BENEDETTO CROCE (continued 7)

Irony: Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis.

The ego which created the universe can also destroy it; the universe is an empty appearance at which the only true reality, the ego, can smile, holding itself aloof, like an artist or a creative god, from creatures of its own which it does not take seriously.[15] Friedrich Schlegel described art as a perpetual parody of itself and a "transcendental farce." Tieck defined irony as "a power which allows the poet to dominate the matter which he handles." Another Romantic Fichtian, Novalis, dreamed of a magical idealism, an art of creation by the instantaneous act of the ego and of realizing our dreams.

F. Schelling.

But it is only to the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) of Schelling, to his Bruno (1802), to his celebrated course of lectures on the Philosophy of Art given at Jena in 1802-1803 (repeated at Würzburg, and distributed subsequently in manuscript notes all over Germany), to the no less celebrated lecture on the Relation between the Figurative Arts and Nature (1807), as well as to other works of this eloquent and enthusiastic philosopher that we owe the first great philosophical affirmation of Romanticism, and of a renewed and conscious neo-Platonism in Æsthetic.

Beauty and character.

Like all the other idealistic philosophers, Schelling held firmly to the fusion of the theories of art and the beautiful already effected by Schiller. From this point of view it is interesting to note his explanation of the condemnation of art by Plato: this condemnation, says Schelling, was directed against the art of his time, the natural and realistic art of antiquity in general, with its character of finitude: Plato could not have uttered such a condemnation (as we moderns are unable to utter it) if he had known Christian art, whose characteristic is infinity.[16] The pure abstract beauty of Winckelmann is not enough; no less inadequate, false and negative is that concept of the characteristic which would try to make art something dead, hard and ugly by imposing upon it the limitations of the individual. Art is beauty and characteristic in one; characteristic beauty, character from which beauty is evolved, according to Goethe's saying; it is therefore not the individual but the living concept of the individual. When the artist's eye recognizes the creative idea of the individual and draws it forth, he transforms the individual into a world in itself, into a species (Gattung), an eternal idea (Urbild), and fears no more the limitation or hardness which is the condition of life: characteristic beauty is that plenitude of form which kills form; it does not inflame passion, it regulates it, like the banks of a river which are filled but not overflowed by the waters.[17] In all of this we feel the influence of Schiller, with something added which Schiller could never have expressed.

Art and Philosophy.

Indeed, whilst gratefully acknowledging the excellent contributions to the theory of art made by the writers who succeeded Kant, Schelling laments that in none of them can he find exact scientific method (Wissenschaftlichkeit),[18] The true point of departure in his theory is in the philosophy of nature, i.e. in that criticism of the teleological judgement which Kant places directly after that of the æsthetic judgement in his third Critique. Teleology is the union of theoretical and practical philosophy; but the system would be incomplete but for the possibility of demonstrating in the subject itself, in the ego, the identity of the two worlds, theoretical and practical; an activity which has, and at the same time has not, consciousness; unconscious as nature, conscious as spirit. This activity is precisely the æsthetic activity: "the general organ of philosophy, keystone of the whole edifice."[19] There are but two ways open to one who is desirous of escaping from common realities: poetry, which transports into the ideal world; and philosophy which annihilates the real world.[20] Strictly speaking, "there is but one sole absolute work of art; it may exist in various exemplars, but in itself it is one, although it may not yet possess existence in its original form." True art is not the impression of one moment, but the representation of infinite life;[21] it is transcendental intuition become objective, and is therefore not only the organ but the document of philosophy. A time will come when philosophy will return to poetry, from which she has detached herself; and from the new philosophy a new mythology will arise.[22] The Absolute is thus the object of art as well as of philosophy (as Schelling insists elsewhere in greater detail): the first represents it in idea (Urbild), the second in its reflexion (Gegenbild): "philosophy portrays ideas, not realities: so is it with art: those same ideas of which real things, as philosophy demonstrates, are imperfect copies, themselves appear in the objective arts as ideas, i.e. in all their perfection, and represent the intellectual world in the world of reflexion."[23] Music is the "very ideal rhythm of Nature and the Universe, which by means of this art makes itself felt in the derivative world"; perfect creations of statuary are "the very ideas of organic nature represented objectively"; the Homeric epic, "the very identity constituting the foundation of history in the Absolute."[24] But while philosophy gives an immediate representation of the Divine, of absolute Identity, art can but give the immediate representation of Indifference; and "since the degree of perfection or reality in a thing becomes higher in proportion as it approaches nearer to the absolute Idea and the fulness of infinite affirmation and in proportion as it comprehends within itself other powers, it is clear that art, above everything else, is in closest relation with philosophy, from which it is distinguished merely by the character of its specification: in everything else it may be considered as the highest power in the ideal world."[25] To the three powers of the real and ideal world correspond in a rising scale the three ideas of Truth, Goodness and Beauty. Beauty is neither the mere universal (truth), nor mere reality (action), but the perfect interpenetration of both: "beauty exists when the particular (the real) is so adequate to its concept that the latter, as infinite, enters the finite and presents itself to our contemplation in concrete form. With the appearance of the concept, the real becomes truly similar and equal to the idea, wherein the universal and the particular find their absolute identity. Without ceasing to be rational, the rational becomes at the same time apparent and sensible."[26] But as above the three powers is poised God, their point of union, so Philosophy stands supreme over the three ideas; concerning itself not with truth or morality or even beauty alone, but with that which belongs to all the three in common, deduced from one common source. If philosophy assumes the character of science and truth, while yet remaining superior to truth, this is made possible by the fact that science and truth are its formal determination; "philosophy is science in the sense that truth, goodness and beauty, i.e. science, virtue and art, interpenetrate each other; therefore it is also not science but is that which is common to science, virtue and art." This interpenetration distinguishes philosophy from all other sciences; for instance, if mathematics can dispense with morality and beauty, philosophy cannot do so.[27]

Ideas and the gods. Art and mythology.

In Beauty are contained truth and goodness, necessity and liberty. When beauty appears to be in conflict with truth, the truth in question is a finite truth with which beauty ought not to agree, because, as we have seen, the art of naturalism and of the merely characteristic is a false art.[28] The individual forms of art, being in themselves representatives of the infinite and the universe, are called Ideas.[29] Considered from the point of view of reality, Ideas are gods; their essence, their "in-itself," is in fact equivalent to God; every idea is an idea so far as it is God in a particular form; every idea, therefore, is equal to God, but to a particular god. Characteristic of all the gods is pure limitation and indivisible absoluteness: Minerva is the idea of wisdom united with strength, but she is lacking in womanly tenderness; Juno is power without wisdom and without the sweet attraction of love, for which she is forced to borrow the cestus of Venus; Venus again has not the weighty wisdom of Minerva. What would become of these ideas if deprived of their limitations? They would cease to be objects of Imagination.[30] Imagination is a faculty which has no connexion with pure intellect or with reason (Vernunft) and is distinct from fancy (Einbildungskraft) which collects and arranges the products of art, whereas imagination intuits them, forms them out of itself, represents them. Imagination is to fancy as intellectual intuition is to reason: it is therefore the intellectual intuition of art.[31] "Reason" no longer suffices in a philosophy such as this: intellectual intuition, which for Kant was a limiting concept, is now asserted as really existing: intellect sinks to a subordinate place: even the genuine imagination which operates in art is overshadowed by this new-fangled Imagination, twin with intellectual Intuition, who sometimes changes places with this sister of hers. Mythology is proclaimed a necessary condition of all art: mythology which is not allegory, for in the latter the particular signifies only the universal, while the former is already itself the universal; which explains how easy it is to allegorize, and how fascinating are such poems as those of Homer which lend themselves to such interpretations. Christian, as well as Hellenic, art has its mythology: Christ; the persons of the Trinity; the Virgin mother of God.[32] The fine between mythology and art is as shadowy as that between art and philosophy.

K. W. Solger.

The year 1815 saw the publication of Solger's principal work, Erwin, a long philosophical dialogue on the beautiful; subsequently in 1819 he gave a course of lectures on Æsthetic which were published posthumously. He was one of those who found but a glimpse of truth in Kant and held the post-Kantians in very slight estimation, particularly Fichte; in Schelling, who begins from the original unity of the subjective and the objective, he detects for the first time a speculative principle not adequately developed, since Schelling had never triumphed dialectically over the difficulties of intellectual intuition.[33]

Fancy and Imagination.

Solger was one of those who conceived of Imagination as totally distinct from Fancy: fancy (says he) belongs to common cognition and is none other than "the human consciousness, in so far as it continues, in temporal succession, infinitely reasserting an original intuition"; it presupposes the distinctions between common cognition, abstraction and judgement, concept and representation, amongst which "it acts as mediator by giving to the general concept the form of individual representation; and to the latter the form of a general concept; in this manner it has its being among the antitheses of the ordinary understanding." Imagination is totally different; proceeding "from the original unity of the antitheses in the Idea, it acts so that the elements in opposition, separated as they are from the idea, find themselves united in the reality; by its means we are capable of apprehending objects higher than those of common cognition and of recognizing in them the idea itself as real: also, in art, it is the faculty of transforming the idea into reality." It presents itself in three modes or degrees: as Imagination of the Imagination, which conceives the whole as idea, and activity as nothing more than the development of the idea in reality; as Sensibility of the Imagination, in so far as it expresses the life of the idea in the real and reduces the one to the other; lastly (and here we have the highest grade of artistic activity, corresponding with Dialectic in philosophy) as Intellect of the Imagination or artistic Dialectic, conceiving idea and reality in such a way that one passes over into the other, that is to say, into reality. Other divisions and subdivisions are made on which it is not necessary to dwell. Imagination is said to produce the Irony essential to true art: this is the Irony of Tieck and Novalis, of whom Solger is in a sense a follower.[34]

Art, practice and religion.

