Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/224

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210 W. E. SCOTT : and which must have some voice in the approving of these actions. Thus the delight resulting from each step towards the attainment of this ideal is not merely analogous to (as with Shaftesbury), but practically identical with the artist's pleasure in the progress of his work, and, while this is no doubt a joyful feeling, it is neither unanalysable nor ultimate and therefore can scarcely be described as intuitive else every workman's satisfaction in work well done would be equally intuitive. In the case of the proper sphere of the artistic imagination namely, in Literature and Art it would appear from the hints in the essay on Castle-building that the faculty works consciously, since it must be watched and its procedure kept within bounds. It is here where Arbuckle of the Shaftes- bury writers comes closest to later aesthetic theories, that he misses the importance of the unconscious element in art. Nor need one blame him for lack of insight, when it is remembered that as a verse- writer he was one of the imita- tors of Pope, amongst whose consciously laboured efforts one looks in vain for outbursts of " fine frenzy". Finally, with regard to the Beauties of Nature he would also have found a place for Imagination here also, since Nature not only appeals to the natural capacity for ap- preciating the Beautiful, but rouses the " fancy " to use it for its own purposes certainly in Arbuckle's own treatment of Natural Beauty, as well as in his frequent use of per- sonification, there is much that is the result of the artistic imagination. Therefore it would appear that the psychologic order and values are something as follows : Delight arises immediately from the appreciation of Beauty : but Beauty itself (at least in the case of moral and artistic beauty) is the result of the natural capacity for perceiving beauty modified by the artistic imagination and its ideals, and this again is influenced by memory, hope and the effects of education and training. 1 Thus in all cases of joy in the beautiful life, the natural capacity is modified by external training and also by in- ternal faculties. It is to this that life and conduct are presented as an artistic product, the creation of a personal- ity, which, like the " disappearing gun," sinks momentarily out of sight, and then the resulting pleasure partakes of the character of artistic disinterestedness. 2 1 Hibernicus's Letters, ii., p. 324. 2 Thus Arbuckle's Beauty would have three characteristics of Kant's " Judgments of Taste " Universality, Necessity and Disinterestedness.