OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 



17 



are prominently brought forward : the first is, that man, 

 as placed between the purely sensual (animal) and the 

 purely intellectual (superhuman) creation, alone possesses 

 art ; this latter flourishes only on the borderland of the 

 higher and lower worlds.^ The second leading idea is 

 that art or poetry appears in history before science and 

 philosophy ; the Beautiful is the portal through which 

 man enters into the region of truth. 



Kant had given expression to the first idea in a 

 different form.'^ He had maintained that neither the 



which they had been stripped of 

 their poetical interest in the sys- 

 tematic philosophy of the Wolffian 

 school. In addition to the doctrine 

 of the pre - established harmony 

 wliich led to the conception of the 

 World as a work of beauty and of 

 Divine Art, Leibniz' doctrine of the 

 jietites perceptions, the half-illumin- 

 ated storehouse of the Soul, which 

 formed the abode of the sensations 

 of beauty, lent itself to a twofold, 

 a prosaic and a poetical, interpreta- 

 tion. It might Vje interpreted as 

 meaning that the Beautiful was an 

 inferior stage in the development 

 of ideas which in Knowledge and 

 Science had to rise to complete 

 clearness and definition, or it might 

 be interpreted as meaning that the 

 human soul contained an inex- 

 haustible store, or fund, of intuitive 

 knowledge on which the intellect 

 with its stricter logical methods 

 could always draw, finding new 

 matter for thought. The immediate 

 followers of Leibniz accepted the 

 former interpretation, and started 

 their Ecsthetical theories, as Lotze 

 has shown, with a kind of excuse 

 for the necessity of their existence 

 to fill up a gap which had been left 

 in the system, attempting to furnish 

 a kind of logic of sensations, inferior, 

 it is true, to the perfect logic of 

 thought. The other and more in- 



VOL. IV. 



spiring interpretation of Leibniz' 

 doctrine was, consciously or uncon- 

 sciously, worked out by later ideal- 

 istic thinkers at a time when Ger- 

 many had put forward its great 

 creative effort in the realms of 

 poetry and art, an effort which had 

 been wanting or not sufficiently 

 recognised (note the long -delayed 

 ajjpreciation of Sebastian Bach's 

 great musical creation) before the 

 end of the eighteenth century. 



1 In industry a bee may be your master, 

 And greater skill a worm may own, 

 Knowledge thou shar'st with Spirits 

 vaster, 

 But Art, oh Man, thou hast alone. 



^ A great deal has been written 

 regarding the exact point at which 

 Kantian ideas made themselves 

 felt in the philosophy of the Beauti- 

 ful, which, as we have seen, was a 

 subject that had occupied Schiller 

 independently. It likewise crops 

 up in the writings of Winckelmann, 

 of Lessing, of Herder, and of 

 Goethe in connection with and 

 suggested h>y their own poetical 

 and artistic creations. But though 

 their writings abound in valuable 

 hints and aphorisms on the subject, 

 they deal more immediately with 

 definite artistic problems, and they 

 do not get the length of a compre- 

 hensive treatment of the problem 

 of the Beautiful in its general- 



B 



