57 
place. In looking at the buildings erected on the Fair grounds, at 
Chicago, I could not but think that architecture, at least, would 
receive a vigorous impulse in our land; for in these buildings 
there is an originality, a sense of creative power, a pregnant sug- 
gestion of something new, of a style more truly American than 
that of the Middle Ages and better suited to express the breadth 
and simplicity of our democratic ideas, which will doubtless be 
worked out by American genius into a national architecture of 
noble design, of which we need not be ashamed and can claim as 
our own. But my object at present is purely theoretic rather than 
practical. It will dwell more on the idea than on the expression 
of art. 
The subject of the philosophy of art may be still more. briefly 
comprehended in the term ‘‘ #sthetics.’’ A%sthetics, from a 
Greek word of subtle meaning, was first used comparatively re- 
cently in Germany to signify the philosophic classification of those 
mental faculties with which we perceive and are pleasurably affected 
by the beauty of the world, and was thus made to comprise more 
than the term fairly means, viz., the whole theory, production and 
criticism of art; and yet this word, ‘‘ zsthetics,’’ happily empha- 
sizes one important element of art—feeling, or the sense of delight 
in the perception of beauty—for art springs chiefly from the emo- 
tions and love, just as in the ‘‘ terribleness’’ of Michael Angelo’s 
nature averse to delights there was one spring of joy—the love of 
his art and beauty; and so, too, after the influence of the skeptical 
philosophy of the early part of the eighteenth century, that dried 
up the spiritual emotions, the new feeling for the beautiful opened 
by the movement of romantic literature, produced such works as 
Faust and Wallenstein. 
The philosopher, Hegel, in treating esthetics as a branch of psy- 
chology, set to work to explore the laws of spirit which constitute 
mind and to construe nature and art by means of universal ideas, 
on the principle assumed by the German transcendental philosophy 
of the subjectivity of all knowledge, regarding nature as the uncon- 
scious realization of spirit in time and space, and, in the same way, 
viewing the genesis of every human institution, science and art as 
spiritual expressions. He sought to trace through its various stages 
the philosophy of culture, and to develop @ grzori the history of 
human consciousness in its growth from the first crude ideas to the 
PROC, AMER. PHILOS. 80C. XXXII. 143. H. PRINTED NOV. 27, 1893. 
