58 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



Schelling. Gifted with a keen perception of artistic 

 beauty, he published in 1815 a philosophical dialogue on 

 the Beautiful, very much on the platonic models, and 

 gave a complete course of ^Esthetics in 1819. Agreeing 

 in general with Schell ing's view, he nevertheless con- 

 siders the " intellectual intuition " of the latter to be too 

 indefinite. He himself distinguishes between phantasy 

 and imagination. The latter belongs to the ordinary in- 

 tellect, and moves, as a mediator, between the antitheses 

 of the ordinary understanding. From this he distin- 

 guishes phantasy which starts from the original unity of 

 these antitheses in the " Idea," and is able to reunite 

 them in the actual world. Thanks to this faculty, we 

 are able to perceive objects which are higher than those 

 of the ordinary consciousness, and to recognise in them 

 the " Idea " as real. This faculty of phantasy has vari- 

 ous forms and subdivisions and a dialectic of its own, cor- 

 responding to the dialectic of thought. With Solger, as 

 with Schelling, beauty belongs to the region of the Idea, 

 it is inaccessible to the ordinary consciousness ; the 



the Absolute, in the existing world a spirit kindred to his own. In 

 (notably in its historical progress), : the Introduction to his Lectures 

 and the archetypal view of Schel- there is the following passage about 



ling, Solger, and the Platonists, as 

 there exists between Schelling's and 

 Goethe's philosophy of nature on 

 the one side, and the more recent 

 evolutionary ideas of Darwin, Spen- 

 cer, and their successors on the other 

 (see on this vol. iii., chap. 6, p. 595, 

 the quotation from Wundt in the 

 note). It is, however, well to 

 remark that Solger as well as 

 Weisse worked out their sesthetical 

 theories before Hegel's ^Esthetics 



Solger : " His innermost specula- 

 tive desire forced him to descend 

 into the depths of the philosophical 

 idea. Here he came upon the 

 dialectical movement of the idea, 

 . . . upon its activity to negative 

 itself as the infinite and universal 

 in the shape of the finite and the 

 special, and equally to overcome 

 this negation and thus to re-estab- 

 lish again the universal and the 

 infinite in the finite and the 



were generally known, and that ', special" (Hegel, 'Werke,' xi. p. 

 Hegel recognised in Solger's work , 89). 



