purpose of the worship of images of the gods. But the most
penetrating study of the slow moulding of this type will never
reveal how and why just those proportions were chosen which
make the joy and the despair of all beholders. Early Italian
art was purely ecclesiastical in its origin. The exigencies
of adaptation to altars, convent walls, or cathedral domes
explain the choice of subjects, the composition, even perhaps
the color schemes (as of frescoes, for instance); and yet all
that makes a Giotto greater than a Pictor Ignotus is quite
unaccounted for by these considerations.

The quality of beauty is not evolved. All that comes under
the category of material and practical purpose, of idea or of
moral attitude, belongs to the succession, the evolution, the
type But the defining characters of the work of art are
independent of time. The temple, the fresco, and the symphony,
in the moment they become objects of the critical judgment,
become also qualities of beauty and transparent examples of
its laws.

If the true critical judgment, then, belongs to an order of
ideas of which natural science can take no cognizance, the
self-styled scientific criticism must show the strange paradox
of ignoring the very qualities by virtue of which a given work
has any value, or can come at all to be the object of aesthetic
judgment. In two words, the world of beauty and the world of
natural processes are incommensurable, and scientific criticism
of literary art is a logical impossibility.

But the citadel of scientific criticism has yet one more