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Art and Science ,,---,... At the Burlington Fine Arts Club there is now on view a most remarkable collection of Florentine Primitives. I do not propose in this article to criticize these pictures, about many ofwhich I have written at one time or another, but rather to take up a question of aesthetics which is suggested by the peculiar significance of Florentine art. In the preface to the Catalogue I have endeavoured to discuss this, and where it is convenient for the purposes of this article I shall quote what I have there written: We can get an idea ofwhat Florence ofthe fifteenth century meant for the subsequent tradition of European art if we consider that had it not been for Florence the art of Italy might have been not altogether unlike the art of Flanders and the Rhine-a little more rhythmical, a little more gracious, perhaps, but hardly more significant. To Florence of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, then, and to France of the seventeenth and succeeding centuries, we owe the existence in Europe of generalized or what, for want of a better word, we may call intellectual art. It is, of course, doubtful whether the word intellectual is really justified in this context; but I use it in order to call attention to the close analogy that exists between certain processes of art and science, and my speculations naturally find a place in the Athenaeum as referring to my colleague S.'s approach to the subject from the scientific side. In his article "The Place of Science" (Athenaeum, April II) S. distinguishes between two aspects of intellectual activity in science: one motived by curiosity, which analyses and particularizes; the other aiming at the widest possible generalization , the motive force being the satisfaction which the mind gets from the contemplation of inevitable relations. In a later article (May 2) S. says boldly that this satisfaction is an aesthetic satisfaction: "It is in its aesthetic value that the justification of the scientific theory is to be found, and with it the justification of the scientific From Athenaeum, June 6, 1919. Art and the Market method." I should like to pose to S. at this point the question ofwhether a theory that disregarded facts would have equal value for science with one which agreed with facts. I suppose he would say No; and yet, so far as I can see, there would be no purely aesthetic reason why it should not. The aesthetic value ofa theory would surely depend solely on the perfection and complexity of the unity attained, and I imagine that many systems of scholastic theology, and even some more recent systems of metaphysic, have only this aesthetic value. I suspect that the aesthetic value of a theory is not really adequate to the intellectual effort entailed unless, as in a true scientific theory (by which I mean a theory which embraces all the known relevant facts), the aesthetic value is reinforced by the curiosity value which comes in when we believe it to be true. But now, returning to art, let me try to describe rather more clearly its analogies with science: Both of these aspects [the particularizing and the generalizing] have their counterparts in art. Curiosity impels the artist to the consideration of every possible form in nature: under its stimulus he tends to accept each form in all its particularity as a given, unalterable fact. The other kind of intellectual activity impels the artist to attempt the reduction of all forms, as it were, to some common denominator which will make them comparable with one another. It impels him to discover some aesthetically intelligible principle in various forms, and even to envisage the possibility of some kind of abstract form in the aesthetic contemplation of which the mind would attain satisfaction-a satisfaction curiously parallel to that which the mind gets from the intellectual recognition of abstract truth. Ifwe consider the effects of these two kinds of intellectual activity, or rather their exact analogues, in art, we have to note that in so far as the artist's curiosity remains a purely intellectual curiosity it interferes with the perfection and purity of the work of art by introducing an alien and non-aesthetic element and appealing to non-aesthetic desires; in so far as it merely supplies the artist with new motives and a richer material out of which to build his designs, it is useful but subsidiary. Thus the objection to a "subject picture," in...

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