SOURCE: "Samuel Alexander's Aesthetics," in The Menorah Journal, Vol. XXX, No. 2, July-September, 1942, pp. 145-60.

[In the following essay, Listowel discusses Alexander's views on beauty in art and nature, noting Alexander's emphasis of the role of the spectator in artistic creation.]

Those, like the present writer, for whom the late Samuel Alexander unlocked doors to new realms of wisdom and delight, or who basked in the sunshine of encouragement and kindly advice he gave so readily to younger men, will understand with what alacrity this opportunity was seized of paying a small tribute to the memory of so unusual and attractive a personality. To resurrect the mind that has built of its own fabric a mansion so vast that its chambers have room for every fact of experience and every theory of science will always provide a happy and appropriate memorial to one whose main business in life was the disinterested speculation idolized by the Greeks as the worthiest employment to which the human spirit can devote its powers. My own share in this labor of love is small and limited in scope; I want to fill in one corner of the picture of Alexander's philosophical system, by describing in some detail what he thought about Art and Beauty in their most important aspects and relations.

If one were to venture a conclusion from the sheer bulk and volume of Alexander's philosophical writings, one would say with little hesitation that aesthetics was his youngest and, after metaphysics, his favorite child. Putting ontology on one side as naturally the most serious topic for a born system-builder, nourished from intellectual infancy on the Bradleyan tradition, there was no branch of philosophy to which he devoted more time and study, or about which he wrote more voluminously and talked more incessantly, than the theory of the Beautiful. Prior to the production in 1920 of Space, Time, and Deity (two volumes), his magnum opus, he managed to find leisure in the interstices of teaching for one book on ethics and another on epistemology; but from that date until his death in September 1938, a span of eighteen consecutive years, he was constantly reading papers and publishing pithy manifestos on aesthetics alone of the many subjects that might have absorbed the unfettered attention of his final period.

It has happened on numberless occasions that a poet's creative impulse burned brightest in the years of his youth, growing steadily dimmer and more pedestrian with the passage of time; but crabbed age, with its passionless serenity and detachment from personal preoccupations, is more usually the blooming season for philosophy. It was certainly no disadvantage to Samuel Alexander that he took the plunge into aesthetics from the topmost pinnacle of fame, at a moment when he was already recognized on all sides as the leading spirit of his generation in British philosophy, and long after the laurels of academic prowess and professional success had lost whatever glamor they may once have had. In the cool evening of his life there was nothing left to distract him from the singleminded quest of truth.

But why, of the many unsailed seas he must have been tempted to chart, did his insatiable curiosity launch him on a last voyage into the rough waters of aesthetic theory? There is no certain answer to this question. What we do know is that the third person of the hallowed trinity whose members are Truth, Goodness, and Beauty had hitherto been sadly neglected as compared with the first two, and that a treatise on esthetics was urgently required as the coping stone of a neatly finished philosophical system. Yet it would be a grievous error to suppose that his fondness for the subject was due solely or even mainly to systematic grounds. Art, in its manifold shapes, attracted him irresistibly, and poetry in the wide sense most of all; Professor Muirhead has described his habit of reciting great chunks of Shelley to his friends.

His temperament was not that of the cold-blooded intellectuals whose main interest in a work of art is that of a surgeon in the corpse he has successfully dissected. The wealth of illustration in his writings affords us a glimpse—rare enough in a philosopher—of one who wrote and talked about Art because he really loved the pictures, statues, mansions, poems, novels, and plays that are its concrete manifestations. Communion with the fictitious characters of the dramatist and the inanimate figures of the sculptor or the painter was much easier for him than communication with real people, and one likes to think that much of the happiness denied him by his infirmity in personal relations was given back by a closer intimacy with the more distinguished inhabitants of an imaginary universe.

However that may be, the meticulous care he himself paid to the manner in which his ideas were expressed showed a keen appreciation of and a high esteem for verbal artistry. No writer practised more faithfully than he the precept he laid down about words being used by the literary artist for their own sake, and not as mere handcarts in which meanings are trundled about from one mind to another. Not that he ever allowed the philosopher in him to play second fiddle to the artist; his prose, for all the richness and harmony of its texture, is forged in the first instance to yield perfect clarity of definition, to sustain rigorous argument, and to convey to his readers the logical structure corresponding in the mind of man to the material structure of the world about us. A Pater or a Flaubert would probably have despised him as a mere craftsman.

