elements, viz. motor sensations; which again may be regarded either as concomitants of eye movements, or as arising from an organically connected impulse to move the hand along the lines followed by the eye. Thus the columns of a temple represent upward movement, and are apperceived as striving upwards so as to resist the downward pressure of the entablature. Since movements are the great means of expression in man, this imaginative reading of movement into motionless and even massive and

value to a harmony of the feeling-tones of the elements. This is pretty certainly the case where the feeling-tones of the elements are closely akin, as in the case of a number of low tones of colours, or of architectural or other forms where one formal element— say, a vertical line, a rectangle of a certain proportion or a particular variety of arch-repeats itself and becomes a dominating feature of the whole.

The imaginative factor.

(C) The imaginative factor-which corresponds with what Fechner calls the "indirect "-includes all that imaginative activity adds to our enjoyment when we contemplate an aesthetic object. It may consist first of all in recalling concrete experiences firmly associated with the object, as when the sight of wild-flowers in a London street calls up an image of fields and lanes. In order that these images may add to the aesthetic value of the object they must correspond to our common associations, as distinguished from accidental individual ones. A large increase of aesthetic enjoyment comes to us through such suggested images. Although in general it is images of concrete objects which are called up, ideas of a more abstract character may take part though they tend in this case to assume a concrete aspect. This is illustrated in the appreciation of "typical beauty" in which a concrete form represents in an exceptional way the common form of a species, and in that of symbolic representation. An important part of this work of association is to render objects expressive of mental states, as when we read off the particular shade of feeling expressed by a natural scene.3

of imagin. ation.

66

In the poetic contemplation of nature, her forces, her gladness and other moods, this imaginative activity, though still deriving its material from association, takes a freer form, Freer play leading to an investment of natural objects with a new and more fanciful meaning, as when we ' apperceive" a willow drooping over a pond or the front of an old cottage under a quasi-human form, endowing it with something akin to our own feelings and memories. What, it may be asked, is the whole range of this freer play of a life-giving fancy in our aesthetic enjoyment? Some recent theorists have attempted to answer this question by saying that it constitutes a vital element in all aesthetic contemplation. Th. Lipps and others who follow him seek to show that this vitalizing activity of the fancy, which produces a new and illusory object, is the essential ingredient in the aesthetic enjoyment of the forms of material objects. According to this theory, when in the aesthetic mood I enjoy the form of a tree, of a church steeple or of the front of a Greek temple, I am not only ascribing life and feeling to it, but am projecting myself in fancy into the object thus constructed, feeling for the moment that I am the tree or the steeple. The process of vivification is carried out as follows. Lines represent certain movements, and in the aesthetic mood we translate all lines and so all forms back into

the corresponding movements, which may be merely imagined (as 1 On the later investigations into musical consonance and harmony, harmony of colours, rhythmic and pleasing spatial forms, see Wundt, op. cit. Bd. ii. pp. 419 ff., and iii. 135 ff., 140 ff., 147 ff. and 154 ff. Time-form in music is specially discussed by E. Gurney, The Power of Sound, v.

2 K. Lange, who recognizes the influence of nature and custom, here denies that proportion is an aesthetic principle (Das Wesen der Kunst, 11es Kap.).

3 Alison and other English Associationists have emphasized the aesthetic importance of the principle of association. Among more recent advocates of it is G. T. Fechner, Vorschule der Ästhetik, and O. Külpe, "Über den associativ. Factor des ästhet. Eindrucks," Vierteljahrsschrift für wissensch. Philosophie, xxiii. pp. 145 ff.