Solger joins Schelling in placing beauty in the region of the Idea, inaccessible to common consciousness. It is distinct from the idea of Truth, because instead of dissolving the appearances of common consciousness after the manner of truth, art accomplishes the miracle of making appearance dissolve itself while still remaining appearance; artistic thought, therefore, is practical, not theoretical. Furthermore, it is distinct from the idea of Goodness, with which at first sight it would seem to be closely related, because in the case of Goodness the union of ideal with real, of the simple with the multiple, of the infinite with the finite, is not real and complete, but remains ideal, a mere ought-to-be. It is related more closely to Religion, which thinks the Idea as the abyss of life where our individual conscience must lose itself in order to become "essential" (wesentlich), while in beauty and art the Idea manifests itself by gathering into itself the world of distinctions between universal and particular and placing itself in their place. Artistic activity is more than theoretical, it is of a practical nature, but realized and perfected; art, therefore, belongs not to theoretical philosophy (as Kant thought, according to Solger), but to practical. Necessarily attached on one side to infinity, it cannot have common nature as its object; for example, art is absent from a portrait, and the ancients showed their discrimination in selecting gods and heroes for objects in sculpture since every deity—even in limited and particular form—always signifies a determinate modification of the Idea.[35]

G. W. F. Hegel.

The same concept of art appears in the philosophy of Hegel, whatever may be the minor differences which he felt to separate himself from his predecessors. Little concerned as we are with the shades and varieties of mystical Æsthetic exhibited by each of these thinkers, we are chiefly concerned to lay bare the substantial underlying identity, the mysticism of arbitrarism which gives them their historic place in Æsthetic.

Art in the sphere of absolute spirit.

Opening the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Spirit, one need not expect to find any discussion of art in the analysis of the forms of the theoretical Spirit, among definitions of sensibility and intuition, language and symbolism, and various grades of imagination and thought. Hegel places Art in the sphere of absolute Spirit, together with Religion and Philosophy,[36] and in this he regards Kant, Schiller, Schelling and Solger as his precursors, for like them he strongly denies that art has the function of representing the abstract concept, but not that it represents the concrete concept or Idea. Hegel's whole philosophy consists in the affirmation of a concrete concept, unknown to ordinary or scientific thought. "Indeed," says he, "no concept has in our day been more mishandled than the concept in itself and for itself; for by concept is generally meant the abstract determinateness or one-sidedness of representation and intellectualistic thought, with which it is naturally impossible to think either the entirety of truth or concrete beauty."[37] To the realm of the concrete concept belongs art, as one of the three forms wherein the freedom of the spirit is achieved; it is the first form, namely that of immediate, sensible, objective knowledge (the second is religion, a representative consciousness plus worship, an element extraneous to mere art: the third is philosophy, free thought of the absolute spirit).[38]

Beauty as sensible appearance of the Idea.

Beauty and truth are at the same time one yet distinct. "Truth is Idea as Idea, according to its being-in-itself and its universal principle, and so far as it is thought as such. There is no sensible or material existence in Truth; thought contemplates therein nothing but universal idea. But the Idea must also realize itself externally and attain an actual and determinate existence. Truth also as such has existence; but when in its determinate external existence it is immediately for consciousness, and the concept remains immediately one with the external appearance, the Idea is not only true but beautiful. In this way Beauty may be defined as the sensible appearance of the Idea."[39] The Idea is the content of art: its sensible and imaginative configuration; its form: two elements which must interpenetrate and form a whole, hence the necessity that a content destined to become a work of art should show itself capable of such transformation; otherwise we have but an imperfect union of poetic form with prosaic and incongruous content.[40] An ideal content must gleam through the sensible form; the form is spiritualized by this ideal light;[41] artistic imagination does not work in the same way as the passive or receptive fancy, it does not stop at the appearances of sensible reality but searches for the internal truth and rationality of the real. "The rationality of the object selected by him should not be alone in awakening the consciousness of the artist: he should have well meditated upon the essential and the true in all their extension and profundity, for without reflexion a man cannot become conscious of that which is within himself, and all great works of art show that their material has been thought again and again from every side. No successful work of art can issue from light and careless imagination."[42] It is a delusion to fancy that poet and painter need nothing beyond intuitions: "a true poet must reflect and meditate before and during the execution of his poem."[43] But it is always understood that the thought of the poet does not take the form of abstraction.

Æsthetic in metaphysical idealism and Baumgartenism.

Some critics[44] affirm that the æsthetic movement from Schelling to Hegel is a revived Baumgartenism on the ground that this movement regarded art as a mediator of philosophical concepts; they mention the fact that a follower of Schelling, one Ast, was moved by the trend of his system to substitute didactic poetry for drama as the highest form of art.[45] Putting aside some isolated and accidental deviations, there is no truth in this affirmation: these philosophers are hostile to intellectualistic and moralistic views, frequently entering upon definite and explicit polemic against them. Schelling wrote: "Æsthetic production is in its origin an absolutely free production.... This independence on any extraneous purpose constitutes the sanctity and purity of art, enabling it to repel all connexion with mere pleasure, a connexion which is a mark of barbarism, or with utility, which cannot be demanded of art save at times when the loftiest form of the human spirit is found in utilitarian discoveries. The same reasons forbid an alliance with morality and hold even science at arm's length, although nearest by reason of her disinterestedness; having her aim, however, outside herself, she must restrict herself definitely to serve as means to something higher than herself: the arts."[46] Hegel says, "Art contains no universal as such." "If the aim of instruction is treated as an aim, so that the nature of the content represented appears for itself directly, as an abstract proposition, prosaic reflexion, or general theory, and is not merely contained indirectly and implicitly in the concrete artistic form, the result of such a separation is to reduce the sensible and imaginative form, the true constituent of a work of art, to an idle ornament, a covering (Hülle) presented simply as a covering, an appearance maintained as mere appearance. The very nature of the work of art is thus completely altered, for a work of art must not present to intuition a content in its universality, but this universal individualized and converted into a sensible individual."[47] It is a bad sign, he adds, when an artist sets himself about his work from a motive of abstract ideas instead of that of the fulness of life (Überfülle des Lebens).[48] The aim of art lies in itself, in presentation of truth in a sensible form; any other aim is altogether extraneous.[49] It would not be hard to prove, certainly, that by separating art from pure representation and imagination and making it in some sense the vehicle of the concept, the universal, the infinite, these philosophers were facing in the direction of the road opened by Baumgarten. But to prove this would mean accepting as a presupposition the dilemma that if art be not pure imagination, it must be sensuous and subordinate to reason; and it is just this presupposition and dilemma that the metaphysical idealists denied. The road they tried to follow was to conceive a faculty which should be neither imagination nor intellect but should partake of both; an intellectual intuition or intuitive intellect, a mental imagination after the fashion of Plotinus.

Mortality and decay of art in Hegel's system.

In a greater degree than any of his predecessors Hegel emphasized the cognitive character of art. But this very merit brought him into a difficulty more easily avoided by the rest. Art being placed in the sphere of absolute Spirit, in company with Religion and Philosophy, how will she be able to hold her own in such powerful and aggressive company, especially in that of Philosophy, which in the Hegelian system stands at the summit of all spiritual evolution? If Art and Religion fulfilled functions other than the knowledge of the Absolute, they would be inferior levels of the Spirit, but yet necessary and indispensable. But if they have in view the same end as Philosophy and are allowed to compete with it, what value can they retain? None whatever; or, at the very most, they may have that sort of value which attaches to transitory historical phases in the life of humanity. The principles of Hegel's system are at bottom rationalistic and hostile to religion, and hostile no less to art. A strange and painful consequence for a man like Hegel, endowed with a warmly æsthetic spirit and a fervid lover of the arts; almost a repetition of the hard fate endured by Plato. But as the Greek philosopher, in obedience to the presumed command of religion, did not hesitate to condemn the mimetic art and the Homeric poetry he loved, so the German refused to evade the logical exigencies of his system and proclaimed the mortality, nay, the very death, of art. "We have assigned," he says, "a very high place to art: but it must be recollected that neither in content nor in form can art be considered the most perfect means of bringing before the consciousness of the mind its true interests. Precisely by reason of its form, art is limited to a particular content. Only a definite circle or grade of truth can be made visible in a work of art; that is to say, such truth as may be transfused into the sensible and adequately presented in that form, as were the Greek gods. But there is a deeper conception of truth, by which it is not so intimately allied to the sensible as to permit of its being received or expressed suitably in material fashion. To this class belongs the Christian conception of truth; and, furthermore, the spirit of our modern world, more especially that of our religion and our mental evolution, seems to have passed the point at which art is the best road to the apprehension of the Absolute. The peculiar character of artistic production no longer satisfies our highest aspirations.... Thought and reflexion have superseded fine art." Many reasons have been adduced in order to account for the moribund condition of modern art; in especial, the prevalence of material and political interests; the true reason, says Hegel, consists of the inferiority in grade of art in comparison with pure thought. "Art in its highest form is and for us must remain a thing of the past"; and just because the thing has vanished, one can reason about it philosophically.[50] The Æsthetic of Hegel is thus a funeral oration: he passes in review the successive forms of art, shows the progressive steps of internal consumption and lays the whole in its grave, leaving Philosophy to write its epitaph.

Romanticism and metaphysical idealism had elevated art to such a fantastic height among the clouds that at last they were obliged to admit that it was so far away as to be absolutely useless.

X

SCHOPENHAUER AND HERBART

Æsthetic mysticism in the opponents of Idealism.

