ABSTRACT
Pragmatism undertakes to reform the theory of judgments, to plunge them into the "continuous stream of consciousness," to make them take root in the real needs of life and thus to give them a more human meaning. The perception of art will participate in all the fluctuations of the judgments of truth. Excessive subjectivism does not give an account of the entirety of the aesthetic fact. It were wise to look for the aesthetic phenomenon in the correspondence of one to the other; and, by way of consequence, to restore to the masterpieces the objective qualities which inhere in them, and which explain the esteem they have enjoyed through the centuries. Not any more than the heritage of scientific truth or that of moral principle does the heritage of artistic beauty give itself over periodically to conformity with the merely new.
