626 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



of nature has had likewise to give way to the poetical and 

 artistic treatment, in which Goethe and Wordsworth on 

 t he one side, the great schools of modern landscape paint- 

 ing on the other, have shown us the way. We have thus 

 two distinct and seemingly different aspects of nature. 

 This has drawn forth the oft-repeated lament to which 

 Schiller in his ' Gotter Griechenlands ' has given classical 

 expression. But Goethe and Ruskin have told us what 

 they and other great masters on both sides have always 

 folt, that the two ways of approaching and understand- 

 ing nature are ultimately rooted in Sight, and not in 

 Thought ; to which source they must ever and again 

 return for new guidance and inspiration. 



As in other instances, when the old problem has been 

 taken out of the hands of the philosopher, there still 

 remains the philosophical task to examine the methods 

 by which mental work is being' carried on in these new 

 fields, and the principles upon which it rests. We have 

 seen how an analysis of the methods and principles of 

 the scientific exploration of nature has, under the name 

 of philosophy of nature, largely occupied philosophy in 

 the latter part of the nineteenth century. It was to be 

 expected that a similar interest would attach to the 

 philosophical study of the principles of poetical and 

 artistic creation. Accordingly, we find that this has, in 

 the course of the century, more and more engaged the 

 attention of thinkers, so that a new philosophical inquiry, 

 under the name of ^Esthetics, now forms a prominent 

 subject of philosophical interest, centring in a definite 

 problem, — the problem of the Beautiful. 



This will be the subject of the next chapter. 