Nothing, perhaps, shows more clearly how well this imaginative conception of art suited the spirit of the times (not only a particular fashion in philosophy, but the psychological conditions expressed by the Romantic movement) than the fact that the adversaries of the systems of Schelling, Solger and Hegel either agreed with this conception in general or, while believing themselves to be departing widely from it, actually returned to it involuntarily.

A. Schopenhauer.

Everybody knows with what lack, shall we say, of phlegma philosophicum Arthur Schopenhauer fought against Schelling, Hegel and all the "charlatans" and "professors" who had divided amongst themselves the heritage of Kant. But what was the artistic theory accepted and developed by Schopenhauer?

Ideas as the object of art.

His theory, like Hegel's own, turns upon the distinction between the concept which is abstraction and the concept which is concrete, or Idea; although Schopenhauer's Ideas are by himself likened to Plato's, and in the particular form in which he presents them more nearly resemble those of Schelling than the Idea of Hegel. They have something in common with intellectual concepts, for like them they are unities representing a plurality of real things: but "the concept is abstract and discursive, entirely indeterminate in its sphere, rigorously precise within its own limits only; the intellect suffices to conceive and understand it, speech expresses it without need for other intermediary, and its own definition exhausts its whole nature; the idea, on the contrary (which may be defined clearly as the adequate representative of the concept) is absolutely intuitive, and although it represents an infinite number of individual things, it is not for that any the less determined in all its aspects. The individual, as individual, cannot know it; in order to conceive it he must strip himself of all will, of all individuality, and raise himself to the state of a pure knowing subject. The idea, therefore, is attained by genius only, or by one who finds himself in a genial disposition attained by that elevation of his cognitive powers inspired usually by genius." "The idea is unity become plurality by means of space and time, forms of one intuitive apperception; the concept, on the contrary, is unity extracted from plurality by means of abstraction, which is the procedure of our intellect: the concept may be described as unitas post yewi the idea, unitas ante rem."[1] Schopenhauer is in the habit of calling ideas the genera of things; but on one occasion he remarks that ideas are of species, not genera; that genera are simply concepts, and that there are natural species, but only logical genera.[2] This psychological illusion as to the existence of ideas for types originates (as we find elsewhere in Schopenhauer) in the habit of converting the empirical classifications of the natural sciences into living realities. "Do you wish to see ideas?" he asks; "look at the clouds which scud across the sky; look at a brooklet leaping over rocks; look at the crystallization of hoar-frost on a window-pane with its designs of trees and flowers. The shapes of the clouds, the ripples of the gushing brook, the configurations of the crystals exist for us individual observers, in themselves they are indifferent. The clouds in themselves are elastic vapour; the brook is an incompressible fluid, mobile, transparent, amorphous, the ice obeys the laws of crystallization: and in these determinations their ideas consist."[3] All these are the immediate objectification of will in its various degrees; and it is these, not their pale copies in real things, that art delineates; whence Plato was right in one sense and wrong in another, and is justified and condemned by Schopenhauer exactly in the same way as by Plotinus of old, as well as by Schopenhauer's worst enemy, the modern Schelling.[4] In consequence, each art has a special category of ideas for its own dominion. Architecture, and in some cases hydraulics, facilitate the clear intuition of those ideas which constitute the lower degrees of objectification—weight, cohesion, resistance, hardness, the general properties of stone and some combinations of light; gardening and (most curious association) landscape painting represent the ideas of vegetable nature; sculpture and animal painting those of zoology; historical painting and the higher forms of sculpture that of the human body; poetry the very idea of man himself.[5] As for music, that (let him who can justify the logical discontinuity) is outside the hierarchy of the other arts. We have seen how Schelling considered it to be representative of the very rhythm of the universe;[6] differing but slightly from this, Schopenhauer affirms that music does not express ideas but, parallel with ideas, Will itself. The analogies between music and the world, between the fundamental bass and crude matter, between the scale and the series of species, between melody and conscious will, led him to the conclusion that music was not, as Leibniz thought, an arithmetic but a metaphysic: exercitium metaphysices occultum nescientis se philosophari animi.[7]

Æsthetic catharsis.

To Schopenhauer, no less than his idealistic predecessors, art beatifies; it is the flower of life; he who contemplates art is no longer an individual but a pure knowing subject, at liberty, free from desire, from pain, from time.[8]

Signs of a better theory in Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer's system no doubt contains here and there premonitions of a better and more profound treatment of art. Schopenhauer, who was capable on occasion of clear and keen analysis, constantly insists that the forms of space and time must not be applied to the idea or to artistic contemplation, which admits of the general form of representation only.[9] From this he might have inferred that art, so far from being a superior and extraordinary level of consciousness, is actually its most immediate level, namely that which in its primitive simplicity precedes even common perception with its reference of objects to a position in the spatial and temporal series. To free oneself from common perception and to live in imagination does not mean rising to a Platonic contemplation of the ideas, but descending once more into the region of immediate intuition, becoming children again, as Vico had seen. On the other hand Schopenhauer had begun to examine the categories of Kant with an unprejudiced eye; he was not satisfied with the two forms of intuition, and wished to add to them a third, causality.[10] In conclusion, we note that, like his predecessors, he makes a comparison between art and history, with this difference and advantage over the idealist authors of the philosophy of history, that for him history was irreducible to concepts; it was contemplation of the individual, and therefore not science. Had he persevered in his comparison between art and history, he would have arrived at a better solution than that at which he stopped; that is to say, that the matter of history is the particular in its particularity and contingency, while that of art is that which is, and is always identical.[11] But instead of pursuing these happy ideas Schopenhauer preferred to play variations on the themes fashionable in his day.

J. F. Herbart.

Most astounding of all is the fact that a dry intellectualist, the avowed enemy of idealism, of dialectic and of speculative constructions, head of the school calling itself realistic or the school of exact philosophy, Johann Friedrich Herbart, when he turns his attention to Æsthetic, turns mystic too, though in a slightly different way. How weightily he speaks when expounding his philosophical method! Æsthetic must not bear the blame of the faults into which metaphysic has fallen; we must make it an independent study, and detach it from all hypothesis about the universe. Nor must it be confounded with psychology or asked to describe the emotions awakened by the content of works of art, such as the pathetic or the comic, sadness or joy; its duty is to determine the essential character of art and beauty. In the analysis of particular cases of beauty and in registering what they reveal lies the way of salvation. These proposals and promises have misled numbers of people as to the nature of Herbart's Æsthetic. But ce sont là jeux de princes; by paying attention we shall see what Herbart meant by analysis of particular case; and how he held himself aloof from metaphysics.

Pure Beauty and relations of form.

Beauty, for him, consisted in relations: relations of tone, colour, line, thought and will; experience must decide which of these relations are beautiful, and æsthetic science consists solely in enumerating the fundamental concepts (Musterbegriffe) in which are summarized the particular cases of beauty. But these relations, Herbart thought, were not like physiological facts; they could not be empirically observed, e.g. in a psycho-physical laboratory. To correct this error it is only necessary to observe that these relations include not only tones, lines and colours, but also thoughts and will, and that they extend to moral facts no less than to objects of external intuition. He declares explicitly "No true beauty is sensible, although it frequently happens that sense-impressions precede and follow the intuition of beauty."[12] There is a profound distinction between the beautiful and the pleasant; for the pleasant needs no representation, while the beautiful consists in representation of relations, followed immediately in consciousness by a judgment, an appendix (Zusatz) which expresses unqualified approbation ("es gefällt!"). And while the pleasant and the unpleasant "in the progress of culture gradually become transient and unimportant, Beauty stands out more and more as something permanent and possessed of undeniable value."[13] The judgment of taste is universal, eternal, immutable: "the complete representation (vollendete Vorstellung) of the same relations is always followed by the same judgment; just as the same cause always produces the same effect. This happens at all times and in all circumstances, conditions and complications, which gives to the particularity of certain cases the appearance of a universal rule. Granted that the elements of a relation are universal concepts, it is plain that although in judging we think only of the content of these concepts, the judgment must have a sphere as large as that common to the two concepts."[14] Herbart considers æsthetic judgements as a general class comprising ethical judgements as a subdivision: "amongst other beauties is to be distinguished morality, as a thing not only of value in itself but as actually determining the unconditioned value of persons"; within morality in the narrowest sense is distinguished in turn justice.[15] The five ethica ideas guiding moral life (internal liberty, perfection, benevolence, equity and justice) are five æsthetic ideas or rather æsthetic concepts applied to relations of will.

Art as sum of content and form.

Herbart looks on art as a complex fact, the combination of an extra-æsthetic element, content, which may have logical or psychological or any other kind of value, and a purely æsthetic element, form, which is an application of the fundamental æsthetic concepts. Man looks for that which is diverting, instructive, moving, majestic, ridiculous; and "all these are mingled with the beautiful in order to procure favour and interest for the work. The beautiful thus assumes various complexions, and becomes graceful, magnificent, tragic, or comic; it can become all these because the æsthetic judgement, in itself calmly serene, tolerates the company of the most diverse excitations of the soul which are no part of itself."[16] But all these things have nothing to do with beauty. In order to discover the objectively beautiful or ugly, one must make abstraction from every predicate concerning the content. "In order to recognize the objectively beautiful or ugly in poetry, one must show the difference between this and that thought, and the discussion will concern itself with thoughts; to recognize it in sculpture, one must show the difference between this and that outline, and the discussion will turn upon outlines; to recognize it in music, one should show the difference between this and that tone, and the discussion will turn upon tones. Now, such predicates as 'magnificent, charming, graceful' and so forth contain nothing whatever about tones, outlines or thoughts, and therefore tell us nothing about the objectively beautiful in poetry, sculpture, or music; indeed they rather lead us to believe in the existence of an objective beauty to which thought, outline, or tone are equally accidental, which may be approached by receiving impressions from poetry, sculpture, music and so forth, obliterating the object and giving oneself up to the pure emotion of mind."[17] Very different is the æsthetic judgement, the "cold judgement of the connoisseur" who considers exclusively form, i.e. objectively pleasant formal relations. This abstraction from the content in order to contemplate pure form is the catharsis produced by art. Content is transitory, relative, subject to moral law and liable to moral judgement: form is permanent, absolute, free.[18] Concrete art may be the sum of two or more values; but the æsthetic fact is form alone.

