modern. For illustration, take the three philosophical contributions of
the Greeks to aesthetic theory, as they are stated by Bosanquet:
[Footnote: Bosanquet, _History of Aesthetic_, chap. 3.]
(1) the conception that art deals with images, not realities, i.e. with
aesthetic "semblance" or things as they appear to the artist;
(2) the conception that art consists in "imitation," which they carried to
an absurdity, indeed, by arguing that an imitation must be less "valuable"
than the thing imitated;
(3) the conception that beauty consists in certain formal relations, such
as symmetry, harmony of parts--in a word, "unity in variety."

Now no one can snap a Kodak effectively without putting into practice the
first of these conceptions: nor understand the "new music" and "free
verse" without reckoning with both the second and the third. The value to
the student of poetry of some acquaintance with aesthetic theory is
sometimes direct, as in the really invaluable discussion contained in
Aristotle's _Poetics_, but more often, perhaps, it will be found in the
indirect stimulus to his sympathy and taste. For he must survey the
widespread sense of beauty in the ancient world, the splendid periods of
artistic creation in the Middle Ages, the growth of a new feeling for
landscape and for the richer and deeper human emotions, and the emergence
of the sense of the "significant" or individually "characteristic" in
the work of art. Finally he may come to lose himself with Kant or Hegel or
Coleridge in philosophical theories about the nature of beauty, or to
follow the curious analyses of experimental aesthetics in modern
laboratories, where the psycho-physical reactions to aesthetic stimuli are
cunningly registered and the effects of lines and colors and tones upon
the human organism are set forth with mathematical precision. He need not
trouble himself overmuch at the outset with definitions of Beauty. The
chief thing is to become aware of the long and intimate preoccupation of