ith a diatribe in the manner of
Rousseau on the depravity of the times and the corrupting effect of
the arts. (For this and many of the following comments I am indebted
to Mr. Ralph Cohen of the College of the City of New York.)

The cause of some of the ambiguities in her discussion may perhaps be
traced to a rather careless use of terms. At one time "instinct"
or "impulsion," the moral force driving man toward perfection, is a
potentiality developed by cultivation, and at another a force that
is created by cultivation. Although the sublime is the apex of her
mathematically-definite program and is a moral quality attained by
the few, every human being has his point of sublimity in the idea of
a Supreme Being. On the one hand, beauty is a preconceived idea in
the human species; on the other it is not preconceived, but developed.
Finally, the rules of art are perceptions of moral virtue, yet art
which exhibits these rules can corrupt.

It is easy to pick flaws in Miss Reynolds' thinking, for the lack of
sustained logic which Johnson early recognized is apparent at every
turn. Yet for students of the history of ideas the _Enquiry_ contains
much of interest. As a painter, Miss Reynolds throughout stresses the
visual, a concentration which leads her to several valuable insights.
She divides form into two categories, masculine and feminine, but
makes a novel use of these Ciceronian divisions. All non-human
objects--flowers, animals, etc.--are seen as exhibiting male or female
attributes. It might almost be said that with this anthropomorphic
approach she is attempting to develop a "philosophical" basis for the
pathetic fallacy. Furthermore, if the human is used to measure beauty
in the non-human, the implication is that man, not God, is the measure
of beauty. By setting up man as the mediator between the material and
the divine, she points to the concentration in the next century on
human values.

When discussing the _Enquiry_ in his book on the _Sublime_, Samuel
Monk pointed out certain other tendencies which fore-shadow the
coming Romantic revolt. This shift may also be noted in Miss Reynolds'
extension of countenance, the reflection of internal virtue, to mean
"form," and the extension of internal virtue to mean "disposition,"
"object," or content. In developing this form-content division, she
stumbles on a key criticism of associationism: "From association of
ideas, any object may be pleasing, though absolutely devoid