Herbart and Kantian thought.

The reader who goes behind appearances and discounts diversities of terminology will not fail to observe the close similarity of the æsthetic doctrine of Herbart to that of Kant. In Herbart we again find the distinction between free and adherent beauty, and between form and the sensuous stimulus (Reiz) attached to form: we find an affirmation of the existence of pure beauty, the object of necessary and universal, but not discursive, judgements; lastly, we find a certain connexion between beauty and morality, between Æsthetic and Ethics. In these matters Herbart is perhaps the most faithful follower and propagator of the thought of Kant, whose doctrine contains the germ of his own. In one passage he describes himself as "a Kantian, but of the year 1828"; and he is quite right, even in pointing out the exact difference in date. Amidst the errors and uncertainties of his æsthetic thought, Kant is rich in suggestion and scatters fertile seed; he belongs to a period when philosophy was still young and impressionable. Herbart, coming later, is dry and one-sided; he takes whatever is false in Kant's doctrine and hardens it into a system. If they had done little else, the Romanticists and idealists had at least united the theory of beauty to that of art, and destroyed the rhetorical and mechanical view; and they had brought into relief (frequently exaggerating, doubtless) various important characteristics of artistic activity. Herbart re-states the mechanical view, restores the duality, and presents a capricious, narrow, barren mysticism, devoid of all breath of artistic feeling.

XI

FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER

Æsthetic of content and Æsthetic of form: meaning of the contrast.

We have now reached a point when we are able to give ourselves an exact account of the signification and importance of the celebrated war waged for over a century in Germany between the Æsthetic of content (Gehaltsästhetik) and the Æsthetic of form (Formästhetik); a war which gave birth to vast works on the history of Æsthetic undertaken from one or other point of view, and sprang from Herbart's opposition to the idealism of Schelling, Hegel, and their contemporaries and followers. "Form" and "Content" are among the most equivocal words in the whole philosophical vocabulary, particularly in Æsthetic; sometimes, indeed, what one calls form, others call content. The Herbartians were specially given to quoting in their own defence Schiller's dictum, that the secret of art consists in "cancelling content by form." But what is there in common between Schiller's concept of "form," which placed the æsthetic activity side by side with the moral and intellectual, and Herbart's "form," which does not penetrate or enliven, but clothes and adorns a content? Hegel, on the other hand, often gives the name "form" to what Schiller would call "matter" (Stoff), that is, the sensible matter which it is the business of spiritual energy to dominate. Hegel's "content" is the idea, the metaphysical truth, the constituent element of beauty: Herbart's "content" is the emotional and intellectual element which falls outside beauty. The Æsthetic of "form" in Italy is an æsthetic of expressive activity; the form is neither a clothing nor a metaphysical idea nor sensible matter, but a representative or imaginative faculty with the power of framing impressions; yet there have been attempts to confute this Italian æsthetic formalism with the same arguments that are used against German æsthetic formalism, a totally different thing in every respect. And so forth. Having given a plain account of the thoughts of the post-Kantian æstheticians, we shall be able to appreciate their opponents without seeking light from their obscure terminology or allowing ourselves to be misled by the banners they wave. The antithesis between the Æsthetic of content and that of form, the Æsthetic of idealism and that of realism, the Æsthetic of Schelling, Solger, Hegel and Schopenhauer and that of Herbart, will appear in its true light, as the lamily quarrel between two conceptions of art united by a common mysticism, although one is destined almost to meet with truth during its long journey, while the other wanders ever further away.

The first half of the nineteenth century was for Germany a period of many fine-sounding philosophical formulæ: subjectivism, objectivism, subjective—objectivism; abstract, concrete, abstract-concrete; idealism, realism, idealism—realism; between pantheism and theism Krause inserted his pan-en-theism. In the midst of this uproar, in which the second-rate men shouted down the first-rate and made good their claim to their only true property, namely words, it is not surprising that a few modest clear thinkers, philosophers who preferred to think about realities, should have the worst of it and remain unheard and unnoticed, lost among the roaring crowd or labelled with a false ticket.

Friedrich Schleiermacher.

This, at least, seems to have been the lot of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose æsthetic doctrine is amongst the least known although it is perhaps the most noteworthy of the day.

Wrong judgements concerning him.

Schleiermacher delivered his first lectures on Æsthetic at Berlin University in 1819, and from that date he began to study the subject seriously with a view to writing a book on it. He repeated his lectures on two occasions, in 1825 and 1832-1833; but his death, which occurred in the following year, prevented him from carrying out his plan, and all we know of his thoughts on Æsthetic comes from his lectures, as collected by his pupils and published in 1842.[1] A Herbartian historian of Æsthetic, Zimmermann, attacks the posthumous work of Schleiermacher with real ferocity; after twenty pages of invective and sarcasm he concludes by asking, how could his pupils so dishonour their great master by publishing such a mass of waste paper, "all play upon words, sophistical conceits and dialectical subtleties"?[2] Nor was the idealistic historian Hartmann much more benevolent when he describes the work as "a confused mess in which, among much that is merely trivial, many half-truths and exaggerations, one can detect a few acute observations"; and says that, in order to make bearable "such unctuous afternoon sermons delivered by a preacher in his dotage," it must be shortened by three-quarters; and that, "as regards fundamental principles," it is simply useless, offering no innovations upon concrete idealism as presented by Hegel and others; and that, in any case, it seems impossible "to attach it to any line of thought except the Hegelian, to which Schleiermacher's contribution is only of second-rate importance." He further observes that Schleiermacher was primarily a theologian, and in philosophy more or less an amateur.[3] Now it cannot be denied that Schleiermacher's doctrine has reached us in a hazy form, by no means free from uncertainties and contradictions; and, which is more important, it is here and there affected for the worse by the influence of contemporary metaphysics. But, side by side with these defects, what excellent method, really scientific and philosophical; what a number of cornerstones well and truly laid; what wealth of new truths, and of difficulties and problems not suspected or discussed before his day!

Schleiermacher contrasted with his predecessors.

Schleiermacher considered Æsthetic as an essentially modern line of thought, and drew a sharp distinction between the Poetics of Aristotle, which never shakes itself free from the empirical standpoint of the maker of rules, and what Baumgarten tried to do in the eighteenth century. He praised Kant for having been the first truly to include Æsthetic among the philosophical sciences, and recognized that in Hegel artistic activity had attained the highest elevation by being brought into connexion and almost into equality with religion and philosophy. But he was not satisfied either with the followers of Baumgarten when they degenerated into the absurd attempt to construct a science or theory of sensuous pleasure, or with the Kantian point of view which made its principal aim the consideration of taste; or with the philosophy of Fichte, in which art became a means of education; or with the more widely received opinion which placed at the centre of Æsthetic the vague and equivocal concept of Beauty. Schiller pleased him by having called attention to the moment of artistic spontaneity or productiveness, and he praised Schelling for having laid stress on the importance of the figurative arts, which lend themselves less easily than poetry to facile and illusory moralistic interpretations.[4] Having with the utmost clearness excluded from Æsthetic the study of practical rules as empirical, and therefore irreducible to a science, he assigned to Æsthetic the task of determining the proper position of artistic activity in the scheme of ethics.[5]

Place assigned to Æsthetic in his Ethics.

To avoid falling into error over this terminology, we must call to mind that the philosophy of Schleiermacher followed the ancient traditions in its tripartite division into Dialectic, Ethics and Physics. Dialectic corresponds with ontology; Physics embraces all the sciences of natural facts; Ethics includes the study of all free activities of mankind (language, thought, art, religion and morality). Ethics represented to him not only the science of morality but what others name Psychology or, better still, the Science or Philosophy of the Spirit. This explanation once given, Schleiermacher's point of departure seems to be the only one just and permissible, and we shall not be surprised when he talks of will, of voluntary acts and so on, where others would have simply spoken of activity or spiritual energy; he even endows such expressions with a broader meaning than that conferred upon them by practical philosophy.

Æsthetic activity as immanent and individual.

A double distinction may be made amongst human activities. In the first place, there are activities which we presume to be constituted in the same manner in all men (such as the logical activity) and are called activities of identity; and others whose diversity is presumed, which are called activities of difference or individual activities. Secondly, there are activities which exhaust themselves in the internal life, and others which actualize themselves in the external world: immanent activities and practical activities. To which of the two classes in each of the two orders does artistic activity belong? There can be no doubt of its different modes of development, if not actually in each individual person, at least in different peoples and nations; therefore it belongs properly to activities of difference or individual activities.[6] As for the other distinction, it is true that art does realize itself in the external world, but this fact is something superadded ("ein später Hinzukommendes") "which stands to the internal fact as the communication of thought by means of speech or writing stands to thought itself": art's true work is the internal image ("das innere Bild ist das eigentliche Kunstwerk"). Exceptions to this might be adduced, such as mimicry; but they would be apparent only. Between a really angry man and the actor who plays the part of an angry man on the stage there is this difference: in the second case anger appears as controlled and therefore beautiful; that is, the internal image is in the actor's soul interposed between the fact of passion and its physical manifestation.[7] Artistic activity "belongs to those human activities in which we presuppose the individual in its differentiation; it belongs equally to those activities developing essentially within themselves and not completing themselves in any external world. Art, therefore, is an immanent activity in which we presuppose differentiation." Internal, not practical: individual, not universal or logical.