In looking, for example, at the weighty masses of a building we enter sympathetically into the successful strivings of the supporting structures to resist the downward thrust of gravity in the supported masses. The theory here briefly indicated is interesting as illustrating an attempt from the psychological side to find a scientific support for philosophic idealism or expressionalism. It is already beginning to be recognized in Germany as an exaggeration. It may be enough to say that as applied to forms generally, including those of sculpture and architecture, the theory is opposed by our ordinary way of speaking, which implies quite another point of view in the aesthetic contemplation of form, namely, that of a spectator external to the object contemplated. When our eye glides over the beauties of a statue, our imaginative activity so far from transporting us within the object carries us as tactual feelers outside the surface. Similarly, when we delight in the divided spaces of a Gothic roof, so far from being imaginatively engaged in taking part in the efforts and strains of pillar, arch and the rest, we move in fancy along the pathways defined by the designer, tactually feeling and appreciating each dimension, each detail of form. The attempt to force a theory fitted for poetry on sculpture and architecture would rob these of their distinctive aesthetic values; in the one case, of the plastic beauty of finely moulded marble surfaces as realized by imaginative excursions of the hand; and in the other case, of the perfect stillness and stability which give to great structures their solemn and quieting aspect.

Aesthetic Illusion.

The theory of a vitalizing play of imagination (Einfühlung) running through all modes of aesthetic contemplation is an exaggeration of the element of illusion which certainly characterizes this contemplation. As suggested above, by blotting out for the moment the perception of all save that which pleases it substitutes a new for the more solid reality of our practical mood. Moreover, as a state of perceptual absorption in which one loses consciousness of the ordinary self and its world, it has a certain resemblance to the state of ecstasy and of the hypnotic trance.' It is favourable to the play-like indulgence in a fanciful transformation of what is seen or heard, which may be described as a "willing self-deception," more or less complete. Yet as we have seen, something of the real everyday world survives even in our freer aesthetic contemplation of form. Hence there is much to be said for the idea that we have in aesthetic illusion to do with a kind of double consciousness, a tendency to an illusory acceptance of the product of our fancy as the reality, restrained by a subconscious recognition of the everyday tangible reality behind." It is evident that both in the more confined and in the freer form the element of imaginative activity in aesthetic experience will vary greatly among individuals and among peoples. Differences in past experience leading to diverse habits of association,

is supported by K. Groos, Der ästh. Genuss, pp. 49 ff. This idea of imitative hand-movement in contemplating form

It is commonly spoken of as "feeling oneself into " (Einfühlen), or as "sympathetic feeling" (Mitempfinden).

Lipps' theory is developed in a number of works, the chief of which is Ästhetik: Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst, see esp. Ier Theil, 1er to 3er Abschnitt; cf. Paul Stern, Einfühlung und Association, in which is to be found an historical sketch of the theory, and A. Hildebrand, Form in der bildenden Kunst. The play of imagination in the contemplation of form is discussed also by P. Souriau, L'Esthétique du mouvement, 3me part., and La Suggestion dans l'art, pp. 300 ff. Cf. works of Karl Groos and K. Lange named below (Bibliography).

7 See P. Souriau, La Suggestion dans l'art (1ère partie). 8 Cf. K. Lange, op. cit. Bd. i. p. 208.

legitimate aesthetic function of scientific ideas when they enlarge the scope of a pleasurable play of the imagination, and are freed from the control of a serious purpose of explaining what is seen.

treatment

A similar remark applies to the contacts of our aesthetic with our practical interests. While as dominant factors the latter are excluded from aesthetic activity they may in(b) with fluence our feeling for beauty in an indirect and subpractical interests. ordinate way. This is recognized by those (e.g. Home) who insist on a particular kind of aesthetic value under the name of relative beauty, or the pleasing aspect of fitness for a purpose. If a drinking-vessel please in part because of its perfect adaptation to its purpose, the aesthetic value ascribed to it seems to derive something from a feeling of respect for utility itself. In another way beauty reasserts in modern aesthetics that kinship with utility on which it insisted in the days of Socrates. The idea that typical beauty coBiological incides with what is vigorous and conducive to the of beauty. conservation of the species is as old as Hobbes.1 Darwin and his followers have developed the biological conception that sexual selection tends to develop aesthetic preferences along lines which correspond to what subserves the maintenance of the species or tribe. Recent writers have shown how the rude germs of aesthetic activity in primitive types of community would subserve necessary tribal ends-e.g. musical rhythm by exercising members of the tribe in concerted war-like action. Yet these interesting speculations have to do rather with the earlier stages of the evolution of the aesthetic faculty than with its functions in the higher stages. An idea of a social utility in aesthetic experience which does demand the attention of the theorist is that the culture of beauty and art has a socializing influence, helping to and ethics, give to our emotional experience new forms of expression whereby our sympathies are deepened and enlarged. The further elucidation of this element of humanizing influence in aesthetic enjoyment may be expected to throw new light on the question, much discussed throughout the history of aesthetics, of the relation of the science to ethics, by showing that they have a common root in our sympathetic nature and interest in humanity.

