What Dr. Bosanquet cannot abide is Croce’s great principle that in æsthetic philosophy there are no arts but only art. He says this “offers to destroy our medium of intercourse through the body and through natural objects.” Why “destroy”? Surely it is not a case of destruction but of removal; removal from the philosophy of art to that of practice. Croce is not quite so foolish as to offer to destroy things indestructible; he is only trying to put them in their place. “The truth is, surely, that different inclinations of the spirit have affinities with different qualities and actions of body—meaning by body that which a sane philosophy accepts as concretely and completely actual in the world of sense-perception. The imagination of the particular artist is like the dyer’s hand, Subdued to what it works in, and its intuition and expression assume a special type in accordance with the medium it delights in, and necessarily develop certain capacities and acknowledge, however tacitly, certain limitations.” Who denies anything so obvious? Certainly not Croce. What he denies, I take it, is that these considerations, however valuable in their right place, are proper to a philosophy of art. They are classifications and generalizations, he would say, and philosophy deals not with _generalia_ but with universals. To say that art is one is not to say that Raphael and Mozart are one. There are no duplicates in human life and no two artists have the same activity of intuition-expression. You may classify them in all sorts of ways; those who express themselves in paint, those who express themselves in sounds, and so forth; or sub-classify them into landscapists, portraitists, etc., etc.; or sub-sub-classify them into “school” of Constable, “school” of Reynolds, etc., etc. But you are only getting further and further away from anything like a philosophy of art, and will have achieved at best a manual or history of technique. In a philosophic theory Dr. Bosanquet’s “affinities of the spirit” are a will-o’-the-wisp. Thereupon he says, crushingly, “if you insist on neglecting these affinities of the spirit, your theory remains abstract, and has no illuminating power.” Well, Croce’s theory is certainly “up there,” it inhabits the cold air of pure ideas; it will not be of the least practical use at the Academy Schools or the Royal College of Music; but when a philosopher like Dr. Bosanquet finds no illumination in a theory which unifies the arts, gives a comprehensible definition of beauty and, incidentally, constructs, to say the least of it, a plausible “cycle of reality,” I can but respectfully wonder. WILLIAM HAZLITT