Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, page 189 by Benedetto Croce
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ory, and poetry to the imagination or fancy; Hobbes described the manifestations of the latter; and Addison devoted several numbers of the Spectator to the analysis of "the pleasures of the imagination."
During the same period, the division between those who are accustomed "à juger par le sentiment" and those who "raisonnent par les principes" became marked in France, Du Bos (1719) is an interesting example of the upholder of the feelings as regards the production of art. Indeed, there is in his view no other criterion, and the feeling for art is a sixth sense, against which intellectual argument is useless. This French school of thought found a reflex in England with the position assigned there to emotion in artistic work. But the confusion of such words as imagination, taste, feeling, wit, shows that at this time there was a suspicion that these words were all applicable to the same fact. Alexander Pope thus distinguished wit and judgment:
For wit and judgment often are at strife, Though meant each other's aid like man and wife.
But there was a divergence of opinion as to whether the latter should be looked upon as part of the intellect or not.
There was the same divergence of opinion as to taste and intellectual judgment. As regards the former, the opposition to the intellectual principle was reinforced in the eighteenth century by Kant in his Kritik der Urtheilskraft. But Voltaire and writers anterior to him frequently fell back into intellectualist definitions of a word invented precisely to avoid them. Dacier (1684) writes of taste as "Une harmonie, un accord de l'esprit et de la raison." The difficulties surrounding a true definition led to the creation of the expression non so che, or je ne sais quoi, or no se qué, which throws into clear relief the confusion between taste and intellectual judgment.
As regards imagination and feeling, or sentiment, there was a strong tendency to sensualism. The Cardinal Sforza-Pa