ABSTRACT
the obscure world of wit, taste, imagination, feeling and the je ne sais quoi was not selected for examination or even, so to speak, included in the picture of Cartesian philosophy. The French philosopher abhorred imagination, the outcome, according to him, of the agitation of the animal spirits: and though not utterly condemning poetry, he allowed it to exist only in so far as it was guided by intellect, that being the sole faculty able to save men from the caprices of the folle du logis. He tolerated it, but that was all; and went so far as not to deny it anything “qu’un philosophe lui puisse permettre sans offenser sa conscience.” 1 It has been observed that the æsthetic parallel with Cartesian intellectualism is to be found in Boileau, 2 slave to rigid raison (“Mais nous que la raison à ses regies engage . . .”) and enthusiastic partisan of allegory. We have already had occasion to draw attention to the diatribe of Malebranche against imagination. The mathematical spirit fostered in France by Descartes forbade all possibility of a serious consideration of poetry and art. The Italian Antonio Conti, living in that country and witness of the literary disputes raging around him, thus describes the French critics (La Motte, Fontenelle and their followers): “Ils ont introduit dans les belles lettres l’esprit et la methode 205de M. Descartes; et its jugent de la poésie et de l'eloquence independamment des qualites sensibles. De Ià vient aussi qu’ils confondent le progrès de la philosophic avec celui des arts. Les modernes, dit l'Abbe Terrasson, sont plus grands geometres que les anciens: done ils sont plus grands orateurs et plus grands poètes.” 1 The fight against this mathematical spirit in the matters of art and feeling was still going on in France in the day of the encyclopedists; the din of the battle was heard in Italy, as is shown by the writings of Bettinelli and others. At the time when Du Bos published his daring book there was a counsellor in the parliament of Bordeaux, Jean-Jacques Bel by name, who composed a dissertation (1726) against the doctrine that feeling should be the judge of art. 2
