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Most of us lead a double life. There is a day world, and there is a night world, and we shift gears so punctually that we are unaware of this astonishing dissociation, unless some too vivid memory of the night before makes us squirm in the “cold” light of day.
There was a time when the light of day was not so cold, when the seasons mimicked human life and life entire—work and “play,” technology and feeling, traced the dynamics of the universe. But that was a primitive world, and now we work in a scientific world of objective fact—and relax in a “meaningful” world of value. After the advent of psychoanalysis, we are too sophisticated to think of these worlds as entirely separate; but after the advent of positivism (and the cultural atmosphere that inspired it), we find it hard to put them together. It is probably only in this context that esthetics arises, as a speculative task requiring us to relate things and fact to feeling and value.
When the philosophers of the 18th Century talked about inescapable forms of human experience, they were in effect training us to catch the rich harmony of overtones that radiate from our simplest awareness. But they did not mend the breach between fact and value because (despite a popular misunderstanding of Hume) they dealt only with momentary experience, and properly left it to the empirical scientist to study the consequences of the passage of time, which is the vehicle of feeling and value. The crucial questions