158 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



great and the powerful, in one word, it possessed the 

 character of the Sublime. It was to him the greatest 

 delight, internally to elevate himself and to see every- 

 thing that was mean and little far below himself. This 

 desire, this powerful impulse, constituted the natural 

 pulse, the poetical throb of his whole being. . . . 

 Now Kant had for the first time revealed to the world 

 wherein the essence of the Sublime consists, that really 

 nothing is sublime but our own elevation, the elevation 

 of our supersensuous, free, moral self above our limited, 

 sensuous, and small self. . . . Without these two human 

 natures, without their connection and their contest, there 

 is no elevation of the one above the other, of the higher 

 above the lower, there exists nothing that is sublime. 

 The words in which Goethe's ' Faust ' describes how he 

 felt in the presence of the earth-spirit are the most con- 

 cise expression, the formula of all sublime sensations : ' I 

 felt so small, so great.' " 



Kuno Fischer further shows us how Schiller had 

 already, in the character of the Marquis Posa in his 

 ' Don Carlos/ personified his conception of the manner in 

 which the idea of freedom and human dignity in thought 

 and action constitutes the sublime character. Thus he 

 saw in Kant's theory of the Sublime the light of his own 

 aspirations and poetical creations. A series of aesthetical 

 essays followed this discovery of the resemblance between 

 his own and Kant's views. But he soon found himself 

 driven to a further generalisation which was not in the 

 spirit of Kant's philosophy, and which was repudiated by 

 Kant himself in an appreciative criticism of Schiller's 

 essay. Schiller's mind, filled with admiration for the 



