ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses several notes on I. A. Richard's 'Aesthetic Theory'. Since the publication of The Principles of Literary Criticism London, 1925, his theories have gained increasingly in prestige among theoretical writers as well as among practical critics, and he seems in the process of gathering a school. Richards holds that the function of art is to produce an organization of impulses and attitudes through which the individual comes into a competence and sanity he could not otherwise acquire. Richards attempts to resolve the difficulty through the appeal to a 'competent reader' or spectator, who decides when the means of communication employed by the artist are capable of producing a valuable organization on the normal beholder. The distinction between the technical and the critical parts of aesthetic theory necessarily implies an object, capable of giving rise to the subjective phenomenon of organization, with which the critic is concerned.
