OF THE GOOD. 157 



into the higher region of culture, refinement, and social 

 order. Impressed with this Hellenic ideal of culture as 

 the union of the Beautiful and the Good, he became 

 acquainted with Kant's doctrine of the Autonomy or 

 Self-restraining Freedom of the human Will, and at 

 once hailed it as an expression of a truth which had 

 lain dormant in his own mind and in the minds of many- 

 other contemporary thinkers. 



It was not, however, the purely practical or moral 

 side of Kant's teaching, as contained in the second of his 

 * Critiques,' through which Schiller gained an entry into 

 the world of Kant's ideas. It was first of all through 

 some smaller and more popular writings of Kant, upon 

 the methods of writing universal history, that the his- 

 torian, Schiller, was attracted towards his thought. It 

 was next Kant's third ' Critique,' which dealt with the 

 -^sthetical problem, through which Schiller found him- 

 self at one with Kant. And it was lastly Kant's theo- 

 logical treatise, entitled ' Eeligion within the limits of 

 Mere Eeason,' which stimulated Schiller to original 

 speculation : he not only assimilated, he completed a line 

 of thought taken up by Kant. Kuno Fischer has elo- 

 quently pointed out the common ground on which both 

 thinkers stood, as well as the direction in which Schiller's 

 original contributions lay. " What he had long carried 

 about within himself, and what he had so often experi- 

 enced in his imagination, he found here (i.e., in the third 

 of Kant's ' Critiques ') for the first time explained and 

 illuminated out of the depths of human reason. His 

 mental disposition, his way of thinking, had an inborn 

 direction towards the higher, it was attracted by the 



