32 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



for a short time came under the extreme influence of 

 Kant's and Fichte's philosophy with its ethical rigorism. 

 He stood for a moment in danger of giving up poetry 

 for philosophy, but his poetical genius asserted its 

 supremacy again and was led to higher activity through 

 his contact with Goethe. "With the last of his philo- 

 sophical essays, just mentioned, and the last of his 

 philosophical poems, he retired from the field of specula- 

 tion and entered into the last and greatest phase of 

 his creative productivity. 



In the course of his various speculations, and through 

 his intercourse and correspondence with Korner, Goethe, 

 and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schiller had arrived at a 

 more or less definite conception that two new problems 

 presented themselves to the thinker on art : the problem 

 of the beautiful had become much more complicated. 

 These two new problems had likewise occupied Goethe's 

 prolonged thought, though his occupation with them 

 was never methodical and continuous.-^ They can 



^ The question, how to deal with 

 Goethe in a history of German 

 thought, is as important and diffi- 

 cult as it will be, how to deal with 

 Ruskin in a history of more recent 

 thought on which he has had a very 

 marked and — so far as that of the 

 Continent is concerned — a growing 

 influence. As to Goethe, historians 

 of aesthetics have had difficulty in 

 assigning to him a definite place, or 

 have, like Lotze, von Hartmann, and 

 B. Croce, left him out altogether ; 

 and this has also been his fate in 

 most of the German histories of 

 philosophy. In the plan of this 

 work a discussion of his many- 

 sided intellectual activity, including 

 the thought revealed in his poeti- 

 cal creations, should belong to the 



third section. Nevertheless, it may 

 be noted here that it is probably 

 owing mainly to his influence that 

 Schelling in his speculations was 

 led away from the direct line indi- 

 cated by Kaut and Fichte through 

 the philosophy of nature and that 

 of art into the region of the 

 spiritual and mystical, somewhat 

 analogous to the various stages 

 described in the second part of 

 Goethe's 'Faust.' Schelling was, 

 though no doubt only for a short 

 time, under the influence of Schiller, 

 yet he was much more attracted 

 by Goethe's love of nature ; 

 whereas Hegel, though referring 

 to Goethe, laid more stress upon 

 the stimulus which Schiller had 

 imparted to German speculation at 