Aesthetics

Aesthetic

In order to complete the outline of aesthetic theory we need to glance at the relation of general aesthetics to the special problems of Fine Art. It is evident that the definition of theory and the aims and methods of art, both as a whole and in problems its several forms, involving as it does special technical of art. knowledge, may with advantage be treated apart from a general theory. (See FINE ARTS.) At the same time the study of art raises larger problems which require to be dealt with to some extent by this theory. We may instance the group of problems which have to do with the relation of art to "beauty " in its narrower sense, such as the function of the painful and of the ugly in art, the meaning of artistic imitation and truth to nature, of idealization, and the nature of artistic illusion; also the question of the didactic and of the moral function of art. Even more special problems of art, such as the effect of the tragic, the nature of musical expression, can only be adequately treated in the light of a general aesthetic theory.

In conclusion, it may be pointed out that the psychological theorist has of late been busy in an outlying region of art-lore, inquiring into the nature of the artistic impulse and temperament, and into the processes of imaginative creation. These inquiries have been carried out to some extent in connexion with studies of the origin of art, and of the relation of art to the 1 See passage in Human Nature (first part of Tripos), ch. viii. § 5 (Molesworth's edition of Works, vol. iv. p. 38).

2 See among others, R. Wallascheck, Primitive Music, pp. 270 ff., and Y. Hirn, The Origin of Art, pp. 9 ff.; cf. W. Jerusalem, Einleitung in die Philosophie, pp. 116, 117.

The idea of this social utility in aesthetic enjoyment is touched on by Kant, Critique of Judgment (Bernard's trans.), p. 174; and is more fully worked out by Guyau, L'Art au point de vue sociologique, ch. ii. and iii.; cf. Rutgers Marshall, Aesthetic Principles, pp. 81-82.

social environment. Their importance for aesthetics lies in the circumstance that they are fitted to throw light upon the aesthetic consciousness as it is developed in those who are not only in a special sense cultivators of it, but represent in a peculiar manner the ideas and the aims of art.1

HISTORY OF THEORIES

In the following summary of the most important contributions to aesthetic doctrine, only such writings will be recognized as contribute to a general conception of aesthetic objects or experience. These include the more systematic treatment of the subject in philosophic works as well as the more thoughtful kind of discussion of principles to be met with in writings on art by critics and others.

1. Greek Speculations.-Ancient Greece supplies us with the first important contributions to aesthetic theory, though these are scarcely, in quality or in quantity, what one might have expected from a people which had so high an appreciation of beauty and so strong a bent for philosophic speculation. The first Greek thinker of whose views on the subject we really know something is Socrates. We learn from Xenophon's account of him that he regarded the beautiful as coincident with the good, and both of them are resolvable into the useful. Every beautiful object is so called because it serves Socrates appears to have attached little importance to the immediate some rational end, whether the security or the gratification of man. gratification which a beautiful object affords to perception and contemplation, but to have emphasized rather its power of furthering the more necessary ends of life. The really valuable point in his doctrine is the relativity of beauty. Unlike Plato, he recognized no self-beauty (aÚTÒ TÒ Kaλóv) existing absolutely and out of all relation to a percipient mind.

Plato.

