OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 



87 



idealistic philosophies ; but he lays stress upon what he 

 calls the concrete side of the idealistic view. According 

 to him the Beautiful consists in the sensible appearance 

 of the Idea. In his history of modern ^Esthetics in 

 Germany he accordingly divides the idealistic writers 

 on the Beautiful into two classes. The first represent 

 concrete idealism, the principal representative being 

 Hegel ; the second represent abstract idealism, the prin- 

 cipal representatives being Schelling, Solger, and Weisse. 1 



1 A concise summary of his criti- 

 cal account will be found at the end 

 of the first book of his ' Deutsche 

 Aesthetik seit Kant '(1886),pp. 357- 

 362. This work contains as do 

 likewise several of Hartmann's later 

 writings, such notably as his 

 ' Treatise on the Categories ' and his 

 ' Phenomenology of the Moral Con- 

 sciousness ' an enormous mass of 

 historical information, and does 

 justice to the writings of many 

 authors, unnoticed or forgotten, 

 who nevertheless advanced the dis- 

 cussion of the subject on more or 

 less important lines. He is unjust 

 only when he criticises thinkers 

 whose fundamental principles put 

 his own entirely out of court, such, 

 e.g., as Weisse and Lotze in their 

 distinctly theistic tendency, which 

 he wrongly regards as mere accom- 

 modation to current but neverthe- 

 less obsolete beliefs. The con- 

 structive part of his aesthetics 

 (' Philosophic des Schonen,' 1887), 

 though its aim is to show the im- 

 portance of his fundamental doc- 

 trine of the Unconscious in dealing 

 with the problem of the Beautiful 

 and of Art, contains, nevertheless, 

 lucid chapters which may be read 

 with advantage even by those who 

 do not appreciate his fundamental 

 doctrine. Such are notably the 

 passage on ' ' the Beautiful as 

 Mystery" (pp. 197-199), and still 



more the chapter on " Beauty and 

 Truth " (pp. 434-444), from which 

 1 have freely quoted in the text. 

 One more quotation is character- 

 istic : ' The word Mystery does not 

 mean anything else but that the 

 decisive point of the aesthetical 

 process lies in the Unconscious, and 

 the increase of the feeling for the 

 strength and depth of this mystery 

 is equivalent to the increasing 

 anticipation that the essence of 

 the beautiful lies in the uncon- 

 scious perception of an immanent 

 content unconscious in aesthetical 

 appearance. Higher beauty does 

 indeed give more matter for reflec- 

 tion also to discursive thought 

 than the lower ; but proportion- 

 ally to the inexplicable mysterious 

 remainder the conceptual part of 

 the beautiful becomes smaller, the 

 higher the beautiful stands ; and 

 still more the conceptual part 

 becomes in proportion to the 

 mysterious ever less important and, 

 taken aesthetically, more indiffer- 

 ent. Not only does the ideal kernel 

 of the beautiful become broader 

 and larger, also it becomes more 

 weighty and important, the nearer 

 the individual idea stands to the 

 absolute world-ground. That the 

 increase of the mystery is at the 

 same time an increase of the uncon- 

 scious logic of the Beautiful is seen 

 only in the highest modifications of 



