Now if we undertake to consider the sentiments which form part of the _Furioso,_ if we disassociate them from the connection established among them by the harmonising sentiment of Harmony, and therefore in their particularity, disaggregation and materiality, we shall have before us the _material_ of the _Furioso._ For the "material" of Art is nothing but this, when ideally distinguished from the _content,_ in which the sentiments themselves are fused in the dominant sentiment, whether it be called the leading motive or the lyrical motive: a content which in its turn can be only ideally distinguished from the _form,_ in which it expresses itself or is possessed and present in the spirit. Philological criticism, deprived of philosophical enlightenment, philology in its bad sense or philologism, means rather by "material" or "sources," as they are also called, external things, such as the books which the poet had read or the stories that he had heard told, and on the pretext of supplying in this way the genesis of a work of art _ab ovo,_ it penetrates to the sources of the sources, let us say to the origins of warrior women, of the ogress and the hippogryph of Ariosto. Their procedure suggests that of one who when asked what language a poet found in circulation in his time, should open for that purpose an etymological dictionary of the Italian language, or of the romance languages, or of Indo-European languages, which expound formative ideological processes, either forgotten or thrown into the background of the speaker's consciousness when engaged in speaking. But even if we do not lose our way in such learned and interminable dissertations, if we escape the error referred to above, of forming judgments as to merit upon them, philologistic search for sources and for material becomes capricious and ends by being impossible; because it takes as sources only certain literary lumber scattered here and there, and were we to unite this with the whole of the rest of literature, with the figurative and musical arts, and with other external things which actually surround the poet, public and private events, scientific teachings and disputes, beliefs, customs, and so on, we should find ourselves involved in all endless and infinite enumeration, convincing proof of the illogical nature of such an inquiry. Nor do we make any progress in the determination of the material by limiting it to more modest terms, that is to say, only to certain things which the poet had before him (even if they be documents and information, not without use for certain ends), because the true _material_ of art, as has been said, is not _things_ but the _sentiments_ of the poet, which determine and explain one another, why and for what reason he turns to certain things and not to others, to these things rather than to those. Since we have already described Ariosto's character and shown its reflection in his minor works, now