By Tolstoy (q.v., 1828-1910) art is regarded as a means, not an end, and in this he agrees with Ruskin. Art is a human activity aiming at the transmission of emotion, and is not the pursuit of beauty. Art should not be the ex clusive property of one class or one race, and should avoid such subjects as sexual love, patriotism, or religious devotion. Its true func tion is ethical.
According • to Bosanquet (q.v.), the beauti ful is °that which has characteristic or indi vidual expressiveness for sense-perception or imagination, subject to the conditions of gen eral or abstract expressiveness in the same Bosanquet finds beauty in charged ness with associated ideas. Here the voice is Hegel's but the hand is Bain's. Beauty is to be judged, not by individual human feeling, but by the tendency of human feeling. usually means such beauty as is recorded in art e., by those who perceive best.
According to Bergson (q.v.), art exhibits the intention of life, as opposed to science, which presents its analysis. Art is the sphere of intuition, science that of reason. As B:erg son considers the knowledge gained by intui tion as deeper and truer than that gained by reason, he assigns a higher place to art in his philosophy than to science. He names sym pathy as one of the cardinal marks of art.
Bergson's antithesis between art and science is foreign to the philosophy of Santayana (q.v.), who regards art as plastic instinct which is conscious of its aims. The instinct which constitutes art in Bergson's philosophy need not possess this consciousness. For Santayana art is reason propagating itself. This attitude is not unlike that of Benedetto Croce (9.v.). Croce holds that art is essen tially lyrical, and consists in a representation of the feelings. He denies to art all ulterior metaphysical purpose. It should exhibit feel ings and not deliberately construct them.
Let us now leave the historical for the sys tematic part of the discussion. We find that the two cardinal problems of esthetics are that of the nature of beauty and that of the nature of art. Although art does not always deal with what is prima facie beautiful, it would seem difficult to deny that any proper object of art, no matter how great its apparent ugliness, will be beautiful when approached from the stand point of the artist or the appreciative observer. Although, then, it is easy to formulate para that appear to point in the opposite direction, we are justified in defining art as that human activity which has as its end the production of the beautiful. This definition
does not tacitly introduce the "Art for art's sake" which Tolstoy combats, for it leaves en tirely open the question of the independence of beauty from morality, and furthermore does not declare that the attainment of beauty is an end which justifies action. If we admit the validity of this definition, we have left of the two problems of esthetics but one— that of the nature of beauty.
The most important question which, as we have seen, has historically presented itself as to the nature of beauty is that of its source. This question is completely analogous to that of realism or idealism in epistemology; is beauty something intrinsic in what is perceived, which is only disclosed through the act of per ception and not at. all altered thereby, or does beauty consist in a relation between the beauti ful object and the subject who is aware of it or the act of perception by which it is brought to consciousness? Those who hold views of the first type, such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Hegel or Bosanquet are called objective aestheti cians, while their opponents, including among others Home, Shaftesbury, Burke and in a limited sense Kant, are said to be subjective aestheticians.
The dispute between subjectivists and ob jectivists in esthetics has been full of much conf nsion. The subjectivists have been ac cused of degrading their science by making the validity of the esthetic judgment dependent on the mere passing whim of any self-appointed critic. Without in the least prejudicing the answer to the main question at issue, it may be pointed out that to say that a view is degraded or ignoble is not to say that it is false, and furthermore that a property of an object which is dependent on its relation to a percipient is not necessarily mutable at the will of the per cipient. An esthetic judgment which is de pendent, let us say, on my feeling of admiration for a certain statue, is no more under my con trol for that reason than if it were solely de pendent on the physical shape of the statue. As far as my will is concerned, my sentiment of admiration is as immutable a datum as the statue itself. The subjectivist, then, may have canons of taste quite as binding as those of the objectivist, but these canons involve a double reference—a reference not only to the object but to the subject.