Of the views of Plato on the subject, it is hardly less difficult to gain a clear conception from the Dialogues, than it is in the case the beautiful are rejected as inadequate by the Platonic of ethical good. In some of these, various definitions of Socrates. At the same time we may conclude that Plato's mind leaned decidedly to the conception of an absolute beauty, which took its place in his scheme of ideas or self-existing forms. This true beauty is nothing discoverable as an attribute in another thing, for these are only beautiful things, not the beautiful itself. Love (Eros) produces aspiration towards this pure idea. Elsewhere the soul's intuition of the self-beautiful is said to be a reminiscence of its prenatal existence. As to the precise forms in which the idea of beauty reveals itself, Plato is not very decided. His theory of an absolute beauty does not easily adjust itself to the notion of its contributing merely a variety of sensuous pleasure, to which he appears to lean in some dialogues. He tends to identify the self-beautiful with the conceptions of the true and the good, and thus there arose the notion of any common element in beautiful objects, it is proportion, Platonic formula kaλokȧyabía. So far as his writings embody the harmony or unity among their parts. He emphasizes unity in its simplest aspect as seen in evenness of line and purity of colour. He recognizes in places the beauty of the mind, and seems to think that the highest beauty of proportion is to be found in the union of a beautiful mind with a beautiful body. He had but a poor opinion of art, regarding it as a trick of imitation (uunots) which takes us another step farther from the luminous sphere of rational intuition into the shadowy region of the semblances of sense. Accordingly, in his scheme for an ideal republic, he provided for the most inexorable censorship of poets, &c., so as to make art as far as possible an instrument of moral and political training.

Aristotle.

Aristotle proceeded to a more serious investigation of the aesthetic phenomena so as to develop by scientific analysis certain principles of beauty and art. In his treatises on poetry and rhetoric he gives us, along with a theory of these arts, certain general principles of beauty; and scattered among his other writings we find many valuable suggestions on the same subject. He seeks (in the Metaphysics) to distinguish the good and the beautiful by saying that the former is always in action (¿ páže) whereas the latter may exist in motionless things as well (ev ȧKvTOLS). At the same time he had as a Greek to allow that though essentially different things the good might under certain conditions be called beautiful. He further distinguished the beautiful from the fit, and in a passage of the Politics set beauty above the useful and necessary. He helped to determine another characteristic of the beautiful, the absence of all lust or desire in the pleasure it bestows. The universal elements of beauty, again, Aristotle finds (in the Metaphysics) to be 1 On the nature of the primitive art-culture, see Rutgers Marshal, Aesthetic Principles, ch. iii.; M. Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations, pp. 151 ff: Y. Hirn, The Origin of Art, ch. ii. On artistic genius and its creative process, see H. Taine, The Philosophy of Art, Part ii.; P. Souriau, L'Imagination de l'artiste; G. Séailles, Essai sur la génie dans l'art; E. Grosse, Kunstwissenschaftliche Studien iii.; Arréat, Psychologie du peintre; L. Dauriac, Essai sur l'esprit musical.

order (ráğıs), symmetry and definiteness or determinateness (rò wplouévov). In the Poetics he adds another essential, namely, a certain magnitude; it being desirable for a synoptic view of the whole that the object should not be too large, while clearness of perception requires that it should not be too small. Aristotle's views on art are an immense advance on those of Plato. He distinctly recognized (in the Politics and elsewhere) that its aim is immediate pleasure, as distinct from utility, which is the end of the mechanical arts. He took a higher view of artistic imitation than Plato, holding that so far from being an unworthy trick, it implied knowledge and discovery, that its objects not only comprised particular things which happen to most, but contemplated what is probable and what necessarily exists. The celebrated passage in the Poetics, where he declares poetry to be more philosophical and serious a matter (orovdaιóтepov) than philosophy, brings out the advance of Aristotle on his predecessor. He gives us no complete classification of the fine arts, and it is doubtful how far his principles, e.g. his celebrated idea of a purification of the passions by tragedy, are to be taken as applicable to other than the poetic art.

Of the later Greek and Roman writers the Neo-Platonist Plotinus deserves to be mentioned. According to him, objective reason (vous) as self-moving, becomes the formative influence Plotinus. which reduces dead matter to form. Matter when thus formed becomes a notion (Móyos), and its form is beauty. Objects are ugly so far as they are unacted upon by reason, and therefore formless. The creative reason is absolute beauty, and is called the more than beautiful. There are three degrees or stages of manifested beauty: that of human reason, which is the highest; of the human soul, which is less perfect through its connexion with a material body; and of real objects, which is the lowest manifestation of all. As to the precise forms of beauty, he supposed, in opposition to Aristotle, that a single thing not divisible into parts might be beautiful through its unity and simplicity. He gives a high place to the beauty of colours in which material darkness is overpowered by light and warmth. In reference to artistic beauty he said that when the artist has notions as models for his creations, these may become more beautiful than natural objects. This is clearly a step away from Plato's doctrine towards our modern conception of artistic idealization.

