16 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



11. 



Special 

 mission 

 of Art. 



however, more of an artist than of an abstract thinker, the 

 doctrine of the independence of Art became magnified in 

 his mind so as to signify the special mission which Art had 

 to fulfil in the origin and progress of culture. Schiller's 

 speculations can be divided into two periods, as has been 

 clearly pointed out by Kuno Fischer. 1 It is incorrect to 

 look upon Schiller merely as a disciple of Kant. His 

 speculations started much earlier than the appearance of 

 Kant's principal work on ^Esthetics, which he did not 

 study till he had laid down his own ideas, not only in 

 prose writings and in his correspondence with Korner, 

 but likewise in one of his greatest and most original 

 poems, 'Die Kiinstler' (1789). On this inspired poem 

 he spent much time, discussing it with friends and other 

 prominent writers, such as Korner, Wieland, and Moritz. 

 But it belongs to the period which preceded his personal 

 association with Goethe and his acquaintance with Kant's 

 theory. In it he puts into a final form his earlier pre- 

 Kantian conception of the place which beauty and art 

 occupy in the evolution of human culture. 2 Two points 



1 In his ' Schiller-Schriften' (1892). 

 The second series deals specially 

 with Schiller as a philosopher, and 

 divides the subject into two periods: 

 the earlier pre-Kantian period, fall- 

 ing iiito the third decade of Schiller's 

 life (1779-1789) ; the second com- 

 prising Schiller's career as an aca- 

 demic teacher (1789-1796). 



2 Schiller's speculations in this his 

 first period stood under the influ- 

 ence of Spinoza, Leibniz, and some 

 of the English writers, such as 

 Shaftesbury and Ferguson. They 

 centred in what he termed his Kunst- 

 idee (art-idea). This included the 

 Spinozistic conception that the 

 whole of creation is divine and the 



Leibnizian idea of a universal har- 

 mony and of the world of monads, 

 each of which reflected the whole 

 with more or less distinctness. It 

 has been remarked (e.g. , by Lotze, 

 in his ' Qeschichte der Aesthetik,' 

 p. 9 sqq.) that Leibniz* system 

 contained important suggestions 

 which might have been developed 

 in the interest of a philosophy of 

 the Beautiful, but that this escaped 

 his immediate followers, such as 

 Baumgarten, Moses Mendelssohn, 

 and others. Nevertheless, such 

 poetical minds as Herder, Schiller, 

 Goethe, and Schelling always felt 

 themselves attracted by Leibniz' 

 ideas, though not by the manner in 



