The Breviary of Aesthetic 17
as practical acts, extraneous and inimical to the world of
art. Thus it happens that art manifests much more repug-
nance toward the positive and mathematical sciences than
toward philosophy, religion and history, because these seem
to it to be fellow-citizens of the same world of theory or of
knowledge, whereas those others shock it with the brutality
toward contemplation of the practical world. Poetry and
classification, and, worse still, poetry and mathematics, ap-
pear to be as little in agreement as fire and water: the esprit
mathématique and the esprit scientifique, the most declared
enemies of the esprit poétique; those periods in which the
natural sciences and mathematics prevail (for example, the
intellectualism of the eighteenth century) seem to be the
least fruitful in poetry.
And since this vindication of the alogical character of art
is, as I have said, the most difficult and important of the
negations included in the formula of art-intuition, the
theories that attempt to explain art as philosophy, as re-
ligion, as history, or as science, and in a lesser degree as
mathematics, occupy the greater part of the history of
aesthetic science and are adorned with the names of the
greatest philosophers. Schelling and Hegel afford examples
of the identification or confusion of art with religion and
philosophy in the eighteenth century; Taine, of its confusion
with the natural sciences; the theories of the French verists,
of its confusion with historical and documentary observa-
tion; the formalism of the Herbartians, of its confusion with
mathematics. But it would be vain to seek pure examples of
these errors in any of these authors and in the others that
might be mentioned, because error is never pure, for if it
were so, it would be truth. Thus the doctrines of art that
for the sake of brevity I shall term ‘ conceptualistic” contain