44 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
language, which has the inevitable correlative of the mysti-
cal theory as its inevitable reaction. It will no longer be nec-
essary to construct absurd parallelisms even for language, or
to promote mysterious nuptials between sign and image:
when language is no longer conceived as a sign, but as an
image which is significant—that is, a sign in itself, and there-
fore coloured, sounding, singing, articulate. The significant
image is the spontaneous work of the human spirit, whereas
the sign, wherewith man agrees with man, presupposes lan-
guage; or if it be wished, nevertheless, to explain lan-
guage by signs, it recommends us to call upon God, as upon
the giver of the first signs—that is, to presuppose language
in another way, by consigning it to the Unknowable.
I shall conclude my account of the prejudices relating to
art with that one of them which is most usual, because it is
mingled with the daily life of criticism, namely, history of
art: prejudice of the possibility of distinguishing several or
many particular forms of art, each one determinable in its
own particular concept and within its limits, and furnished
with its proper laws. This erroneous doctrine is embodied in
two systematic series, one of which is known as the theory of
literary and artistic kinds (lyric, drama, romance, epic and
romantic poem, idyll, comedy, tragedy; sacred, civil-life, fa-
miliar, from life, still-life, landscape, flower and fruit paint-
ing; heroic, funereal, costume, sculpture; church, operatic,
chamber music; civil, military, ecclesiastic architecture, etc.,
etc.), and the other as theory of the arts (poetry, painting,
sculpture, architecture, music, art of the actor, gardening,
etc., etc.). One of these sometimes figures as a subdivision
of another. This prejudice, of which it is easy to trace the
origin, has its first notable monuments in Hellenic culture,
and persists in our days. Many æsthetieians still write trea-