20 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



public, the execution of the King, the victorious begin- 

 nings of the Revolutionary wars. The new Republic 

 had given him the right of citizenship ; the document 

 (which reached him only after years) was dated August 

 1792, was signed by Danton and forwarded by Roland. 

 . . . Under the impression of murderous terrorism, 

 overcome by horror and pity, he retracted the high 

 opinion which he had formed of the humanities of 

 the age. The present generation is not ripe for civil, 

 as it is wanting in human, freedom. . . . He had 

 thought that art had furthered the noble work of human 

 education, the fruit of which was human culture and 

 liberty ; he had now become convinced that this work 

 had not been done in the present time — it had rather to 

 be held in view, to be begun. The cesthetical education 

 of man, which in his poem he had praised as the work 

 of bygone times, rose before him as the task of the 

 future." ^ 



At the same time the conviction must have dawned 

 upon Schiller as it dawned upon many others, that 

 what was needed was not so much an ajsthetical as 

 an ethical revival : strict discipline and order, the 

 acknowledgment of duty, reverence for the sacredness 

 and inviolability of a supreme moral law. This was 

 the note that Kant had already struck in the second 

 of his three Critiques. He had there proclaimed, in all 

 rigour and above all compromise, his ' Categorical Im- 

 perative.' When Schiller, after an absence of several 

 years, returned to Jena, he met there the second great 

 disciple of Kant's philosophy — Fichte, who had suc- 



^ See Kuno Fischer, loc. cit., p. 291 sqq. 