He had in full measure those blessed gifts of good taste and minor executive ability that aesthetic theory can no more educe from the ungifted than racial theory can bestow blue eyes and flaxen hair upon the most naïve believers in Aryan superiority. Besides, the range of his appreciation was not limited by exclusive attachment to any single branch of fine art, or by an engrossing enthusiasm for any one school or style, classical or romantic, ancient or modern, to the detriment of the many other offshoots of the artistic faculty in the last five thousand years of history. His appetite for Beauty was insatiable, and his sensibility responded like a well-tuned instrument to every note that was struck upon it. One important and unhappy limitation does, however, deserve mention. The deafness that plagued him throughout his life, and grew painfully worse in his later years—one could only speak to him latterly through the black sound-box of an electrical instrument—shut him off from what many of us still believe with Schopenhauer to be the queen of all the arts. For he listened to music at second hand, with the ears of competent but often one-sided critics, and that explains why his comments on the purest of the arts are scanty and strangely unsatisfactory as compared with what he writes about things seen or read with his own eyes.

Such was the psychological background of the most interesting contribution to a clear intellectual grasp of Art and Beauty made by any English writer on these topics since the time of Bosanquet. And now let me sketch, quite briefly and in broadest outline, Alexander's attitude to the principal problems, philosophical and psychological, of aesthetics.

II

Nowhere in Alexander's writings do we find any definition or even discussion of the nature and scope of the most recent outgrowth from the main stem of philosophy. We can only infer from the field over which he roams in . the course of his inquiries that the object he is studying covers the whole range of our experience of the Beautiful in art and nature, and the relation in which it stands to our experience of the other values and to the total, allinclusive reality of which our reflective consciousness is aware. The method of his research into this miscellaneous bunch of problems is the method he used throughout his philosophical work, the empirical method that leads from observed facts to broad generalizations and back again to the stubborn particulars by which they must be verified. It would be platitudinous nowadays to mention the a posteriori method in aesthetics were it not for certain Italian thinkers who still sin against the light. It is perhaps remarkable that Alexander never succumbed to the temptation that besets a system-builder to squeeze facts willy-nilly into the logical strait-jacket of his preconceptions. His happy blending of Herbert Spencer's patient epiricism with the bolder systematic sweep of Bradley and the giant figures of German idealism was nowhere more fruitful than in his treatment of aesthetics.

The more technically philosophical aspect of his intellectual task was to compare and contrast Beauty with the other members of the value trinity, to locate the rightful place of their common parent in the scheme of things, and to decide whether the Beautiful is a simple quality of outside objects or born of their relation to an artist's mind; for axiology, ontology, and epistemology are inalienable perquisites of the professional philosopher.

Let us take as our starting-point his definition of value, and follow out the path described by one of its consequences. "Value," he says in the second volume of Space, Time, and Deity, "in its greatest dilution and least intention is the relation between things in virtue of which one satisfies a want of another." Now as "wants" and their "satisfaction" permeate and pervade everything everywhere, and as possible sources of "satisfaction" are as varied and numerous as the "wants" they cater for, a value is not a prerogative of man or a faint gleam of what is changeless and abiding amid the flux of nature. Beauty, whatever the Platonic philosophers and theologians may say, is no better equipped than Goodness or Truth to furnish a short cut to a transcendent reality, for like all our values it is relative to the mentality of human beings and its future is inextricably bound up with their history upon earth. A little more humility, a little stricter impartiality, would convince us that the universe is not moulded to accommodate the needs and desires of our puny selves, but rather that our noblest cravings and boldest aspirations are simply a special instance of ordinary happenings observable at every level of organic and inorganic being.

Thus it is that we have below the philosophical values those "psychological" values which spring from the satisfaction of our biological urges—hunger, thirst, sexual need; the "economic" values arising from the relation between material wants and a limited number of material goods; and the "instinctive" values pervading animal and plant life from the complex organism of the anthropoid apes down to the pullulating unicellular families of ultramicroscopic bacteria. Descending yet lower in the scale of being, we find the drama of worth being vigorously enacted by the atoms and molecules of inorganic matter; for lo and behold, the lordly and bivalent oxygen atom refuses stoutly to be satisfied by anything less than the constant attendance of two hydrogen atoms. And what about the irresistible fascination, termed "natural election" by Professor Laird, of a magnet for the iron filings that fly like a flock of lovers to its embrace? It would seem, indeed, that wherever two things are related in time and space, they have a value for one another.

