The famous Greek song, preserved by Plutarch, is matched by recent songs of the Africans, as well as by those of European traditions.
“La sympathie pour les choses,” says M. de Vogüé, _Histoire et Poésie_, p. 190, is the “principe et raison de l’art d’écrire.”
Bastian, in his book _Der Völkergedanke im Aufbau einer Wissenschaft vom Menschen_, Berlin, 1881, pp. 8 f., notes that in a modern work of art one looks for traits of the genius that brought it forth, while in the beginnings of society, of institutions, one looks “for the unconscious stirrings, in the organism, of the average man who has realized himself in them.” And in an address (same book, p. 172) on the aims of ethnology, he declares that for this science man is not the individual _anthropos_, but the social being, the _zoon politikon_ of Aristotle, which demands the social state as condition of his existence. “_Das Primäre ist also der Völkergedanke._”
_Œuvres_, Paris, 1790, III. 165 ff., from the _Mercure_ of January, 1678.
Nowhere better discussed and settled than in Goethe’s sonnet, “_Natur und Kunst, sie scheinen sich zu fliehen_,” with its concluding lines:—
In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister, Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben.
_Theatrum Poetarum_, first published 1675, ed. Brydges, Canterbury, 1800 (who limits it to English poets, so changing the title), p. xxxvi.
_Ueber Ursprung und Verbreitung des Reimes_, Dorpat, 1866, p. 18. “Anschauung” and “Empfindung” are the terms.
_Nature and Elements of Poetry_, pp. 76 f.
_Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen_, Bd. III., three essays, “Die Kunst und die Revolution” (1849); “Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft,” a more important work, dithyrambic, but highly interesting and full of the “folk,” as against “Ihr Intelligenten”; and thirdly, “Kunst und Klima” (1850).
Preface to _Cromwell_, p. 16: “La société, en effet, commence par chanter ce qu’elle rêve, puis raconte ce qu’elle fait, et enfin se met à peindre ce qu’elle pense,” Hugo’s well-known sequence of lyric, epic, drama.
_L’Art au Point de Vue Sociologique_, p. 26.
This doctrine is in line with modern psychological notions of the part played by intelligent mental selection upon the instinctive material of consciousness. See Lloyd Morgan, _Habit and Instinct_, pp. 323 f.