2. German Writers.-We may pass by the few thoughts on the subject to be found among medieval writers and turn to modern theories, beginning with those of German writers as German the most numerous and most elaborately set forth. The writers. first of the Germans who attempted to develop an aes(a) Systhetic theory as a part of a system of philosophy was tematic Baumgarten (Aesthetica). Adopting the Leibnitz-Wolffian treatises: theory of knowledge, he sought to complete it by setting Baumover against the clear scientific or logical" knowledge garten. of the understanding, the confused knowledge of the senses, to which (as we have seen) he gave the name "aesthetic." Beauty with him thus corresponds with perfect sense-knowledge. Baumgarten is clearly an intellectualist in aesthetics, reducing taste to an intellectual act and ignoring the element of feeling. The details of his aesthetics are mostly unimportant. Arguing from Leibnitz's theory of the world as the best possible, Baumgarten concluded that nature is the highest embodiment of beauty, and that art must seek its supreme function in the strictest possible imitation of nature.

Kant.

The next important treatment of aesthetics by a philosopher is that of Kant. He deals with the "Judgment of Taste" in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (J. H. Bernard's translation, 1892), which treatise supplements the two betterknown critiques (vide KANT), and by investigating the conditions of the validity of feeling mediates between their respective subjects, cognition and desire (volition). He takes an important step in denying objective existence to beauty. Aesthetic value for him is fitness to please as object of pure contemplation. This aesthetic satisfaction is more than mere agreeableness, since it must be disinterested and free that is to say, from all concern about the real existence of the object, and about our dependence on it. He appears to concede a certain formal objectivity to beauty in his doctrine of an appearance of purposiveness (Zweckmässigkeit) in the beautiful object, this being defined as its harmony with the cognative faculties involved in an aesthetic judgment (imagination and understanding); a harmony the consciousness of which underlies our aesthetic pleasure. Yet this part of his doctrine is very imperfectly developed. While beauty thus ceases with Kant to have objective validity and | remains valid only for the contemplator, he claims for it universal subjective validity, since the object we pronounce to be beautiful is fitted to please all men. We know that this must be so from reflecting on the disinterestedness of our pleasure, on its entire independence of personal inclination. Kant insists that the aesthetic judgment is always, in logical phrase, an "individual." i.e. a singular one, of the form " This object (e.g. rose) is beautiful." He denies that we can reach a valid universal aesthetic judgment of the form "All objects possessing such and such qualities are beautiful." (A judgment of this form would, he considers, be logical, not aesthetic.) In dealing with beauty Kant is thinking of nature, ranking this as a source of aesthetic pleasure high above art, for which he shows something of contempt. He seems to retreat from his doctrine of

pure subjectivity when he says that the highest significance of beauty is to symbolize moral good; going further than Ruskin when he attaches ideals of modesty, frankness, courage, &c., to the seven primary colours of Newton's system. He has made a solid contribution to the theory of the sublime, and has put forth a suggestive if a rather inadequate view of the ludicrous. But his main service to aesthetics consists in the preliminary critical determination of its aim and its fundamental problems.

Schelling is the first thinker to attempt a Philosophy of Art. He develops this as the third part of his system of transcendental idealism following theoretic and practical philosophy. (See Schelling. SCHELLING; also Schelling's Werke, Bd. v., and J. Watson, Schelling's Transcendental Idealism, ch. vii., Chicago, 1882.) According to Schelling a new philosophical significance is given to art by the doctrine that the identity of subject and object—which is half disguised in ordinary perception and volition-is only clearly seen in artistic perception. The perfect perception of its real self by intelligence in the work of art is accompanied by a feeling of infinite satisfaction. Art in thus effecting a revelation of the absolute seems to attain a dignity not merely above that of nature but above that of philosophy itself. Schelling throws but little light on the concrete forms of beauty. His classification of the arts, based on his antithesis of object and subject, is a curiosity in intricate arrangement. He applies his conception in a suggestive way to classical tragedy.

