M2 ILLUSION AND REAL IT Y Vl!

must inevitably have in mind, as an already given fact, that she
is "like a red. red rose".

But since poetry is not abstract, but a concrete non-symbolic
language, we are entitled, in the next poem we write, to say

^fy love is a white, white rose.
or

If fl<,wrr«? IK? blossoms, my love is no ro^e.

But with an abstract non-symbolic language we would only be
entitled to make this statement in a bod) of poetry other than
the one in which we made the first, that is to say, in another
language. A misunderstanding of this point makes Plato regard
all poets as liars: and an understanding of it makes Sidney able
to answer him by explaining that the poet "is no lyar, for he
nothing affirms".

Thus this concrete character of poetry's subjective generalisa-
tion is just what makes it necessary to give poetry the half-
assent of illusion—to accept its statements while we are in its
phantastk: world but not to demand that all the statements of
all novels and poems should form one world in which the
principles of exclusion and contradiction would apply, as they
do in the real material world. This does not mean that no
integration is necessary as between novels and poems. That
integration is the very province of aesthetics. It is the essential
task of aesthetics to rank Herrick below Milton, and Shakes-
peare above either, and explain in rich and complex detail why
and how they differ. But such an act implies a standard, an
integrated world view, which is not scientific—i.e. rational—but
aesthetic. This is the logic of art.

This concretion and particularity applies also to the sphere
of scientific argument, which, like poetry, is impure but is
nearer the opposite pole. Everyone knows that biology, physics,
sociology and psychology are spheres in each of which different
laws apply, although there is a connecting principle which
states that the law applicable to the more generalised sphere
must not be contradicted in any less generalised sphere, e.g. the
laws 'of sociology must not contradict those of physics. In the
same way poetry must have this congruence, that its experi-
ences always happen to the same "I", in whatever phantastk
world* and novels must have this congruence, that they always
have their scene laid in the same real world of human society
whatever the 'T* (character) may be; and the structure of this
emotional *T" or real world determines the aesthetic judgment.
This ego is in fact the ''world-view" in which a logic of art is
already given.