OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 21 



ceedecl Eeinhold. If Reinhold had been the chief 

 exponent of Kant's intellectualism, Fichte became the 

 still greater exponent of his moral system. He was 

 fully impressed by the necessity of following up Kant's 

 work in that direction. He preached the autonomy of 

 the human will, self -restrained liberty, as the foundation 

 of the moral order and the only guarantee for its main- 

 tenance. This elevated idea of human freedom, opposed 13. 

 alike to slavery and to libertinism of every kind, was an assimilation 



of Kantian 



ideal not unknown to Schiller, but it was expressed by Ethics. 

 Kant and Fichte in the most captivating terms. It 

 takes from now a leading part in Schiller's speculations 

 regarding the Beautiful. 



At the same time all this indicated a split in the u. 



i . . -ITT i Split in the 



humanistic movement which had centred in Weimar, and humanistic 



movement. 



of which, by tacit consent, Goethe's person and Muse 

 formed the brilliant focus. A discord had arisen which 

 may be denned by the divergence of the resthetical and 

 the ethical idealists. The latter, whose leader for a short 

 time was Fichte, saw before them definite practical tasks 

 which had to be clearly set before the age and nation 

 and pushed forward with vigour and self-sacrifice. The 

 serenity of the poetical and artistic atmosphere had 

 become disturbed ; those who wished to maintain it had 

 to retire more or less from active life into what Plato 

 termed the world of ideas, into the recesses of their 

 own artistic consciousness, into the region of self- 

 culture, of poetry and artistic creation. Schiller pro- 

 claimed this in the last of his philosophical poems : it 

 was termed ' Ideal and Life,' and was published in 1795. 

 Its theme is sesthetical freedom, to be gained by rising, 



