The first volume, treating of the ideas of Truth, was chiefly occupied
with an inquiry into the various success with which different artists
had represented the facts of Nature,--an inquiry necessarily conducted
very imperfectly, owing to the want of pictorial illustration.
The second volume merely opened the inquiry into the nature of ideas
of Beauty and Relation, by analysing (as far as I was able to do so)
the two faculties of the human mind which mainly seized such ideas;
namely, the contemplative and imaginative faculties.
It remains for us to examine the various success of artists,
especially of the great landscape-painter whose works have been
throughout our principal subject, in addressing these faculties of the
human mind, and to consider who among them has conveyed the noblest
ideas of beauty, and touched the deepest sources of thought.
I do not intend, however, now to pursue the inquiry in a method so
laboriously systematic; for the subject may, it seems to me, be more
usefully treated by pursuing the different questions which rise out of
it just as they occur to us, without too great scrupulousness in
marking connections, or insisting on sequences. Much time is wasted by
human beings, in general, on establishment of systems; and it often
takes more labour to master the intricacies of an artificial
connection, than to remember the separate facts which are so carefully
connected.
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