In the evolutionary cosmogony of Alexander, values in the narrowerer and human sense are the highest and most recent emergent from a changing but progressive universe. The infinite and everlasting space-time continuum—surely a modern version of Spinoza's substance—which encompasses all that is and carries in its womb all that is to be, has blossomed forth at immense intervals, by a process of spontaneous emergence, into the whirlwind dance of electrons, into the delicate tissues of living organisms, into the sudden light of consciousness, and into the rapturous awareness of values or ideals; and is still in travail with an unborn God who will be as superior to the most god-like man as he now is to the sanguinary carnivores of the jungle. Such, very briefly, is the relative but elevated function of Beauty in the life of man, and its proper status in the boundless empire of nature.

If we probe deeper into the separate values that lend dignity to personality and provide a fixed purpose among a welter of conflicting aims, we shall find that their worth derives from the satisfaction they give to certain deepseated impulses we all share. Thus Beauty, we are told, "is that which satisfies the constructive impulse used contemplatively," while Goodness gratifies the social or herd impulse of the virtuous man, and Truth slakes the disinterested curiosity of the scientist and philosopher.

As seen from the viewpoint of the relative importance of mind and its environment in the manufacturer of value, fine art, in which the artist mixes in some sort his personality with his materials, stands mid-way between Goodness and Truth. For in science the brute facts of nature control and direct the mind, whereas virtue appertains to motives and draws all its nourishment from volitional sources. But these superficial differences only serve to mask an underlying identity; for Truth is the intellectual awareness of reality, the reflective self-consciousness of the whole unconscious universe, and therefore includes within its boundaries the Good and the Beautiful as well as much that is actively opposed or stonily indifferent to these highest values.

It might not unnaturally be supposed that so intransigent a realist as Alexander would have joined the school of thought that has singled out some common characteristic of external objects, such as the form with which they have been invested by natural forces or in which they have been moulded by man, as the hall-mark of the Beautiful in art and nature. Not so, however, for a mind sufficiently elastic to respond to the rich variety of experience. The "tertiary" qualities of things cannot be regarded like their "primary" and "secondary" qualities as real properties of the objects to which we attribute them, for Beauty does not belong to the full-blown rose in the same sense as its contour, its size, its color, its texture, or its fragrance. These so-called qualities are in fact the product of a unique combination of mind and matter, of subject and object, being a superior mongrel bred of the undeclared marriage between man and nature. "In every value," we are told in the second volume of Space, Time, and Deity, "there are two sides, the subject of valuation and the object of value, and the value resides in the relation between the two and does not exist apart from them." This happy compromise between realism and idealism enabled Alexander to avoid the pitfall of an undiluted subjectism as successfully as the snare of a naïve objectivism in aesthetics; for there can be no glimmer of Beauty in the universe without the work of art as well as the artist, without the sunset or the starlit sky as well as their human witness, without an assortment of material objects in an outside world as well as minds that people it with the animated figments of their happiest dreams.

An obvious but paradoxical conclusion is that when we wax enthusiastic about the beauty of natural scenery, we are really praising our own artistic perception of what would be a matter of utter indifference to the philistine onlooker or the domestic cat. The so-called "beauty" of nature is an illusion that not even Ruskin could shatter, for it is we who clothe its naked limbs with fine raiment spun from the thread of our own imaginations. In a pamphlet on Art and Nature, Alexander states as follows the problem as he saw it and its solution: "Does nature of herself possess beauty as what the philosophers call a tertiary quality? That is the question of my discourse, and the answer I am about to give is that she does not and that nature and works of nature possess beauty only so far as they are converted into works of art." It follows from this that we are all artists to a greater or a lesser degree when we discover beauty in the countryside, in the sea, or in the sky, and, like a painter or a poet, that we read into the impassive countenance of nature the storm and sunshine of the human soul. The relation of art to nature cannot be that of a copy to its original, and even the landscape painter never "imitates" literally a pleasing scene, for the artist's creative imagination is the common source of Beauty both in the fine arts and among the phenomena of nature.

So much for the narrowly philosophical side of Alexander's aesthetics; let us now pass on to his proposed solution of the remaining problems that confronted him.

III

Writers on aesthetics do not seem as yet to have been able to agree as to where they should look in order to lay a finger on the essence of our experience of the Beautiful. Philosophers have often found in the keenest appreciation of art or nature a direct revelation of some transcendent reality, psychologists have concentrated the bulk of their attention upon the frame of mind of the spectator, while those rare critics and art historians who have speculated about the nature of the fine arts have usually confined their inquiries to an analysis of its products. The most original feature of Alexander's theory of aesthetics is that he goes for its backbone neither to the keen enjoyment of the spectator nor to the material work of fine or applied art, but to the process of artistic production, exemplified in the labors of the creative artist. In this connection, there is a revealing obiter dictum on the views of Lipps at the end of a letter dated April 30, 1933; there he writes: "I have a suspicion, which may not be well-grounded, that he [Lipps] takes too much the point of view of appreciation and I like to approach the subject from the point of view of creation."

Now though the production of works of art depends to some extent on the technical procedure and the raw materials employed, it is an event in which the imagination and the emotions of the artist play the leading role. And being a psychological manifestation, it can only be studied scientifically with the assistance of psychological science. Alexander was never afraid to make use of psychology when it could help him to throw light on the problems of aesthetics. And, indeed, when he is not engaged in discussing purely philosophical questions, he is usually applying psychology to a sphere of mind which the professional psychologist has rarely ventured to explore.

Following in the footsteps of Herbert Spencer, Alexander tries to disentangle from among the manifold tendencies and impulsions that direct human actions the conative source peculiar to the activity of the artist. But he does not attempt to resuscitate the long-discredited impulse to play; instead he traces the origins of art to a sublimated and unpractical urge to material construction. According to the psychology of McDougall, it is an irresistible constructive instinct that sets the beaver to build, the bird to nest, and the nightingale to sing. In man this primordial instinct ceases to be blind and becomes purposive, though still subordinate to biological need; and we have the products of his handicrafts which are soon followed by the mechanical marvels of his technological inventiveness. Finally, emancipating himself from the dull task of providing for his daily needs, he begins to make things for the sheer joy of making them and without a thought for their usefulness or profitableness; the humble breadwinner at last becomes an artist. To use the writer's own words in his pamphlet on Art and Instinct: "The thesis which I submit to you is that the aesthetic impulse and the aesthetic emotion which goes with that impulse and is part and parcel of it are an outgrowth from the instinct of constructiveness, and are that impulse or instinct when it has become first human, and next, contemplative."

In his early comparison between "artistic" and "cosmic" creation, Alexander explains why the former event is not a prototype of the latter, and has no metaphysical significance. The brilliance and clarity of this psychological theory of artistic creation should not blind us to the fact that it is based on a more than doubtful analogy between animal instinct and human design, and that it ignores much of the little psychological material that has been collected by students of what is probably the toughest problem in aesthetics. It is difficult not to be persuaded that Alexander's most original contribution to the subject is also his most fragile, and that no aspect of his aesthetic doctrine is less likely to survive the legitimate criticism of his successors.

In his treatment of the arts he is at pains to dissociate himself from the popular fallacy of Croce, according to whom a work of art is made of mental stuff, being an "intuition" or "expression," and its material embodiment is merely a practical convenience whereby the artist shares his imaginative conception with like-minded people. Alexander maintains, in contradistinction to this view, that the artist's material actively influences his conception of the object he is fashioning or composing, and that the growth of a poem or a portrait goes on pari passu with the recitation of the verses and the brush work of the painter. There is a familiar ring about Alexander's emphasis upon the synthesis of form and content in the finished work of art when one calls to mind the unity of "characteristic" and "abstract" expressiveness in which Bosanquet summarizes the thesis of his History of Aesthetics.

The skill of the artist lies in his capacity for "imputing" a "meaning" to materials in themselves emotionally neutral by moulding them so that they become suggestive and eloquent to all beholders of the tenderness and defiance and despair, of the striving and the conflict, that stir in the depths of the struggling and sensitive soul. But a human significance can only be acquired by dumb, inexpressive objects when they have been invested with a form they lacked in the raw state, and there is as it were an organic relationship between the form or pattern of a work of art and its significance for the spectator. In the representative arts it is easy enough to distinguish between the subject and its formal treatment, but in abstract arts like architecture or textiles the two are fused and the subject is no more than the form itself. In his last publication on the subject of aesthetics, originally a broadcast lecture, Alexander writes as follows of the unity of form and content: "The artist's imputation of himself to his materials is represented by the form which he gives them." It would be a simple matter to show that this act of "imputation" is extremely similar in character to what earlier writers have called "aesthetic Einfühlung" or "Empathy," and that Alexander is here re-stating in his own terminology one of the cardinal tenets of modern aesthetics.

