world is premised is it possible to elaborate a consistent view of either work or knowledge.

The validity of such an immediate unity of the mind with the world cannot be doubted by him who is aware and appreciative of the aesthetic ideal as that which is constituted by the universal and necessary without the generalization and abstraction of the logical concept. Kant, who made aesthetic thinking possible, should have placed the aesthetic at the beginning instead of at the end of his critical system; should have regarded it as the original, not as the acquired, unity of sense and understanding, of practical and speculative. When aesthetic truth is understood as that which contains the original unity of mind as existence, it becomes possible to conceive of the aesthetic idea as something natural, rather than as something extraordinary. The aesthetic idea contains the universal and necessary, but not in the general and abstract manner of logic. This idea is to be explained in the light of the fact that it was from the immediate necessity and universality of the idea that logic proceeded when it went on to analyze the necessary in the form of the abstract, the universal in the form of the general. Had not the universal and necessary already existed in the aesthetic idea, the derivation of them by logic would have been impossible. Now, it is the originally necessary and universal which afford the basis of the mind's existence, just as it is upon these grounds that the joy of existence becomes possible. The immediate sense and enjoyment of existence is then completely distinguished from the derivative ideas of worth and truth, inasmuch as one phase of beauty makes no distinctions of interest, while the other ignores the distinction of particular and general. In the original intuition of the aesthetic mind, it is free vision and enjoyment in which as yet no suggestion of interest and the concept have appeared.

III. THE AESTHETIC SYNTHESIS

The misunderstanding that has arisen between the inner self and the outer world has been due to the fact that individualism has ever entertained too limited a conception of selfhood, while scientism has indulged in a conception of nature too prosaic to permit one to regard the world as the place of the human soul. In the same manner, the ethical discussion of the question of life in the world has proceeded to oppose the selfish ego to the practical order of sociality. Where Descartes defined selfhood in such a manner as to render impossible any sort of metaphysical commerce with the exterior world, Hobbes described the human self in a way which at once forbade any genuine relationship between the individual and society. When genuine individualism arose in the nineteenth century, the conception of the ego as the will-to-selfhood and the notion of nature as a system of blind striving served only to make a bad matter worse. Man and the world, so it seemed, had had a serious falling out. On the humanistic side, the situation was no better, since the ego of self-culture was far from having a place in the socialized order. Where self-consciousness opposed itself to the static arrangement of the world, self-will set itself at variance with the world viewed dynamically, so that man and his world were at sword's points. Where self-love tended to negate the political arrangement of humanity, self-culture was out of tune with humanity as social; whence man could find his humanity only as he retreated to his inner life. Solipsism and egoism, irrationalism and immoralism, were the forms in which the independence of the self expressed itself. Now scientism and sociality wish the individual to be something less than these; but individualism believes that the hope of establishing a new synthesis of the self and the world depends upon the individual's becoming something more.

I. THE AESTHETIC SYNTHESIS WITH NATURE

In order to calculate how the better self of humanity may take and occupy its place in the larger world of nature, one must consider just how the inferior ego was led to abandon his place in the world of scientism. Modern thought began as no other movement than the complete naturalization of the world without and within; that desire to dominate the individual which in Paganism had raised the State above the self, which in Mediaevalism had walled the individual within the Church, showed itself in the attempt to submerge the ego in the scientific, social State. At the same time, the subordination of humanity was not so complete as the principles of naturalism would seem to indicate. The physical view of the world was so closely connected with a humanistic conception of mankind that the result of the Enlightenment was at once naturistic and humanistic. Furthermore, the mathematical notions of the times were such as to make the world appear mental; whence the new physics had about it a subjectivism which ended by saying that our only knowledge is the knowledge of ideas. When thought became biological, as it did in the nineteenth century, it made the social one with the natural, so that a certain amount of humanism was to be found in the midst of the crass naturalism. Then the biological ideals of the age were tempted to extend their sway over the psychological; whence another method of escape was provided for the individual. The result, as our treatment of The Naturalization of Life showed, was quite ambiguous, in that humanity and the individual, far from being driven from the field, were enhanced and strengthened by the application of the natural to human life. Like wisdom, nature is justified of her children, so that one might regard naturalism as a hen which has hatched out a

duckling, whose aqueous propensities are so surprising to the land-bird.

Even when the conclusions of scientism in both physical and biological forms were ambiguous, there went abroad the impression that scientism had driven spiritual life from the world. Art lost its one-time sway; ethics became either utilitarian or formal; religion was forced to submit to scientific cosmology and sociology. But the fact remained that the self was still in the world; and, even when the principles of outer existence were developed so rapidly and so completely as to leave the ideals of the inner life far in the rear, man was not wholly distanced in the race for the goal of life. At a time when life had all but passed into the hands of scientism, at a time when the scientific thinker had become as dogmatic and intolerant as the scholastic theologian, the individualistic revolt asserted the independence of the self in its soul-states. Having no means of appreciating these soul-states, scientism had looked upon them as so many inward events comparable to exterior happenings; wanting in a sense of taste, scientism had reduced all phenomena to a dead level, whence one fact became as fine as another, the outer as good as the inner. The lack of perspective which distorted the picture of the world, was supplied in part by the individualistic movement, which brought the self to the foreground. It is not to be doubted that individualism exaggerated the importance of the individual's private experiences; for, where scientism had made the soul-state but one fact among a host of others, individualism allowed the inner experience of the soul-state to blot out the meaning of the exterior order. The Ironie of Schlegel, the culte de soi-meme of Baudelaire, and the solipsism of Huysmans in his maisonette, are so many examples of this exaggeration. Nevertheless, it was just poison which served to cure the soul of its naturalistic malady.

The self still exists! In its unearthliness, its antinaturalness, individualism may have been wrong, but its solipsistic sin was a felix culpa. In its romantic, decadent, symbolistic aestheticism, individualism saved the self from the toils of scientism; where taste was needed to render the view of nature selective and appropriate, such individualism invoked the superfine, the hysterical, and the morbid for the purpose of placing the soul-state in a different light from that which naturalism was shedding upon it. No one who has toiled under the sun of naturalism can regret the cool shadows of what otherwise would be a doubtful philosophy of life. When scientism played Comte, individualism replied with Stirner; when Mill appeared, Wagner checkmated his utilitarianism; the naturalism of Darwin was neutralized by the Satanism of Baudelaire, while Spencer was no match for Ibsen. Erotic, morbid, and lyrical, the individualist was still true to humanity; the individualist defended the self from the attacks of unscrupulous scientism.

Scientism has become one of the most unnatural movements in the history of human culture. For the sake of perfecting its forms, scientism has been as vicious as scholasticism in violating the content of its own subject matter. Where Scholasticism made relentless use of the abstract, scientism has been as perverse in its employment of the analytic; where Scholasticism sought the empty general, scientism has been equally devoted to the particular. The plea under which scientism has advanced the culture of the analytic has been based upon the notion that truth is to be found in the fact; now nature as such does not consist in an array of facts or in an immediate assemblage of facts; nature is obviously a systematic whole the comprehension of which depends upon a form of culture which is able to view the world in its totality. Within the limits of mere scientific investigation, the fallacy of scientism as