TWO:So far Aristotle gives us a purely superficial and sensational view of the drama. Yet he could not help seeing that there was a moral element in tragedy, and he was anxious to show, as against Plato, that it exercised an improving effect on the audience. The result is his famous theory of the Catharsis, so long misunderstood, and not certainly understood even now. The object of Tragedy, he tells us, is to purify (or purge away) pity and terror by means of those emotions themselves. The Poetics seems originally to have contained an explanation of this mysterious utterance, now lost, and critics have endeavoured to supply the gap by writing eighty treatises on the subject. The result has been at least to show what Aristotle did not mean. The popular version of his dictum, which is that tragedy purges the passions by pity and terror, is clearly inconsistent with the wording of the original text. Pity and terror are both the object and the instrument of purification. Nor yet does he mean, as was once supposed,306 that each of these emotions is to counterbalance and moderate the other; for this would imply that they are opposed to one another, whereas in the Rhetoric he speaks of them as being akin; while a parallel passage in the Politics188 shows him to have believed that the passions are susceptible of homoeopathic treatment. Violent enthusiasm, he tells us, is to be soothed and carried off by a strain of exciting, impassioned music. But whence come the pity and terror which are to be dealt with by tragic poetry? Not, apparently, from the piece itself, for to inoculate the patient with a new disease, merely for the sake of curing it, could do him no imaginable good. To judge from the passage in the Politics already referred to, he believes that pity and terror are always present in the minds of all, to a certain extent; and the theory apparently is, that tragedy brings them to the surface, and enables them to be thrown off with an accompaniment of pleasurable feeling. Now, of course, we have a constant capacity for experiencing every passion to which human nature is liable; but to say that in the absence of its appropriate external stimulus we are ever perceptibly and painfully affected by any passion, is to assert what is not true of any sane mind. And, even were it so, were we constantly haunted by vague presentiments of evil to ourselves or others, it is anything but clear that fictitious representations of calamity would be the appropriate means for enabling us to get rid of them. Zeller explains that it is the insight into universal laws controlling our destiny, the association of misfortune with a divine justice, which, according to Aristotle, produces the purifying effect;189 but this would be the purgation of pity and terror, not by themselves, but by the intellectual framework in which they are set, the concatenation of events, the workings of character, or the reference of everything to an eternal cause. The truth is that Aristotles explanation of the moral effect produced by tragedy is307 irrational, because his whole conception of tragedy is mistaken. The emotions excited by its highest forms are not terror and pity, but admiration and love, which, in their ideal exercise, are too holy for purification, too high for restriction, and too delightful for relief.I dare do any wrong for sovereign power
TWO:I also met there a compatriot, who had got permission to go to The Netherlands, but declined to leave. She was Mrs. de Villers, ne Borret. On August 27th I wrote about her to De Tijd:Well be a regular Sky Patrol! exulted Sandy. And watch what goes on while you do the control joband, that waynothing can go wrong! Not with the Sky Patrol over-seeing! Dick, too, spoke overconfidently.
TWO:Still more important than these observations themselves is the great truth he derives from themsince rediscovered and worked out in detail by Von Baerthat in the development of each individual the generic characters make their appearance before the specific characters.211 Nor is this a mere accidental or isolated remark, but, as we shall show in the next chapter, intimately connected with one of the philosophers metaphysical theories. Although not an evolutionist, he has made other contributions to biology, the importance of which has been first realised in the light of the evolution theory. Thus he notices the antagonism between individuation and reproduction;212 the connexion of increased size with increased vitality;213 the connexion of greater mobility,214 and of greater intelligence,215 with increased complexity of structure; the physiological division of labour in the higher animals;216 the formation of heterogeneous organs out of homogeneous tissues;217 the tendency towards greater centralisation in the higher organisms218a remark connected with his two great anatomical discoveries, the central position of the heart in the vascular system, and the possession of a backbone by all red-blooded animals;219 the resemblance of animal intelligence to a rudimentary human intelligence, especially as manifested in children;220 and, finally, he attempts to trace a continuous series of gradations connecting the inorganic with the organic world, plants with animals, and the lower animals with man.221That-there is what started things, Jeff told Dick. The missus was in her private suite, in the dressing bowdoir or whatever it is, with nobody but her French maid to help, and all the jewels in a box in the room, hid in her trunks.
TWO:
