Icon and Idea

Book excerpt: This is one of those rare books whose influence will grow rather than diminish with the years. Icon and Idea is destined to take its place beside Ernst Cassirer's massive and difficult The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as a basic work on the original, creative power of the human spirit as it is enacted as culture -- in myth, religion, science, art. Sir Herbert Read's book is neither massive nor difficult. It was first delivered as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1953-1954, at Harvard. Text and pictures together illustrate the intellectual courage of a great art critic, aesthetician and intellectual theorist, as well as poet and novelist. Advancing beyond Cassirer's theory of the irreducible autonomy of culture, Read develops his theory that "the image always precedes the idea in the development of human consciousness." Having established this major thesis, Read goes on to elaborate it in a way that will interest not only students of art history and the social sciences but any reader interested in the right basis for education. In arguing the primacy of art work in human development, Read gives the reader a fine general education in the history and psychology of art