Artistic truth and intellectual truth.

But if art be one form of thought, there must be one form of thought in which identity is presupposed, and another in which difference is presupposed. We do not look for truth in poetry; or, rather, we do look for truth, but for one that is totally different from that objective truth to which there must correspond some being, either universal or individual (scientific and historical truth). "When a character in a poem is said to be devoid of truth, a slur is cast on the given poem; but if the character is said to be a pure invention, corresponding with no reality, that is quite a different matter." The truth of a poetic character consists in the coherence with which a single person's divers modes of thinking and acting are represented: even in portraits it is not an exact correspondence with an objective reality that makes the thing a work of art. From art and poetry "springs no iota of knowledge" (das Geringste vom Wissen); "it expresses but the truth of the single consciousness." There are then "productions of thought and of sensible intuitions, opposed to the other productions because they do not presuppose identity, and they express the singular as such."[8]

Difference of artistic consciousness from feeling and religion.

The domain of art is immediate self-consciousness (unmittelbare Selbstbewusstsein), which must be carefully distinguished from the thought or concept of the ego or of the determinate ego. This latter is the consciousness of identity in the diversity of moments; immediate self-consciousness is "diversity itself, of which one must be aware, since life in its entirety is but the development of consciousness." In this domain art has often been confused with two facts which accompany it: sensuous consciousness (the feeling of pleasure and pain), and religion. A double confusion, of which the sensationalists fall into the first half and Hegel into the second; Schleiermacher clears it up by proving that art is free productivity, whereas sensuous pleasure and religious feeling, however different in other ways, are both determined by an objective fact (äussere Sein).[9]

Dreams and art: inspiration and deliberation.

The better to understand this free productivity, we must further circumscribe the domain of immediate consciousness. In this we can find nothing more helpful than comparing it with the images produced by dreams. The artist has his own dreams: he dreams with open eyes, and from among the thick-thronging images of this dream-state those having sufficient energy alone become works of art, the rest remaining a mere background from which the others stand out. All the essential elements of art are found in the dream-state, which is the production of free thoughts and sensuous intuitions consisting of mere images. Certainly something is lacking in dreams, and they differ from art not only in their absence of technique, which has already been excluded as irrelevant to art, but in another way, viz. that a dream is a chaotic fact, without stability, order, connexion or measure. But when some sort of order is introduced into the chaos the difference at once disappears, and the likeness to art merges in identity. This internal activity which introduces order and measure, fixes and determines the image, is that which distinguishes art from a dream or transforms a dream into art. It often involves struggle, labour, the obligation to stem the involuntary flood of internal images; in a word, it means reflexion or deliberation. But the dream and the cessation of dreaming are equally indispensable elements of art. There must be production of thoughts and images and, together with such production, there must be measure, determination and unity, "otherwise each image would be confused with its neighbour and have no definiteness." The instant of inspiration (Begeisterung) is as essential as that of deliberation (Besonnenheit).[10]

Art and the typical.

But in order to arrive at artistic truth it is also I necessary (here Schleiermacher's thought becomes less clear and accurate) that the singular be accompanied by consciousness of the species; consciousness of the self as individual man is impossible without consciousness of mankind; nor is a single object true unless referred to its universal. In a pictured landscape "every tree must possess natural truth, that is to say, it must be contemplated as a specimen of a given kind; similarly, the whole complex of natural and individual life must have effective truth of nature and constitute a single harmony. Just because in art we do not strive after the production of individual figures in themselves and for themselves, but their internal truth as well, we commonly assign to them a high place as being a free realization of that in which all cognition has its value, that is to say, in the principle that all forms of being are inherent in the human spirit. If this principle fails, truth is no longer possible; scepticism only remains." The productions of art are the ideal or typical figures which real nature would create were it not impeded by external influences.[11] "The artist creates a figure on the basis of a general scheme, rejecting whatever may hinder or impede the play of the living forces of reality; such a production, founded on a general scheme, is what we call the Ideal."[12]

In spite of all these determinations, Schleiermacher did not apparently intend to limit the artist's scope. He remarks, "When an artist represents something really given, whether portrait, landscape or single human figure, he renounces the freedom of productivity and adheres to the real."[13] There is a twofold tendency at work in the artist: towards perfection of type, and towards representation of natural reality. An artist must not fall into the abstractness of the type or into the unmeaningness of empirical reality.[14] If in flower-painting it is necessary to bring out the specific type, a much more complete individualisation is demanded when representing man, owing to the lofty position which he occupies.[15] Representation of the ideal in the real does not exclude "an infinite variety, such as is found in actual reality." "For instance, the human face wavers between the ideal and caricature, in its moral conformation no less than in its physical. Every human face contains elements of disfigurement (Verbildung,) but it has also something by which it is a determinate modification of human nature; this does not appear openly, but a practised eye can seize it and ideally complete the face in question."[16] Schleiermacher is keenly aware of the difficulties and perplexities of' such problems as the question whether there exists one or many ideals of the human face.[17] He observes that the two views which strive for mastery in the field of poetry may be extended to art as a whole. Some assert that poetry and art should represent the perfect, the ideal, that which would have been produced by nature, had she not been prevented by mechanical forces; others reject the ideal as incapable of realisation and prefer that the artist should depict man as he really is, with those perturbing elements which in reality belong to him no less than his ideal qualities. Each view is a half-truth: it is the duty of art to represent the ideal as well as the real, the subjective as well as the objective.[18] The comic element, that is the unideal and the faulty ideal, is included in the circle of art.[19]

Independence of art.

In respect to morality, art is free just as philosophical speculation is free: its essence excludes practical and moral effects. This leads to the proposition that "there is no difference between various works of art, except in so far as they can be compared in respect of artistic perfection" (Vollkommenheit in der Kunst.) "Given an artistic object perfect of its kind, it has an absolute value which cannot be increased or diminished by anything else. If motions of the will could truly be described as consequences of works of art, a different standard of values would apply to works of art: and since the objects which an artist may depict are not all equally adapted to influence volition, a scale of values would exist which did not depend on artistic perfection." Nor must we confound the judgement passed upon the varied and complex personality of the artist himself with the strictly æsthetic judgement passed upon his work. "In this respect the biggest, most complicated canvas is on a level with the smallest arabesque, the longest poem with the shortest: the value of a work of art depends on the perfect manner in which the external corresponds to the internal."[20]

Schleiermacher rejects the doctrine of Schiller because in his opinion it makes art a sort of game or pastime in contrast to the serious affairs of life: a view, he says, for business men to whom their business is the only serious thing. Artistic activity is universally human, a man devoid of it is inconceivable; although, of course, there are in this respect great differences betwixt man and man, running from the mere desire to enjoy art to real taste, and from this again to productive genius.[21]

Art and language.

The artist makes use of instruments which, by their nature, are framed not for the individual but for the universal; of this kind is language. But it is the business of poetry to extract the individual from language which is universal without giving to its productions the form of the antithesis between individual and universal which is proper to science. Of the two elements of language, the musical and the logical, the poet claims the first for his own ends and constrains the other to awaken individual images. In comparison with pure science as in comparison with the individual image, there is something irrational about language: but the tendencies of speculation and of poetry are always contrary, even in their use of language; the former tends to make language approximate to mathematical formulæ; the latter to imagery (Bild)[22]

Schleiermacher's defects.

Leaving out many details which will be touched on in their proper places, the foregoing is a fair summary of the heads of Schleiermacher's æsthetic thought. Adding up the accounts of the whole statement of views, on the side of error and oversight we find: first, ideas or types are not wholly excluded, in spite of all Schleiermacher's care and anxiety to safeguard artistic individualisation and to make the ideas and types superfluous. Secondly, there is still, undefeated and unexpelled, a certain residue of abstract formalism, visible at various points of his theories.[23] Thirdly, the definition of art as an activity of mere difference may be diluted but is not destroyed by making art a difference of complexes of individuals, a national difference. A closer reflexion on the history of art, a recognition of the possibility of appreciating the art of various nations and various times, a more patient investigation into the moment of artistic reproduction, even an examination of the relation between science and art, would have led Schleiermacher to treat this difference as empirical and surmountable, still holding firmly to the distinctive character (individual as opposed to universal) he assigned to art in comparison with science. Fourthly, he did not recognize the identity of æsthetic activity with linguistic, and failed to make it the basis of all other theoretic activity. It would seem, moreover, that Schleiermacher had no clear ideas concerning that artistic element which enters into the constitution of historic narrative and is indispensable as the concrete form of science; or concerning language, taken not as a complex of abstract means of expression but as expressive activity.

Schleiermacher's services to Æsthetic.

