I.

the terms of a better doctrine? What if theirs CHAPTER be the true commonplace which cannot see the grandeur of a doctrine, because it comes to us clothed in unclean and threadbare garments? There is no more commonplace thinker than he who fails to see the virtue of the commonplace.

about plea

sure.

Pleasure, no doubt, is an ugly word, and, as re- Doubts presenting the end of art, a feeble one; but there is no better to be found. It suggests a great deal for which as yet we have no adequate language. One day it may be that we shall find a different word to express more fully our meaning; but that day will never come until we have first learned thoroughly to understand what is involved in pleasure; and to see what a hundred generations of mankind have groped after when they set before them pleasure as the goal of art. It can be shown that this doctrine of pleasure has a greatness of meaning which the high-fliers little suspect that it is anything but shallow; and that if it be commonplace, it is so only in the sense in which sun, air, earth, water, and all the elements of life are commonplace. We begin Palliated by to feel this the moment we attempt to define nition of it. pleasure. Take any allowable definition. Kant says that it is a feeling of the furtherance of life, as pain is a sense of its hindrance. Such a definition at once leads us into a larger circle of ideas than is usually supposed to be covered by the name of pleasure. Perhaps it is not

Kant's defi

I.

CHAPTER quite satisfactory, but we need not now be too particular about its terms. What Kant says is near enough to the truth to show that on the first blush of it we need not be repelled by the assertion of pleasure being the end of art. Neither need any one be repelled if this doctrine of pleasure strike the key-note, and suggest the title of the present work, in which an attempt will be made to show that a science of criticism is possible, and that it must of necessity be the science of the laws of pleasure, the joy science, the Gay Science.

1

THE SCIENCE OF CRITICISM.

I.

CHAPTER quite satisfactory, but we need not now be too particular about its terms. What Kant says is near enough to the truth to show that on the first blush of it we need not be repelled by the assertion of pleasure being the end of art. Neither need any one be repelled if this doctrine of pleasure strike the key-note, and suggest the title of the present work, in which an attempt will be made to show that a science of criticism is possible, and that it must of necessity be the science of the laws of pleasure, the joy science, the Gay Science.