Aesthetics Dreams And Association Of Ideas

Excerpt from Aesthetics; Dreams; Association of Ideas Omitting to notice the few valuable remarks on atsthetic subjects of the later Greeks and their Roman con temporaries, one may brie y refer to the views of the Alexandrian mys tic and neo-platonist Plotinus, not only because of their intrinsic inter est, but on account of their resem blance to certain modern systems. His theory is to be found in an essay on the Beautiful in the series of dis courses called Emcadcs. His philos ophy differs from the Platonic in the recognition of an objective mix, the direct emanation from the absolute Good, in which the ideas or notions (mm), which are the prototypes of real things, are immanent. This Reason, as self-moving, becomes the formative influence reducing matter, which in itself is dead, to form. Matter thus formed becomes a notion (mpg), and this form is beauty. Ob jects are ugly so far as they are un acted upon by Reason, and so remain formless. The creative vm't: is abso lute Beauty, and is called the more than beautiful There are three degrees or stages of the Beautiful in manifestation, namely, the beauty of subjective wig, or hu man reason, which is the highest; that of the human soul, which is less perfect through the connection of the soul with a material body; and that of real objects, which is the lowest manifestation of all. As to the char acteristic form of beauty, he sup posed, in opposition to Aristotle, that a single thing not divisible into parts might be beautiful through its unity and simplicity. He attached special worth to the beauty of colors in which material darkness is overpowered by light and warmth. In reference to artistic beauty, he said that when the artist has low as models for his crea tions, these may become more beauti ful than natural objects. This is a very curious divergence of opinion from the Platonic. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."

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Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remain one of the most fascinating aspects of that era. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural criticism, such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as incontrovertibly intertwined.

This fourth book in the series continues the tradition of the popular earlier volumes by offering lively and entertaining information about some of contemporary psychology's most illustrious ancestors. The 21 chapters, many of them written by today's most visible and eminent authors, concentrate on the lives and achievements of major psychologists from a variety of areas. Created for undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of psychology, the variety of pioneers represented provide enough flexibility to also use it as a supplemental reader in other psychology courses. Each of the five volumes in this series contains different profiles thereby bringing more than 100 of the pioneers in psychology more vividly to life.

In Zhu Guangqian and Benedetto Croce on Aesthetic Thought, Mario Sabattini studies Croce’s influence on the aesthetic thought of Zhu Guangqian and presents the translation of Zhu Guangqian’s Wenyi xinlixue (Psychology of Art and Literature).