Branching out from the parent stem you get the separate members of the two related families of fine and applied art, and each of these derives an individual flavor from the material—words, tones, pigments, clay, glass, et cetera—used by the artist to embody and express his imaginative vision. Raw material in the crude state is thus a convenient principle for dividing art into its component elements. A distinction of some importance that Alexander liked to draw was between "beauty" and "greatness" in the arts. The latter quality is conferred by the subject-matter alone, so that a drama can be both beautiful and great, whereas a Chinese vase or a Persian carpet must content themselves to be just beautiful. Thus it is that supreme poets like Dante, Sophocles, or Shakespeare bring right home to us the mystery of life and death, reveal the tragic conflict between the forces of good and evil in the world, and show us by the enchantment of their impassioned language how courage and generosity can overcome the sluggish egoism that fetters the majority of human beings. Poets of this order are also, as Shelley claimed in his celebrated Defence of Poetry, prophets and preachers who turn the eyes of the multitude away from the trivialities of the daily round towards the shining heights of moral and intellectual achievement.

It is not often that aestheticians have laid so much emphasis on the intellectual content of an artistic object; but the stress is natural enough in a philosopher, and especially in one for whom poetry was an adored favorite among the arts. In this respect Alexander shares Volkelt's partiality for a "menschlichbedeutungsvoller Gehalt" wherever anything of profound human significance can suitably be enshrined and imparted by a work of art.

It follows from the conception of art as a mixing of the artist with his materials, and from an interpretation of natural beauty according to which the spectator is an artist travelling incognito even to himself, that there is an element of "illusion" in the appreciation of both art and nature. The "illusion" lies in our spontaneous attribution to physical objects of mental qualities they do not really possess. A vibrating string is neither glad nor sorrowful, a solid mass of marble or bronze is neither heroic nor defiant, a large volume of salt water neither laughs nor rages nor laments. Yet the aesthetic "illusion" is not a mere perceptual error or a mistaken judgment, because we do not attribute the illusory quality to a real object as one of its genuine and lasting properties, but rather indulge in a passing fancy that we know full well to be fictitious for the duration and for the sake of the aesthetic experience. The pleasure inspired in us by things of beauty is the purely subjective side of the reaction, for it cannot be shared with or communicated to others. It is a private reverberation set up in our minds by communion with the beautiful in art or nature, and should not be regarded as an intrinsic element of the essential experience.

The obverse of this private side to our reactions in face of art and nature, a factor that fluctuates according to the sensibility of individual art lovers, is the public side that seems universally communicable and enables us to speak of standards of taste having general validity. The standard judgments of approbation and disapprobation, with all the fine shades that lie between the two, are laid down once and for all by the critical verdicts of the practised art critics, the connoisseurs, and the artists themselves; and in so far as our personal judgment approximates to or agrees with this standard aesthetic judgment we have good taste or the reverse. The objectivity and universal validity of the standard judgment is guaranteed in the last instance by the identity between the perfect critic's mind in the moment of contemplative delight and the imaginative vision of the artist himself. Actual diversity of taste in art can be accounted for as an aberration from the common norm due to the interference of personal idiosyncrasies or to the lack of sensibility among the cohorts of the indifferent. This bears out the common-sense view that what we actually like is not by any means always what we should like, and that taste can be improved by cultivation or allowed to deteriorate through neglect.

A word or two to wind up this exposition of Alexander's views about his attitude to the minor but interesting problem of the aesthetic categories. He starts by explicitly repudiating the Crocean denial of the very existence of these different types of experience, and sets out to describe a number of them in considerable detail. Curiously enough, he has nothing to tell us about the most fascinating variety of all from the standpoint of the philosopher—I mean tragedy and the tragic. That he had spent on this problem much time and thought is evident from a passage in a letter dated May 5, 1935: "I am now reading Volkelt's Aesthetik des Tragischen, and it's a very good book, but it could have been said in half the span." What conclusions he reached, or why he was unable to reach any at all, we shall never know. Caution forbids him to generalize broadly about "comedy or the comic spirit." But he relished the comic talent of Molière and offers us a theory of his type of comedy, according to which its essence is the humorous contrast between the average, commonsensical person who faithfully observes the social conventions, and the foibles and follies of those eccentrics who resent them and find the courage to rebel against them.