These defects and uncertainties may perhaps be attributable in part to the fact that his thoughts on æsthetic have reached us in an inchoate form, very far from a mature development. But if on the other hand we wish to cast up the sum of his very striking merits, it will suffice to run over the list of accusations heaped upon him by the two historians before mentioned, Zimmermann and Hartmann. Schleiermacher has denuded Æsthetic of its imperative character; he recognizes in it a form of thought differing from logical thought; he gives this science a non-metaphysical and merely anthropological character; he denies the concept of beauty, substituting that of artistic perfection, and actually affirms the æsthetic equivalence of small and great works of art, so long as each is perfect in its own sphere; he considers the æsthetic fact as pure human productivity: and so on and so forth. All these criticisms are meant for blame and are really praise; for what is blame to the mind of a Zimmermann or a Hartmann, is to ours praise. In the metaphysical orgy of his day, in the perpetual building and pulling down of more or less arbitrary systems, Schleiermacher the theologian, with philosophic acumen, fixed his eye upon what was really characteristic of the æsthetic fact and succeeded in defining its properties and connexions; when he failed to see clearly and wandered from the track, he never abandoned analysis for fantastic caprice. By his discovery that the obscure region of immediate consciousness is also that of the æsthetic fact, he seems to bid his distracted contemporaries listen to the old adage: Hic Rhodus, hic salta.

XII

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE: HUMBOLDT AND STEINTHAL

Progress of Linguistic.

About the time when Schleiermacher was meditating on the nature of the æsthetic fact, a movement of thought was gaining ground in Germany which, tending as it did to overthrow the old concept of language, might have proved a powerful aid to æsthetic science. But not only had the æsthetic specialists—if we may so call them—no notion of the existence of this movement, the new philosophers of language never brought their ideas into relation with the æsthetic problem, and their discoveries languished imprisoned within the narrow scope of Linguistic, condemned to sterility.

Linguistic speculation at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Research into the relations between thought and speech, between the unity of logic and the multiplicity of languages, had been promoted, like many other things, by the Critique of Pure Reason: the earliest Kantians often tried to apply the Kantian categories of intuition (space and time) and of intellect to language. The first to make the attempt was Roth[1] in 1795; the same who wrote an essay twenty years later on Pure Linguistic. Many other noteworthy books on this subject appeared in quick succession: those of Vater, Bernhardi, Reinbeck and Koch were published one after another in the first ten years of the nineteenth century. In all these treatises the dominating subject is the difference between language and languages; between the universal language, corresponding with Logic, and concrete, historical languages disturbed by feeling and imagination or whatever other name was applied to the psychological element of differentiation. Vater distinguishes a general Linguistic (all gemeine Sprachlehre), constructed a priori by means of the analysis of the concepts contained in the judgement, from a comparative Linguistic (vergleichende Sprachlehre) which attempts by means of induction to reach probable laws through the study of a number of languages. Bemhardi considers language to be an "allegory of intellect" and distinguishes it as functioning either as the organ of poetry or that of science. Reinbeck speaks of an Æsthetic Grammar and a Logical. Koch, more energetic than the others, asserts positively that the character of language is "non ad Logices sed ad Psychologiae rationem revocanda."[2] Some few philosophers speculated on language and mythology: for example Schelling considered them to be the products of a pre-human consciousness (vormenschliche Bewusstsein,) presenting them, in a fantastic allegory, as diabolic suggestions which precipitate the ego from the infinite to the finite.[3]

Wilhelm von Humboldt. Relics of intellectualism.

Even the famous philologist, Wilhelm von Humboldt, was unable to detach himself entirely from the prejudice of the substantial identity and the purely historical, accidental diversity between logical thought and language. His celebrated dissertation, On the Diversity of Structure of Human Languages (1836),[4] is based on the notion of a perfect language split up and distributed amongst particular tongues according to the linguistic or intellectual capacity of various nations. "For," says he, "since disposition towards speech is general in mankind, and all men must necessarily carry within themselves the key to the comprehension of all languages, it follows that the form of all languages must be substantially equal and all must attain the same general end. Diversity can exist solely in the means, and within the bounds permitted by the attainment of the end." Yet this same diversity becomes a real divergence not only in sounds, but in the use of sound made by the linguistic sense in respect to the form of language, or rather, in respect to its own idea of the form of the determinate language. "Languages being merely formal, the operation of the linguistic sense by itself should produce mere uniformity; the linguistic sense must exact from every tongue the same right and legitimate construction that is found in one of them. In practice, however, the facts are quite otherwise, partly owing to the reaction of sounds, and partly by reason of the individual aspect assumed by the same internal meaning in phenomenal reality." Linguistic force "cannot maintain its equality everywhere or show the same intensity, vivacity or regularity; it cannot be supported by an exactly equal tendency towards the symbolic treatment of thought or by exactly equal pleasure in richness and harmony of sound." These, then, are the causes which produce in human languages that diversity which manifests itself in every branch of the civilization of nations. But reflexion on languages "ought to reveal to us a form which of all possible forms best fits the purpose of language" and approaches most closely to its ideal; and "the merits and defects of existing languages must be estimated by their nearness or remoteness from this form." Humboldt finds the nearest approximation to such an ideal in the Sanskrit tongues, which can therefore be used as a standard of comparison. Setting Chinese apart in a class by itself, he proceeds to the division of the possible forms of language into inflective, agglutinative and incorporative; types which are found combined in various proportions in every real language.[5] He also inaugurated the division of languages into inferior and superior, unformed and formed, according to the way in which verbs are treated. He was never able to rid himself of a second prejudice connected with the first, namely that language exists as something objective outside the talking man, unattached and independent, and waking up when needed for use.

Language an activity. Internal form.

But Humboldt opposes Humboldt: amongst the old dross we detect the brilliant gleams of a wholly new concept of language. Certainly his work is for this very reason not always free from contradictions and from a kind of hesitation and awkwardness which appear characteristically in his literary style and make it at times laboured and obscure. The new man in Humboldt criticizes the old man when he says, "Languages must be considered not as dead products but as an act of production. ... Language in its reality is something continually changing and passing away. Even its preservation in writing is incomplete, a kind of mummification: it is always necessary to render the living speech sensible. Language is not a work, ergon, but an activity, energeia. ... It is an eternally repeated effort of the spirit in order to make articulated tones capable of expressing thought." Language is the act of speaking. "True and proper language consists in the very act of producing it by means of connected utterance; that is the only thing that must be thought of as the starting-point or the truth in any inquiry which aims at penetrating into the living essence of language. Division into words and rules is a lifeless artifice of scientific analysis."[6] Language is not a thing arising out of the need of external communication; on the contrary, it springs from the wholly internal thirst for knowledge and the struggle to reach an intuition of things." From its earliest commencement it is entirely human, and extends without intention to all objects of sensory perception or internal elaboration.... Words gush spontaneously from the breast without constraint or intention: there is no nomad tribe in any desert without its songs. Taken as a zoological species, man is a singing animal which connects its thoughts with its utterances."[7] The new man leads Humboldt to discover a fact hidden from the authors of logico-universal grammars: namely the internal form of language (innere Sprachform), which is neither logical concept nor physical sound, but the subjective view of things formed by man, the product of imagination and feeling, the individualization of the concept. Conjunction of the internal form of language with physical sound is the work of an internal synthesis; "and here, more than anywhere else, language by its profound and mysterious operation recalls art. Sculptor and painter also unite the idea with matter, and their efforts are judged praiseworthy or not according as this union, this intimate interpenetration, is the work of true genius, or as the idea is something separate, painfully and laboriously imposed upon the matter by sheer force of brush or chisel."[8]

Language and art in Humboldt.

But Humboldt was content to regard the procedure of artist and speaker as comparable by analogy, without proceeding to identify them. On the one hand, he was too one-sided in his view of language as a means for the development of thought (logical thought); on the other, his own æsthetic ideas, always vague and not always true, prevented his perception of the identity. Of his two principal writings on Æsthetic, that on Beauty Masculine and Feminine (1795) seems to be wholly under the influence of Winckelmann, whose antithesis between beauty and expression is revived, and the opinion expressed that specific sexual characters diminish the beauty of the human body and that beauty asserts itself only by triumphing over differences of sex. His other work, which is inspired by Goethe's Hermann und Dorothee, defines art as "representation of nature by means of fancy; the representation being beautiful, just because it is the work of fancy," a metamorphosis of nature carried to a higher sphere. The poet reflects the pictures of language, itself a complex of abstractions.[9] In his dissertation on Linguistic, Humboldt distinguishes poetry and prose, treating the two concepts philosophically, not by the empirical distinction between free and measured or periodic and metric language. "Poetry gives us reality in its sensible appearance, as it is felt internally and externally; but is indifferent to the character which makes it real, and even deliberately ignores that character. It presents the sensuous appearance to fancy and, by this means, leads towards the contemplation of an artistically ideal whole. Prose, on the contrary, looks in reality for the roots which attach it to existence, the cords which bind her to it: hence it fastens fact to fact and concept to concept according to the methods of the intellect, and strives towards the objective union of them all in an idea."[10] Poetry precedes prose: before producing prose, the spirit necessarily forms itself in poetry.[11] But, beside these views, some of which are profoundly true, Humboldt looks on poets as perfecters of language, and on poetry as belonging only to certain exceptional moments,[12] and makes us suspect that after all he never recognized clearly or maintained firmly that language is always poetry, and that prose (science) is a distinction not of æsthetic form but of content, that is, of logical form.

H. Steinthal. The linguistic function independent of the logical.

Humboldt's contradictions about the concept of language lost him his principal follower, Steinthal. With the help of his master, Steinthal restated the position that language belongs not to Logic but to Psychology,[13] and in 1855 waged a gallant war against the Hegelian Becker, author of The Organisms of Language, one of the last logical grammarians, who pledged himself to deduce the entire body of the Sanskrit languages from twelve cardinal concepts. Steinthal declares it is not true that one cannot think without words: the deaf-mute thinks in signs; the mathematician in formulæ. In some languages, as in Chinese, the visual element is as necessary to thought as the phonetic, if not more so.[14] In this he may have overshot the mark, and failed to establish the autonomy of expression with regard to logical thought; for his examples only confirm the fact that if we can think without words, we cannot think without expressions.[15] But he successfully demonstrates that concept and word, logical judgement and proposition, are incommensurable. The proposition is not the judgement but the representation (Darstellung) of a judgement; and all propositions do not represent logical judgements. It is possible to express several judgements in a single proposition. The logical divisions of judgements (the relations of concepts) find no counterpart in the grammatical divisions of propositions. "A logical form of the proposition is just as much a contradiction as the angle of a circle or the circumference of a triangle." He who talks, in so far as he talks, possesses not thoughts but language.[16]

Identity of the problems of the origin and the nature of language.

