The separation of poetic experience from its place in life and its ulterior worths, involves a definite lop-sidedness, narrowness, and incompleteness in those who preach it sincerely. No one, of course, would bring such charges against the author of _Shakespearean Tragedy_; his is that welcome and not unfamiliar case of the critic whose practice is a refutation of his principles. When genuinely held the view leads to an attempted splitting up of the experiencing reader into a number of distinct faculties or departments which have no real existence. It is impossible to divide a reader into so many men—an æsthetic man, a moral man, a practical man, a political man, an intellectual man, and so on. It cannot be done. In any genuine experience all these elements inevitably enter. But if it could be done, as many critics pretend, the result would be fatal to the wholeness and sanction of the critical judgment. We cannot e.g. read Shelley adequately while believing that all his views are moonshine—read _Prometheus Unbound_ while holding that ‘the perfectibility of man is an undesirable ideal’ and that ‘hangmen are excellent things.’ To say that there is a purely æsthetic or poetic approach to, let us say, the _Sermon on the Mount_, by which no consideration of the intention or ulterior end of the poem enters, would appear to be merely mental timidity, the shrinking remark of a person who finds essential literature too much for him. Into an adequate reading of the greater kinds of poetry everything not private and peculiar to the individual reader must come in. The reader must be required to wear no blinkers, to overlook nothing which is relevant, to shut off no part of himself from participation. If he attempts to assume the peculiar attitude of disregarding all but some hypothetically-named æsthetic elements, he joins Henry James’ Osmond in his tower, he joins Blake’s Kings and Priests in their High Castles and Spires. [29] It is true that in mechanics one might draw up a formidable list of names and say “Opposed to all these appeared a certain Einstein”, but the cases are not parallel. A scientific advance is different from a change of fashion, and no new facts nor any new hypothesis—no Michelson-Morley experiment, nor any widened purview—led up to the separate value theory of art. Although historians of æsthetics are sometimes pleased to present their facts as though they represented a progress from cruder to more refined opinion, from ignorance to wisdom, there is no sound basis for the procedure. Aristotle was at least as clearly and fully aware of the relevant facts and as adequate in his explanations as any later inquirers. Æsthetics in fact has hardly yet reached the scientific stage, in which succeeding investigators can start where their predecessors left off. [30] _An Essay on Style_. The final paragraph. [31] See Chapters XVI, XVIII and XXXI. [32] Clive Bell, _Art_, p. 49. [33] A. C. Bradley, _Oxford Lectures on Poetry_, p. 5.