if he used the word sense simply as indicating the passive side of the mind. 1 Arbuckle's point of view is different, probably as a poet, he recognises, with regard to works of Art, that any such account of the appreciation of the Beautiful neglects the importance of the creative imagination. Under the fanciful heading of " Castle-building " he vindicates the productive powers of "fancy," for, he thinks, "whatever may be the abuses of a loose fancy in its wild rambles after chimerical pleasure," being a natural faculty, it must have a legitimate use. This consists in drawing up "ideal memoirs of our future actions and success," thereby constructing a romantic liixtory, for, after all, what is history "but Castle-building backwards, wherein we amuse ourselves with the fortunes and adventures of other persons as if they were our own?" 2 This exercise of imagination, though common, is productive or creative, and, under due artistic restraint, becomes the work of genius. From this point, Arbuckle starts upon the few hints he gives of his views upon .^Esthetics, as such. These are very scattered and tend rather in the direction of literary and artistic criticism than towards the construction of a theory of Art. The influence of the artistic imagination upon life and conduct is more important. Arbuckle appears to have given Imagination the power of outlining an Ideal of the beautiful life, for which each separate act constitutes the material to be worked up as it were, the pigments to be successively applied to make the complete "picture". The application of the productive or artistic imagination to Ethics has an important bearing upon the Psychological character of Arbuckle's theory. While he strongly contends that the basis of the delight in Beauty is "natural," i.e., not wholly the result of education, his theory is more complex than that of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. The delight derived from Beauty can scarcely be said to be ultimate in as much as it is conditioned by the artistic idea of a beautiful personality, which ideal is consciously present in the mind, prior to the different actions which endeavour to realise it, 1 Inquiry Concerning Beauty, 6, x. " The internal sense is a passive power of receiving ideas of Beauty from all objects in which there is' uniformity amidst variety." a Hibemicus's Letters, L, p. 83. 14
