754 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



science, is undoubtedly a mistake ; but tlie human mind really 

 shines the clearest when the luster of art is joined with the luster 

 of science. 



Furthermore, the same takes place here as in practical ethics. 

 The lower the morals of an age or a people have sunk, the more 

 talk there is about virtae. The more the native creative strength 

 subsides and is dried up, the higher rises the flood of aesthetic 

 theories. Hermann Lotze's History of Esthetics in Germany * 

 affords a wearisome and discouraging picture of this long and 

 fruitless movement. The philosophers of all schools have outbid 

 one another in framing abstract formulas for determining exactly 

 what beauty is. It is unity in diversity, or fitness without piir- 

 pose, or unconscious rationality, or the absolute in sensual exist- 

 ence, or the enjoyed harmony of the absolute spirit, and more of 

 the same kind. But between these qualities ascribed to all beauty 

 nominally constituting its essentials, and the perception of the 

 beautiful, there is no more connection than there is between the 

 ether and sonorous vibrations and the qualities made known 

 to us by them. It would indeed be a vain undertaking to con- 

 ceive an expression which shall equally cover the various kinds 

 of beauty ; the beauty of the Cosmos in contrast to chaos, of a 

 mountain view, of a symphony, of a poetical work, of Ristori as 

 Medea, of a rose ; or in fine art alone, the beauty of the Co- 

 logne Cathedral, of the Hermes, of the Sistine Madonna, of a 

 genre picture, of a landscape, of a picture of still life, or of a 

 Japanese vine-weaving. We prefer to say that we in this as in 

 many other points meet something in our organism that is inex- 

 plicable, something inexpressible, but something none the less 

 certainly felt for all that, without which life would pass away 

 grimly bare. 



There is in Schiller's works a discussion concerning the beauty 

 of the human body.f He distinguishes between an architectonic 

 beauty and one that depends upon grace. Twenty years ago on 

 Leibnitz's day, in an address on Leibnitz's ideas in later science, I 

 attacked the rationalism in aesthetics in which the past century 

 had been much entangled, and I ventured among other things 

 the remark that " as little as for the effect of melody is an expla- 

 nation conceivable of the charm which handsome forms of one 

 sex have for the other." | We can not in fact discern in close con- 

 sideration, why this form which, according to Fechner, can be 

 represented by a plain equation between three variables, should 

 please us more than a thousand other possibilities. It can not be 



* The seventh volume of Die Geschichte der Wissenschaften in Dcutschland. Neuere 

 Zeit. Munich, 1888. 



f In the essay on Anmuth und Wiirde. 

 . :j: Reden, etc., vol. i, Leipsic, 1886, pp. 49, 50. 



