OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 



105 



elaborated by the idealists and the purely psychological 

 analysis of the older schools and of that of the psycho- 

 physical school represented in Germany mainly by 

 Fechner. There is, however, no need to dwell on 

 Herbart's views at .any length so far as the problem 

 of the Beautiful is concerned, except to notice that 

 he considered sesthetical judgments as referring to re- 

 lations and not to the elementary sensations or percep- 

 tions between which these relations exist. His disciples 

 took up this idea and attempted to define more closely 

 in what these relations consist, reducing them to a 

 limited number of definite fundamental relations. With 



hensive or synoptic view of the 

 whole realm of the Beautiful, 

 wherever it might appear, tried 

 to give to this view a definite ex- 

 pression or interpretation in con- 

 nection with a general creed as to 

 the nature and essence of what was 

 conceived to be the truly Real, 

 tracing this subsequently through 

 all the numerous single instances 

 and scattered appearances in the 

 actual world of nature or the crea- 

 tions of art and life ; hence the 

 task of aesthetics consisted in in- 

 terpreting the world of the Beauti- 

 ful in the light of the supreme 

 Thought, the Ideal. For Herbart 

 and his followers, on the other side, 

 the task of aesthetics was to de- 

 termine the elemental relations, 

 and to show how through their 

 manifold combination and accord- 

 ing to rules which the science of 

 testhetics had to establish, the 

 beauty of any larger complex was 

 produced. There seems no doubt 

 that Herbart was somewhat misled 

 by his more exclusive acquaintance 

 with music and poetry to desire to 

 establish everywhere definite rules 

 such as have guided musical and, in a 

 lesser degree, poetical, compositions 



with their well-defined elementary 

 notions of rhythm, harmony, 

 melody, &c. ; he desired a similar 

 schooling in the elements of the 

 Beautiful, in the fine arts. On the 

 other side, thinkers such as Lessing, 

 Herder, Schiller, and Schelling 

 approached the Beautiful by con- 

 templating and studying the exist- 

 ing great productions of the antique 

 and the renaissance, of Shakespeare 

 and other ancient and modern 

 poets, and tried to get hold of 

 that essential Something to which 

 they owed their objective excel- 

 lence. Herbartian ^Esthetics are 

 mainly represented by Robert Zim- 

 mermann and elaborately criticised 

 by Fr. Theod. Vischer, the most 

 celebrated representative of the 

 idealistic School. He criticised 

 with equal candour his own great 

 work ('^Esthetik,' 1846-1857) in 

 his ' Kritische Gange,' Neue Folge, 

 No. 5, pp. 1-224; No. 6, pp. 1-166 

 (1866, 1873). These articles are 

 most interesting, showing, inter 

 alia, how prominent disciples of 

 Hegel were gradually abandoning 

 the logic and metaphysics of their 

 master. 



