ABSTRACT
Mr Richards arrives at a basis for the judgement of value by examining the processes of psychology. Anyone who has already freed himself from the system of values imposed on literature by the Kantian metaphysic, with its categorical imperative of judgement have been teased by the unreality of such terms as ideal Beauty or pure Beauty, and its derivative, the specifically aesthetic emotion. The created work is valuable when the response to the impulses which it sets up is the satisfaction of an appetency or of appentencies which does not involve 'the frustration of some equal or more important appetency'. In his anxiety, which we appreciate, to assert the 'normality' of the poetic mind, he has inadvertently put in juxtaposition the mentality of 'the usual and ordinary man' and that of Blake, Nietzsche, and the Apocalypst, and naturally recoils at their incompatibility. The chapters on 'Imagination' and allied subjects are extremely illuminating, and many ideas are set down.