Having thus freed language from all dependence on Logic, having repeatedly proclaimed the principle that language produces its forms independently of Logic and in the fullest autonomy,[17] and having purified Humboldt's theory from the taint of the logical grammar of Port Royal, Steinthal seeks the origin of language, recognizing, with his master, that the question of its origin is identical with that of nature of language, its psychological genesis or rather the position it occupies in evolution of the spirit. "In the matter of language there is no difference between its original creation (Urschöpfung) and the creation which is daily repeated."[18] Language belongs to the vast class of reflex movements; but to say that is to look at it from one side only and to omit its own essential peculiarity. Animals have reflex movements and sensations like man; but in animals the senses "are wide gates through which external nature rushes to the assault with such impetus as to overwhelm the mind and deprive it of all independence and freedom of movement." In man, however, language can arise because man is resistance to nature, conqueror of his own body, freedom incarnate: "language is liberation: even to-day we feel our mind lightened and freed from a weight when we speak." In the situation immediately preceding the production of speech man must be conceived as "accompanying all his sensations and all the intuitions received by his mind with the most lively contortions of body, attitudes of mimicry, gestures, and above all tones, articulate tones." What element of speech did he lack? One only, but a most important one: the conscious conjunction of reflex bodily movements with the excitations of his mind. If sensuous consciousness is already consciousness, it lacks the consciousness of being conscious; if it is already intuition, it is not intuition of intuition; what it lacks is in a word the internal form of speech. When that arises, there arises too its inseparable accompaniment, words. Man does not select sound: it is given him, and he takes it of necessity, instinctively, without intention or choice.[19]

Steinthal's mistaken ideas on art: his failure to unite Linguistic and Æsthetic.

This is not the place for detailed examination of the whole of Steinthal's theory and the various phases, not always progressive, through which he travelled, especially after the beginning of his spiritual collaboration with Lazarus, with whom he studied ethnopsychology (Völkerpsychologie), of which they both took Linguistic to be a part.[20] But, while giving him full credit for bringing Humboldt's ideas into coherent order, and for clearly differentiating, as had never before been done, between linguistic activity and the activity of logical thought, it must be noted that Steintha! never recognized the identity of the internal form of language (which he also called the intuition of intuition, or apperception) with the æsthetic imagination. The Herbartian psychology to which he clung afforded him no clue to such a discovery. Herbart and his followers divorced psychology from logic as a normative science and never succeeded in discerning the true connection between feeling and spiritual formation, soul and spirit; they never understood that logical thought is one of these spiritual formations: an activity, not a code of external laws. The domain allotted by them to Æsthetic we already know; for them Æsthetic too was only another code of beautiful formal relations. Under the influence of these doctrines Steinthal was led to regard Art as the embellishment of thoughts, Linguistic as the science of speech, and Rhetoric or Æsthetic as a thing differing from Linguistic since it is science of fine or beautiful speaking.[21] In one of his innumerable tracts he says, "Poetics and Rhetoric both differ from Linguistic, since they are obliged to touch on many important topics before reaching language. These sciences therefore have but one section devoted to Linguistic, which is the concluding section of Syntax. Moreover Syntax has a character entirely different from Rhetoric and from Poetics; the former is occupied solely with correctness (Richtigkeit) of language; the latter two sciences study beauty or grace of expression (Schönheit oder Angemessenheit des Ausdrucks): the principles of the first are merely grammatical, the others must consider matters outside language; for example, the disposition of the orator and so forth. To speak plainly, Syntax is to Stylistic as is the grammatical measure of the quantity of vowels to the theory of metre."[22] That speaking invariably means good or beautiful speaking, since speech that is neither good nor beautiful is not really speech,[23] and that the radical renewal of the concept of language inaugurated by Humboldt and himself must produce far-reaching effects on the cognate sciences of Poetics, Rhetoric and Æsthetic and, by transforming, unify them, never entered Steinthal's head. After all this labour and all this minute analysis, the identification of language and poetry, and of the science of language with the science of poetry, the identification of Linguistic with Æsthetic, still found its least faulty expression in the prophetic aphorisms of Giambattista Vico.

XIII

MINOR GERMAN ÆSTHETICIANS

Minor æstheticians in the metaphysical school.

When we turn from the pages of methodical and serious thinkers such as Schleiermacher, Humboldt and Steinthal, we are filled with distaste by the books written in enormous quantities during the first half of the nineteenth century by disciples of Schelling and Hegel. We are fatigued and almost disgusted as we pass from this illuminating and scientific study to something which oscillates between vapid fancies and charlatanism; between the vanity of empty formulæ and the attempt, not always free from dishonesty, to employ them in order to amaze and overwhelm the reader or student.

Krause, Trahndorff, Weisse and others.

Why should we encumber a general History of Æsthetic (which ought, certainly, to take account of aberrations from the truth, but only in so far as they indicate the general trend of contemporary thought) with the theories of such men as Krause, Trahndorff, Weisse, Deutinger, Oersted, Zeising, Eckardt and the crowd of manipulators of manuals and systems? The only one who obtained a hearing outside his native Germany was Krause, who was imported into Spain; we are justified, therefore, in leaving them to the memory or forgetfulness of their compatriots. For Krause,[1] the humanitarian, the freethinker, the theosophist, everything is organism, everything is beauty; beauty is organism, and organism is beauty: Essence, that is to say God, is one, free and entire; one, free and entire is Beauty. There is but one artist, God; but one art, the divine. The beauty of finite things is the Divinity, or rather the likeness of Divinity manifested in the finite. Beauty brings into play reason, intellect and imagination in a mode conforming to their laws, and awakens disinterested pleasure and inclination in the soul. Trahndorff,[2] describing the various degrees by which the individual seeks to grasp the essence or form of the universe (the degrees of feeling, intuition, reflexion and presentiment), and noting the insufficiency of simple theoretical knowledge till supplemented by the Will, the Will which is power (Können), in its three degrees of Aspiration, Faith and Love, places the Beautiful in the highest grade, in Love: it would seem, therefore, that Beauty is Love which comprehends itself. Christian Weisse[3] attempted, like Trahndorff, to reconcile the God of Christianity with the Hegelian philosophy: in his estimation the æsthetic Idea is superior to the logical, and leads to religion, to God; the idea of beauty, existing outside the sensible universe, is the reality of the concept of beauty, and, as the idea of divinity is absolute Love, so must that of Beauty be found truly in Love. The same reconciliation was attempted by the Catholic theologian Deutinger;[4] beauty, for him, is born of power (Können), an activity parallel with those of the knowledge of truth and the doing of good but (differing in this from knowledge, which is receptive) realizing itself in an outward movement from within, mastering the world of matter and imprinting upon it the seal of personality. An internal ideal intuition, the Idea: an external shapable matter: the power of interpenetrating internal with external, invisible with visible, ideal with real: such is Beauty. Oersted[5] (the celebrated Danish naturalist whose works were translated into German and gained him a considerable reputation in Germany) defines beauty as the objective Idea in the moment of subjective contemplation: the Idea expressed in things in so far as it reveals itself to intuition. Zeising[6] turned his attention partly to exploration of the mysteries of the golden section, and partly to speculations on Beauty, which he considered as one of the three forms of the Idea; first, the Idea which expresses itself in object and subject; secondly, the Idea as intuition; and thirdly, the Absolute which appears in the world and is conceived intuitively by the spirit. Eckardt,[7] intent on creating a theistic Æsthetic which should avoid the one-sided transcendence of deism on the one hand and the one-sided immanence of pantheism on the other, maintained that its principles must be sought not in the feelings of the contemplator, not in works of art, not in the idea of the beautiful, not in the concept of art, but in the creative spirit of the artist, the original fount of beauty; and since a creative artist cannot be conceived except as derived from the highest creative genius which is God, Eckardt invokes aid from a psychology of God (eine Psychologie des Weltkünstlers).

Fried. Theodor Vischer.

