PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



source, the aims and value of art as a whole, and of the 

 Beautiful in nature and art. With him higher criticism 

 applied to the region of art, went hand in hand with 

 creation. If we except Plato, who may perhaps claim a 

 place among creative artists, what the latter had done, 

 up to the time of Schiller, to establish or perfect a 

 theory of their own activity, consisted in the discussion 

 of isolated questions of taste and technique, such as we 

 find in Horace's " Epistle to the Pisos," and in its many 

 modern imitations, in Lionardo da Vinci's or in Hogarth's 

 fanciful treatise on the line of beauty. Schiller, in fact, 

 went the length of promising a complete philosophy of the 

 Beautiful, which, however, was never written. But what 

 he started viz., the discussion of art by the artist him- 

 self was followed, or independently taken up, by many 

 of the poets and artists of the nineteenth century, among 

 whom we find such names as Wordsworth and Coleridge, 

 and later on Ruskin and William Morris in England, 

 and in Germany Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner 



in music. 



1 With an increasing philosophi- 

 cal interest in Art and the creative 

 faculty of the artist, there has 

 arisen an historical interest, not 

 only in Art itself but latterly also 

 in the theories of Art; and thus 

 we find, within the last fifty years, 

 attempts made to write the 

 history of ^Esthetic. As in other 

 subjects, so also in this, German 

 erudition has furnished the more 

 elaborate works, but this country 

 and Italy have followed with im- 

 portant and original contributions, 

 whilst in France the sociological 

 aspect and value of Art has been 

 discussed by thinkers of very dif- 

 ferent schools. The earliest of the 



larger treatises came, curiously 

 enough, from that school of phil- 

 osophy in Germany in which the 

 problem of the Beautiful was really 

 most meagrely treated, out of the 

 school of Leibniz and Herbart. 

 Robert Zimmermann (1824-1898), 

 Professor in Prague and Vienna, 

 published in 1858 his History of 

 ' ^Esthetic as a Philosophical 

 Science.' It is written from the 

 Herbartian point of view, aesthetic 

 being considered as a Formwissen- 

 schaft. It was followed in 1871 by 

 the History of ' ^Esthetic as the 

 Philosophy of the Beautiful and of 

 Art,' by Max Schasler (1819-1903). 

 As the founder and editor for a long 