In Hegel's system of philosophy art is viewed as the first stage of the absolute spirit. (See HEGEL; also Werke, Bd. x., and Bosanquet's Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Art.) In Hegel. this stage the absolute is immediately present to senseperception, an idea which shows the writer's complete rupture with Kant's doctrine of the "subjectivity" of beauty. The beautiful is defined as the ideal showing itself to sense or through a sensuous medium. It is said to have its life in show or semblance (Schein) and so differs from the true, which is not really sensuous, but the universal idea contained in sense for thought. The form of the beautiful is unity of the manifold. The notion (Begriff) gives necessity in mutual dependence of parts (unity), while the reality demands the semblance (Schein) of liberty in the parts. He discusses very fully the beauty of nature as immediate unity of notion and reality, and lays great emphasis on the beauty of organic life. But it is in art that, like Schelling, Hegel finds the highest revelation of the beautiful. Art makes up for the deficiencies of natural beauty by bringing the idea into clearer light, by showing the external world in its life and spiritual animation. The several species of art in the ancient and modern worlds depend on the various combinations of matter and form. He classifies the individual arts according to this same principle of the relative supremacy of form and matter, the lowest being architecture, the highest, poetry.

Curious developments of the Hegelian conception are to be found in the dialectical treatment of beauty in its relation to the ugly, the sublime, &c., by Hegel's disciples, e.g. C. H. Weisse and J. K. F. Rosenkranz. The most important product of the Hegelian Dialectic School is the elaborate system of aesthetics published by of the F. T. Vischer (Ästhetik, 3 Theile, 1846-1854). It illustrates the difficulties of the Hegelian thought and terminology; Hegelians. yet in dealing with art it is full of knowledge and highly suggestive. The aesthetic problem is also treated by two other philosophers whose thought set out from certain tendencies in Kant's system, viz. Schopenhauer and Herbart. Schopenhauer (see SchopenSCHOPENHAUER, also The World as Will and Idea, transhauer. lated by R. B. Haldane, esp. vol. i. pp. 219-346), abandoning also Kant's doctrine of the subjectivity of beauty, found in aesthetic contemplation the perfect emancipation of intellect from will. In this contemplation the mind is filled with pure intellectual forms, the "Platonic Ideas as he calls them, which are objectifications of the will at a certain grade of completeness of representation. He exalts the state of artistic contemplation as the one in which, as pure intellect set free from will, the misery of existence is surmounted and something of blissful ecstasy attained. He holds that all things are in some degree beautiful, ugliness being viewed as merely imperfect manifestation or objectification of will. In this way the beauty of nature, somewhat slighted by Schelling and Hegel, is rehabilitated.

Herbart

J. F. Herbart (q.v.) struck out another way of escaping from Kant's idea of a purely subjective beauty (Kerbach's edition of Werke, Bd. ii. pp. 339 et seq.; Bd. iv. pp. 105 et seq., and Bd. ix. pp. 92 et seq.). He did, indeed, adopt Kant's view of the aesthetic judgment as singular ("individual "); though he secures a certain degree of logical universality for it by emphasizing the point that the predicate (beauty) is permanently true of the same aesthetic object. At the same time, by referring the beauty of concrete objects to certain aesthetic relations, he virtually accepted the possibility of universal aesthetic judgments (cf. supra). Since he thus reduces beauty to abstract relations he is known as a formalist, and the founder of the formalistic school in aesthetics. He sets out with the idea that only relations please in the Kantian sense of producing pleasure devoid of desire; and his aim is to determine the "aesthetic elementary relations," or the simplest relations which produce this pleasure. These include those of will, so that, as he admits, ethical judgments are in a manner brought