The beautiful in the narrow sense is that which lends itself to effortless aesthetic enjoyment apart from its handling by an artist, while the ugly is what in nature is repulsive or repellent but is transmuted into something aesthetically attractive by the skilful touch of the painter or the poet. This distinction is based on the subject-matter of the work of art, and follows Bosanquet's contrast between "easy" and "difficult" beauty. It is strange that in this connection he has nothing to say about the graceful. In his treatment of the sublime he sticks closely to A. C. Bradley's superb essay. Sublimity is a more than ordinary greatness in man or nature whereof the magnitude does not exceed our powers of imaginative sympathy. It is a "difficult" variety to appreciate because we must overcome the initial disharmony of terror or dismay by a strong effort of self-control before we can sympathize imaginatively with the awe-inspiring grandeur of the sublime object. He concludes these observations by an interesting and original discussion of the sharp contrast between the "classical" and "romantic" styles in art. He attributes their difference to the relative emphasis laid by the artist on the subjective and objective elements in the work of art; thus romantic art is more personal and has greater warmth of emotion, while classical art is colder and more impersonal in conception.

IV

In this essay I have contented myself with displaying Alexander's wares as prominently as possible in my shop window, with just here and there a sentence of praise or blame for what I estimate to be their quality; to have succumbed to the temptation of writing a critical study would have transformed my small effort from a brief article into a stoutish book. Yet I would not care to bid farewell to the friend and philosopher whose opinions I have endeavored to describe in these pages without one last word about his rightful place, so far as I am able with my scanty qualifications to judge, as an aesthetician among his fellow-aestheticians and in the British tradition of speculation on this sorely neglected philosophical topic.

I scarcely think he would himself have claimed to be in the same class as certain Continental authorities who have covered the whole field in systematic fashion; he lacked the time and, with advancing years, the energy to emulate the detailed and exhaustive inquiries of the greatest experts. Acknowledging an article I had sent him on British aesthetics, published in a German periodical, he wrote at the end of November 1934: "I accept humbly your reproaches of my want of vigour to do something really thorough and systematic. What I may yet contrive to do I don't know—but I think I can be most useful in taking up special topics." And so we had to content ourselves with the published lectures and papers on a number of these special topics, as a substitute for the slender volume we dared not hope to see.

Yet among English writers on aesthetics it would be hard to find a compeer in the ranks of his contemporaries, and even harder would it be to fill the gap he has left from among the rare aestheticians of the present day. The mantle of Bosanquet had fallen on his shoulders, and he wore it worthily though with a difference; for there is not one of the main problems of aesthetics, whether philosophical, psychological, or objective, that he did not illuminate by a treatment that was always fair and quite often original. No English philosopher who has grappled with this thorny subject in recent years better repays the student for his midnight oil, as well for his clear formulation of the essential problems and the spirit in which he advanced to meet them as for the theories he evolved for their solution.

In academic circles Croce was hailed at this time as the thinker who had said all but the last word on aesthetics, and the two stout volumes of his Aesthetic had become the vade-mecum of the average university lecturer and professor interested in the subject; but Alexander was not afraid to challenge orthodoxy when it became an excuse for loose thinking or a source of erroneous conclusions. He mentions Croce often in his writings, but it is almost always to refute a misleading fallacy to which the Neapolitan idealist had given currency. Alexander was a scholar in the true sense of the word, being familiar with all the leading authorities on his subject in the English, French, Italian, and German tongues. Judging from occasional conversations and some intermittent correspondence, I should say that his favorite authors were some voluminous and erudite Germans, whose work was so sound and thorough that he even forgave them the weariness of spirit caused by their native prolixity. He had a special liking for Dessoir, whose Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft he was anxious I should translate. "Dessoir," he wrote in the spring of 1933, "seems to me so sane as well as complete."

I cannot myself conceive how a man with so many intellectual interests and attainments was able to read the prodigious number of books on one subject alone to which his scholarship testified. How well I remember my crestfallen astonishment when, soon after the publication of a history of modern aesthetics in which I cited with scholarly pride upwards of two hundred volumes in various languages, I received a letter from Alexander reminding me in the kindest way of two or three authors of some distinction who had escaped my attention. This was a shining example of those rare qualities of heart and mind that made Samuel Alexander one of the most encyclopedic scholars as well as one of the most inspiring and original thinkers in the long history of English philosophy.