78 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
always reproduction of intuitions), would be inconceivable
without the unity of the real; and if we had not been our-
selves Cæsar and Pompey,—that is, that universal which was
once determined as Cæsar and Pompey and is now deter-
mined as ourselves, they Iivmg in us,—we should be unable
to form any idea of Cæsar and Pompey. And further, the
doctrine that individuality is irreproducible and the univer-
sal only reproducible is certainly a doctrine of “sound” phi-
losophy, but of sound scholastic philosophy, which separated
universal and individual, making the latter an accident of
the former (dust carried along by time), and did not know
that the true universal is the universal individuated, and
that the only true effable is the so-called ineffable, the con-
crete and individual. And finally, what does it matter if we
have not always ready the material for reproducing with
full exactitude all works of art or any work of art of the past?
Fully exact reproduction is, like every human work, an ideal
which is realised in infinity, and therefore is always realised
in such a manner that it is admitted at every instant of time
by the conformation of reality. Is there a suggestion in a
poem of which the full signification escapes us? No one will
wish to affirm that that suggestion, of which we now have a
crepuscular vision that fails to satisfy, will not be better de-
termined in the future by means of research and meditation
and by the formation of favourable conditions and sym-
pathetic currents.
Therefore, inasmuch as taste is most sure of the legitimacy
of its discussions, by just so much is historical research and
interpretation indefatigable in restoring and preserving and
widening the knowledge of the past; not mentioning that
relativists and sceptics, both in taste and in history, utter
their desperate cries from time to time, which do not reduce