under an aesthetic form. His typical example of aesthetic relations in objects of sense-perception is that of harmony between tones. The science of thorough-bass has, he thinks, done for music what should be done also for other departments of aesthetic experience. This doctrine of elementary relations is brought into connexion with the author's psychological doctrine of presentations with their tendencies to mutual inhibition and to fusion, and of the varying feeling-tones to which these processes give rise. This mode of treating the problem of beauty and aesthetic perception has been greatly developed and worked up into a complete system of aesthetics by one of Herbart's disciples, Robert Zimmermann (Ästhetik, 1858). Lessing, in his Laocoon and elsewhere, sought to deduce the special function of an art from a consideration of the means at its disposal. He took pains to define the boundaries of poetry and Lessing. painting, and in so doing he reached general reflexions upon the ends and appliances of art. Among these his distinction between arts which employ the coexistent in space and those which employ the successive (as poetry and music) is of lasting value. In his dramatic criticisms he similarly endeavoured to develop clear general principles on such points as poetic truth, improving upon Aristotle, on whose teaching he mainly relies. Goethe wrote several tracts on aesthetic topics, as well as many aphorisms. He attempts to mediate between the claims of ideal beauty, as taught by J. J. Winckelmann, and the aims of Goethe. individualization. Schiller (q.v.) discusses, in a number Schiller. of disconnected essays and letters, some of the main questions in the philosophy of art. He looks at art from the side of culture and the forces of human nature, and finds in an aesthetically cultivated soul the reconciliation of the sensual and rational. His letters on aesthetic education (Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, trans. by J. Weiss, Boston, 1845) are valuable, bringing out among other points the connexion between aesthetic activity and the universal impulse to play (Spieltrieb). Schiller's thoughts on aesthetic subjects are pervaded with the spirit of Kant's philosophy. Another example of this kind of reflective discussion of art by literary men is afforded us in the Vorschule der Ästhetik of Jean Paul. Jean Paul Richter. This is a rather ambitious discussion of the sublime and ludicrous, which, however, contains much valuable matter on the nature of humour in romantic poetry. Among other writers who reflect more or less philosophically on the problems to which modern poetry gives rise are Wilhelm von Humboldt, the two Schlegels and Gervinus.

A word may be said in conclusion on the attempts of German savants to apply a knowledge of physiological conditions to the

Contributions by German savants.

investigation of the sensuous elements of aesthetic effect, as well as to introduce into the study of the simpler aesthetic forms the methods of natural science. The classic work of Helmholtz on " Sensations of Tone is a highly successful attempt to ground the known facts and laws of musical composition on physics and physiology. The endeavour to determine with a like degree of precision the physiological conditions of the pleasurable effects of colours and their combinations by E. W. Brücke, Ewald Hering and more recent investigators, has so far failed to realize the desideratum laid down by Herbart, that there should be a theory of colour-relations equal in completeness and exactness to that of tone-relations. The experimental inquiry into simple aesthetically pleasing forms was begun by G. T. Fechner in seeking to test the soundness of Adolf Zeising's hypothesis that the most pleasing proportion in dividing a line, say the vertical part of a cross, is the "golden section," where the smaller division is to the larger as the latter to the sum. He describes in his work on Experimental Aesthetics" (Zur experimentalen Ästhetik) a series of experiments carried out on a large number of persons, bearing on this point, the results of which he considers to be in favour of Zeising's hypothesis. 3. French Writers.-In France aesthetic speculation grew out of the discussion by poets and critics on the relation of modern art, and especially poetry, to ancient. The writings of Malherbe Discusand Boileau in the 17th century, the development of the sions of dispute between the ancients and the "moderns" at more the end of the 17th century by B. le Bouvier de Fontenelle concrete and Charles Perrault, and the continuation of the discusproblems. sion as to the aims of poetry and of art generally in the 18th century by Voltaire, Bayle, Diderot and others, not only offer to the modern theorists valuable material in the shape of a record by experts of their aesthetic experience, but disclose glimpses of important aesthetic principles. A more systematic examination of the several arts (corresponding to that of Lessing) is to be found in the Cours de belles lettres of Charles Batteux (1765), in which the meaning and value of the imitation of nature by art are further elucidated, and the arts are classified (as by Lessing) according as they employ the forms of space or those of time.

The beginning of a more scientific investigation of beauty in general is connected with the name of Père Buffier (see First Truths, English translation, 1780). He confines himself to organic form, and illustrates his theory by the human face. A beautiful face is at once the most common and most rare among members of the species. This seems to be a clumsy way of saying that it is a clear expression of the typical form of the species. This idea of typical beauty (which was adopted

Theories of organic beauty. Buffler.

