tion, with more abundant sources for aesthetic
treatment. As years go on, life in its widest sense offers more and more
materials "which it is the province of the Poet to embody and combine."
This is evidently true; and would it not seem to follow that literature
is not excluded from participating in the common development of
civilisation? One of the latest of the champions of the Moderns, the
Abbe Terrasson, maintained that "to separate the general view of the
progress of the human mind in regard to natural science, and in regard
to belles-lettres, would be a fitting expedient to a man who had two
souls, but it is useless to him who has only one." [Footnote: Abbe
Terrasson, 1670-1750. His Philosophie applicable a tons les objets
de l'esprit et de la raison was issued posthumously in 1754. His
Dissertation critique sur l'Iliade appeared in 1715.]He put the matter
in too abstract a way to carry conviction; but the nineteenth century
was to judge that he was not entirely wrong. For the question was, as we
shall see, raised anew by Madame de Stael, and the theory was finally
to emerge that art and literature, like laws and institutions, are an
expression of society and therefore inextricably linked with the other
elements of social development--a theory, it may be observed, which
while it has discredited the habit of considering works of art in a
vacuum, dateless and detached, as they were generally considered by
critics of the seventeenth century, leaves the aesthetic problem much
where it was.

Perrault's suggestion as to the enrichment of the material of the artist
by new acquisitions would have served to bring literature and art
into the general field of human development, without compromising the
distinction on which Wotton and others insisted between the natural
sciences and the aesthetic arts. But that distinction, emphatically
endorsed by Voltaire, had the effect of excluding literature and art
from the view of those who in the eighteenth century recognised progress
in the other activities of man.

12.

It is notable that in this literary controversy the Moderns, even
Fontenelle, seem curiously negligent of the import of the theory which
they were propounding of the intellectual progress of man. They treat
it almost incidentally, as part of the case for the defence, not as
an immensely important conclusion. Its bearings were more definitely
realised by the Abbe Terrasson, whom I have just named. A geometer and a