Delsarte does not say that "the law is to start from man to arrive at
things," but that "man uses his corporeal organs to manifest himself in
his three constituent modalities,--physical, mental and moral."
It is very certain that works of art, like all concrete forms, can only
be perceived by the senses. Who does not know this? But that which is
most difficult to comprehend, is the just relation of cause to
effect--as to the faculty and its manifestation,--and it is this which
Delsarte discovered and made clear. The one stated the action of art
when perceived; the other, the necessities of the artist in order that
art respond to the law.
I shall have more than once to render justice to Victor Cousin.
Inheritor of the Greek philosophers, he allows dialectics too great
margin. He wanders in his premises and arrives at his conclusions--when
he can. (Here, of course, I speak only of art.) In philosophy, Cousin,
beginning with effects, from induction to induction, often arrives at
causes and states some principles. Delsarte, perhaps, proceeded thus
while seeking to combine his discoveries, but this accomplished, he
placed in the first line, synthesis, whence all emanates, and this focus
of light radiating in all directions, illumines even to its farthest
limit, the vast field of aesthetics. Cousin, after all, claims neither
for the Greeks nor for himself the discovery of a law.
Proudhon, who represented the Protagorean school among us, humoring his
whim, produced a work on art.
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