French

systems of

The only elaborated systems of aesthetics in French literature are those constructed by the spiritualistes, the philosophic writers who under the influence of German thinkers effected a reaction against the crude sensationalism of the 18th century. They aim at elucidating the higher and spiritual aesthetics: element in aesthetic impressions, appearing to ignore any The spiritcapability in the sensuous material of affording a true ualistes. aesthetic delight. V. Cousin and Jean Charles Lévêque are the principal writers of this school. The latter developed an elaborate system of the subject (La Science du beau). All beauty is regarded as spiritual in its nature. The Lévêque. several beautiful characters of an organic body--of which the principal are magnitude, unity and variety of parts, intensity of colour, grace or flexibility, and correspondence to environmentmay be brought under the conception of the ideal grandeur and order of the species. These are perceived by reason to be the manifestations of an invisible vital force. Similarly the beauties of inorganic nature are to be viewed as the grand and orderly displays of an immaterial physical force. Thus all beauty is in its objective essence either spirit or unconscious force acting with fulness and in order.

4. English Writers.-There is nothing answering to the German conception of a system of aesthetics in English literature. The inquiries of English thinkers have been directed for the most part to such modest problems as the psychological process by which we perceive the beautiful-discussions which are apt to be regarded by German historians as devoid of real philosophical value. The writers may be conveniently arranged in two divisions, answering to the two opposed directions of English thought: (1) the Intuitionalists, those who recognize the existence of an objective beauty which is a simple unanalysable attribute or principle of things; and (2) the Analytical theorists, those who follow the analytical and psychological method, concerning themselves with the sentiment of beauty as a complex growth out of simpler elements.

The Intuitionalists. Shaftes

Shaftesbury is the first of the intuitional writers on beauty. In his Characteristics the beautiful and the good are combined in one ideal conception, much as with Plato. Matter in itself is ugly. The order of the world, wherein all beauty really resides, is a spiritual principle, all motion and life being the product of spirit. The principle of beauty is perceived bury. not with the outer sense, but with an internal or moral sense which apprehends the good as well. This perception yields the only true delight, namely, spiritual enjoyment.

Hutche

son.

Francis Hutcheson, in his System of Moral Philosophy, though he adopts many of Shaftesbury's ideas, distinctly disclaims any independent self-existing beauty in objects. "All beauty," he says, "is relative to the sense of some mind perceiving it." The cause of beauty is to be found not in a simple sensation such as colour or tone, but in a certain order among the parts, or uniformity amidst variety." The faculty by which this principle is discerned is an internal sense which is defined as " a passive power of receiving ideas of beauty from all objects in which there is uniformity in variety." This inner sense resembles the external senses in the immediateness of the pleasure which its activity brings; and further in the necessity of its impressions: a beautiful thing being always, whether we will or no, beautiful. He distinguishes two kinds of beauty, absolute or original, and relative or comparative. The latter is discerned in an object which is regarded as an imitation or semblance of another. He distinctly states that "an exact imitation may still be beautiful though the original were entirely devoid of it." He seeks to prove the universality of this sense of beauty, by showing that all men, in proportion to the enlargement of their intellectual capacity, are more delighted with uniformity than the opposite.

Reid.

In his Essays on the Intellectual Powers (viii. “ Of Taste ") Thomas Reid applies his principle of common sense to the problem of beauty by saying that objects of beauty agree not only in producing a certain agreeable emotion, but in the excitation along with this emotion of a belief that they possess some perfection or excellence, that beauty exists in the objects independently of our minds. His theory of beauty is severely spiritual. All beauty resides primarily in the faculties of the mind, intellectual and moral. The beauty which is spread over the face of visible nature is an emanation from this spiritual beauty, and is beauty because it symbolizes and expresses the latter. Thus the beauty of a plant resides in its perfect adaptation to its end, a perfection which is an expression of the wisdom of its Creator.

In his Lectures on Metaphysics Sir W. Hamilton gives a short account of the sentiments of taste, which (with a superficial resemblance to Kant) he regards as subserving both the subHamilton. sidiary and the elaborative faculties in cognition, that is, the imagination and the understanding. The activity of the