they did not exist at all previous to the formation of this expressive side of the spirit.”[1]
To the two fundamental questions that men ask of æstheticians—“What is art?” and “What is beauty?”—Croce either does not deign to reply, or replies in antediluvian fashion, “Art is symbol, all symbol.”[2] “An aspiration enclosed in the circle of a representaion—that is art; and in it the aspiration alone stands for the representation, and the representation alone for the aspiration.”[3] “Art is a true æsthetic synthesis a priori of feeling and image in the intuition.”[4] These definitions, to my mind, do nothing more than repeat, in more elegant terms, in more sophistical formulæ, the old truism that art consists in the expression of feeling.
With regard to beauty we are still more deeply in the dark. “An appropriate expression, if appropriate, is also beautiful, beauty being nothing but the determination of the image and therefore of the expression.”[5] But we have learned that an expression which is not appropriate is not even an expression, and we remember that art is nothing other than expression: all art, then, is proper and determinate, in other words, beautiful. We are lost in another hopeless labyrinth of identities.
And the worst of it is that the concepts of appropriateness and determinateness are the most
