48 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
intellect. No intermediate element interposes itself philo-
sophically between the universal and the particular, no series
of kinds or species, of generalia. Neither the artist who pro-
duces art, nor the spectator who contemplates it, has need
of anything but the universal and the individual, or, better,
the universal individuated: the universal artistic activity,
which is all contracted or concentrated in the representation
of a single state of the soul.
Nevertheless, if the pure artist and the pure critic, and also
the pure philosopher, are not occupied with generalia, witlr
classes or kinds, these retain their utility on other grounds;
and this utility is the true side of those erroneous theories,
which I will not leave without mention. It is certainly useful
to construct a net of generalia, not for the production of art,
which is spontaneous, nor for the judgment of it, which is
philosophical, but to collect and to some extent circumscribe
the infinite single intuitions, for the use of the attention and
of memory, in order to group together to some extent the in-
numerable particular works of art. These classes will always
be formed, as is natural, either by means of the abstract im-
agination or the abstract expression, and therefore as classes
of states of the soul (literary and artistic kinds) and classes
of means of expression (art). Nor does it avail to object here
that the various kinds and arts are arbitrarily distinguished,
and that the general dichotomy is itself arbitrary; since it is
admitted without difficulty that the procedure is certainly
arbitrary, but the arbitrariness becomes innocuous and useful
from the very fact that every pretension of being a philosoph-
ical principle and criterion for the judgment of art is re-
moved from it. Those kinds and classes render easy the
knowledge of art and education in art, offering to the first,
as it were, an index of the most important works of art, to the
second a collection of most important information suggested