If quantity is as important as quality, we must devote some space to Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the bulkiest of all German æstheticians, indeed the German æsthetician par excellence: after publishing a book on The Sublime and the Comic, a contribution to the Philosophy of the Beautiful,[8] in 1837, he produced four huge tomes on Æsthetic as Science of the Beautiful between 1846 and 1857,[9] where, in hundreds of paragraphs and long observations and sub-observations, is massed a stupendous amount of æsthetic material, of matter foreign to Æsthetic, and of subjects taken haphazard from the whole thinkable universe. Vischer's work is divided into three parts: a Metaphysic of the Beautiful, which investigates the concept of Beauty in itself, no matter where and how it is realized: a treatise on concrete Beauty, which inquires into the two one-sided modes of realization, Beauty of nature and Beauty of imagination, one lacking subjective, the other lacking objective, existence: lastly, a theory of the arts, which studies the synthesis in art of the two artistic moments, the physical and psychical, the objective and subjective. It is easy to sum up Vischer's concept of æsthetic activity; it is Hegel's concept, debased. For Vischer, Beauty belongs neither to the theoretical nor to the practical activity, but is placed in a serene sphere, superior to these antitheses; that is to say in the sphere of absolute Spirit, in company with Religion and Philosophy;[10] but, in contradistinction to Hegel, Vischer assigns the first place in this sphere to Religion, the second to Art, and the third to Philosophy. Much ingenuity was devoted in those days to moving these words about like pieces on a chess-board; it has been observed that of the six possible combinations of the three terms Art, Religion and Philosophy, four were actually adopted: by Schelling, P.R.A.; by Hegel, A.R.P.; by Weisse, P.A.R.; and by Vischer, R.A.P.[11] But Vischer himself[12] states that Wirth, author of a System of Ethics,[13] opted for the fifth combination, R.P.A., which leaves us but the sixth, A.P.R., unclaimed, unless (as is not improbable) some unrecognized genius seized upon it and made it the text of his system. Beauty, therefore, as the second form of the absolute Spirit, is the realization of the Idea, not as abstract concept but as union of concept and reality; and the Idea determines itself as species (Gattung), and every idea of a species, even on the lowest degree, is beautiful as being an integral part in the totality of Ideas; although the higher the degree of the idea the greater is its beauty.[14] Highest of all degrees is that of human personality: "in this spiritual world the Idea attains its true significance; the name of idea is given to the great moral motive powers to which the concept of species may also be applied in the sense that they stand to their restricted spheres in the same relation in which the genus stands to its species and individuals." At the head of all is the Idea of morality: "the world of moral and autonomous ends is destined to furnish the most important, the most worthy content of the Beautiful"; with the warning, however, that Beauty, in actualizing this world through intuition, excludes art having a moral tendency.[15] So Vischer proceeds now to degrade Hegel's Idea to the simple class-concept, now to couple it with the idea of the Good; now, in accord with the teaching of his master, to make it different from, yet superior to, intellect and morality.

Other tendencies.

From the first, the Herbartian formalism was little studied and less followed: two writers, Griepenkerl in 1827 and Bobrik in 1834, made some attempt to develop and apply the cursory notes with which Herbart contented himself.[16] Schleiermacher's lectures, even before their appearance in book form, had served as basis for a series of elegant dissertations by Erich Ritter (1840)[17] (better known as a historian of philosophy); his work is of little value, for instead of dwelling on the important points of the master's doctrine Ritter brings into prominence secondary matters relating to sociability and the æsthetic fife. A penetrating critic of German Æsthetic from Baumgarten to the post-Kantian school was Wilhelm Theodor Danzel, who lived about this time and very properly rebelled against the claim to find "thought" in works of art: "Artistic thought:" he writes; "unhappy phrase, which helped to condemn an entire epoch to the Sisyphean labour of trying to reduce art to intellectual and rational thinking! The thought of a work of art is nothing save that which is contemplated in a definite way; it is not represented, as is commonly asserted, in a work of art, it is the work of art itself. Artistic thought can never be expressed by concepts and words."[18] By his early death Danzel ended the hopes he raised by his original views on the science and history of Æsthetic.

Theory of the Beautiful in nature, and that of the Modifications of Beauty.

The post-Hegelian metaphysical Æsthetic is chiefly noteworthy for the fuller development of two theories or, to speak more accurately, of two very curious combinations of arbitrary assertion and fanciful caprice: the so-called theory of Natural Beauty, and the theory of Modifications of the Beautiful. Neither of the two had any intimate or necessary connexion with this philosophical movement, to which they are rather linked by historical or psychological causes; by the relationship between facts of pleasure and pain and the inclination towards mysticism; by the confusion arising from the really æsthetic (imaginative) quality of some representations wrongly described as observation of natural beauties; or by the scholastic and literary tradition of discussing these cases of pleasure and pain and extra-æsthetic natural beauties in books devoted to the discussion of art.[19] These metaphysicians were sometimes rather grotesque and remind one of the story told of Paisiello, that in the fury of composition he set even the stage directions of his libretto to music; bitten with the rage for construction and dialectic, they did not spare even the indexes of chaotic old books, but seized on them as suitable material for a dialectical exercise.

Development of the first theory. Herder.

Beginning with the theory of Natural Beauty, observations on beautiful natural objects are found among the inquiries of the ancient philosophers on beauty, and especially among the mystical effusions of neo-Platonists and their followers in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.[20] Less frequently such questions were introduced into treatises on Poetics: Tesauro (1654) is among the first who, in his Cannochiale aristotelico, discusses not only the conceits of men, but also of God, the angels, nature and animals; and somewhat later (1707) Muratori speaks of "the beauty of matter," of which examples are "the gods, a flower, the sun, a rivulet."[21] Observations on that which is outside art and is merely natural, are made by Crousaz, by André, and especially by those authors of the eighteenth century who wrote on Beauty and Art in an empirical and gallant style.[22] It was the influence of these persons that led Kant, as we have seen, to sever the theory of beauty from that of art, specially connecting free beauty with objects of nature and those productions of man which reproduce natural beauties.[23] When the adversary of Kant's theory of Æsthetic, Herder (1800), in his sketch of an ethical system united spirit and nature, pleasure and value, feeling and intellect, he inevitably made much of natural beauty, and affirmed that everything in nature has its own beauty, the expression of its own greatest content, and that this accounts for the ascending scale of beautiful objects: beginning with. outlines, colours and tones, light and sound, and proceeding by way of flowers, water and sea, to birds, terrestrial animals, and man himself. For instance "a bird is the sum of the properties and perfections of its element, a representation of its potency, a creature of light, song and air"; amongst terrestrial animals, the ugliest are those resembling man, as the melancholy moping monkey; the most beautiful, those of perfect build, well proportioned, noble, free in action; those which express sweetness; those, in fine, which live in harmony and happiness, endowed with a perfection of their own, harmless to man.[24]

Schelling, Solger, Hegel.

Schelling, on the contrary, utterly, denies the concept of beauty in nature, and considers that such beauty is purely accidental and that art alone supplies the norm by which it can be discovered and judged.[25] Solger also excludes natural beauty;[26] so does Hegel, who distinguishes himself not by denying it but by proceeding with the utmost inconsequence to deal at length with the beautiful in nature. It is in fact not clear whether he means that really no beauty exists in nature and that man introduces it in his vision of things, or whether natural beauty really exists though inferior in degree to the beauty of art. "The beauty of art," he says," stands higher than that of nature; it is beauty born and reborn by the work of the spirit, and spirit alone is truth and reality; hence beauty is truly beauty only when it participates in spirit and is produced therefrom. Taken in this sense, the beauty of nature appears as a mere reflexion of the beauty appertaining to spirit, as an imperfect and incomplete mode, which substantially is contained within the spirit itself." In confirmation, he adds that nobody has attempted a systematic exposition of natural beauties, whereas there actually is, from the point of view of the utility of natural objects, a materia medica[27] But the second chapter of the first part of his Æsthetic is devoted precisely to natural Beauty on the ground that, in order to grasp the idea of artistic beauty in its entirety, three stages must be traversed: beauty in general, natural beauty (whose defects show the necessity for art), and, lastly, the Idea; "the first existence of the Idea is nature, and its first beauty is natural beauty." This beauty, which is beauty for us and not for itself, has several phases, from that in which the concept is immersed in matter to the point of disappearing, such as physical facts and isolated mechanisms, to that higher phase in which physical facts are united in systems (e.g. the solar system); but the Idea first reaches a true and real existence in organic facts, in the living creature. And even the living creature is liable to the distinction between beautiful and ugly; for example, among animals, the sloth, trailing itself laboriously and incapable of animation or activity, displeases us by its apathetic somnolence; nor can beauty be found in amphibians or in many kinds of fish, or in crocodiles, or toads, as well as in many insects and especially in those equivocal creatures which express a transition from one i class to another, such as the ornithorhyncus, a mixture of bird and beast.[28] These samples may suffice to show the general trend of Hegel's doctrine of natural beauty; elsewhere he discusses the external beauty of abstract form, regularity, symmetry, harmony, etc., which are; precisely the concepts which the formalism of Herbart placed in the heaven of the Ideas of the Beautiful.

Schleiermacher.

Schleiermacher, who praised Hegel for his attempt to exclude natural beauty from his Æsthetic, excluded it from his own not verbally but actually, by confining his attention to the artistic perfection of the internal image formed by the energy of the human spirit.[29] But the so-called Feeling for Nature which came in with Romanticism, and the Cosmos and other descriptive works of Humboldt,[30] directed attention increasingly to the impressions awakened by natural facts.

Alexander Humboldt.

This led to the compilation of those systematic lists of natural beauties whose impossibility had been proclaimed by Hegel, though he himself had furnished an example of them; amongst others, Bratranek published an Æsthetic of the Vegetable World.[31]

Vischer's "Æsthetic Physics."

The best-known and most widely circulated treatment of the subject was contained in this very work of Vischer's; who following Hegel's example devoted a section of his Æsthetic, as we have seen, to the objective existence of Beauty, i.e. to the Beauty of nature, and entitled it by the perhaps new and certainly characteristic name of Æsthetic Physics (ästhetische Physik). This Æsthetic Physics comprised the beauty of inorganic nature (light, heat, air, water, earth); organic nature, with its four vegetable types and its animals vertebrate and invertebrate; and beauty of human beings, divided into generic and historic. The generic was subdivided into sections on the beauty of general forms (age, sex, conditions, love, marriage, family); of special forms (races, peoples, culture, political life); and of individual forms (temperament and character). Historical beauty included that of ancient history (Oriental, Greek, Roman), of Mediæval or Germanic, and of modern times; because, according to Vischer, it was the duty of Æsthetic to cast a glance over universal history before summing up the different degrees of the beautiful according to the varying phases of the struggle for freedom against nature.[32]