OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 37 



term, which serves as a kind of resting-place in the 

 development of ideas, giving temporary satisfaction and 

 a basis for further discussion. It forms, as it were, the 

 synthesis or bringing together of many and varied con- 

 tributions, and prepares the application of the reverse 

 process of analysis and explication. Thus we find in 

 more recent times that the word Evolution has exercised 

 such a function, bringing together or focalising many 

 stray thoughts and indefinite suggestions, affording for a 

 moment the triumphant feeling that a new step had been 

 taken forward, a new and comprehensive aspect gained, 

 and that it only required further explication and unfold- 

 ing in order to bring in a rich harvest of results. To 

 the historian such definite steps never present them- 

 selves as final, the focus is soon lost again and the rays 

 of light scattered, the rest and satisfaction afforded 

 proved to have been only temporary. As such we must 

 regard the introduction of the term Characteristic, and 

 the philosophies which made use of it, such as the phil- 

 osophy of Schelling. It is, however, of value to see 

 how, in the term " Characteristic," various attributes were 

 united by which artists and thinkers of that age tried to 

 define to themselves the objects of art or the nature of 

 the Beautiful. The word itself had been first introduced 

 by two friends of Goethe, and the conception had then 

 been criticised by Goethe himself. To him the char- 

 acteristic was, as it were, the skeleton around which 

 both nature and the artist threw the definite form which 

 produced the beautiful object. We know — and I have 

 elsewhere had occasion to refer to it — how Goethe was 

 impressed by the platonic conception of ideas as the 



