An Ideal Critic (Literary Criticism)
Necessity of the existence of criticism That God has not been kind enough to bestow perfection on any institution, that everything has its own peculiar defects, that the conditions of Time, Place and Circumstances produce different temperaments in different men, that these defects and these conditions are the intrinsic and the extrinsic causes of true criticism, that prejudice, jealousy, animosity are the causes of false criticism or deliberate misrepresentation; all these facts are as clear as broad daylight. Politics, Economics, Art, Literature are all of them liable to criticism; because none of them furnishes exact subjects for their respective sciences. The excellence of Mathematics over all these subjects lies in this, that there can be no two opinions about mathematical disquisitions, while about other subjects, there can be. The science of Mathematics, therefore, lies without the domain of criticism and unlike other subjects has its exact laws to obey; hence it was that Arist...