OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 



25 



the beautiful, not as a casual and fanciful attribute of 

 certain things or mental states but as an independent 

 revelation of the essence of reality, of the truly Eeal. 

 " It was of high value to look upon beauty, not as 

 a stranger in the world, not as a casual aspect afforded 

 by some phenomena under accidental conditions, but as 

 the fortunate revelation of that principle which per- 

 meates all reality with its living activity ; it was of 

 value that this idealism put an end to merely psycho- 

 logical theories which reduced the beautiful to a 

 convenient coincidence of external impressions with 

 our subjective habits of thought; and, on the contrary, 

 sought in every object of beauty its objective meaning 

 in the connection of a comprehensive world - plan ; it 

 was of value to recognise in all those formal proper- 

 ties of continuity, of unity in multiplicity, and of com- 

 prehensiveness upon which actually our sesthetical feeling 

 rests, the actual forms in which the eternal ground of 

 everything has voluntarily unfolded itself; and, lastly, 

 it was of value to look upon art likewise not as an 

 accidental play of human powers which might also be 

 wanting, but as a necessary stage in that series of 

 developments which form the essential nature and life 

 of the Eternal and truly Eeal." 1 



1 Lotze, 'Geschichte derAesthetik 

 in Deutschland ' (p. 125 sqq.). This 

 passage may serve as a convenient 

 opportunity to define more pre- 

 cisely the object before us in treat- 

 ing of the Beautiful as a problem 

 of philosophical thought. Leaving 

 out of consideration the views de- 

 veloped in ancient times by Plato, 

 Aristotle, and especially by Plotinus, 

 as to the place of the Beautiful and 



of Art in a comprehensive theory 

 of the world and of life, we do not 

 find (with the solitary exceptions, 

 perhaps, of St Augustine's ' Beauty 

 of the Universe ' and Leibniz's 

 ' Pre-established Harmony,' neither 

 of which was developed in the 

 interest of a philosophy of the 

 Beautiful) the problem treated in 

 this larger spirit till we come to 

 German philosophy in the laj-t 



