Aesthetic Poetry | Page 4

perception, but from the
free play of the reason and of the imagination. In this analysis of the
cognitive faculty, the object only exists relatively to the subject and to
the feeling of pleasure or the enjoyment that it experiences.
The characteristics of the beautiful are, according to Kant:--
1. The pleasure it procures is free from interest.
2. Beauty appears to us as an object of general enjoyment, without
awakening in us the consciousness of an abstract idea and of a category
of reason to which we might refer our judgment.
3. Beauty ought to embrace in itself the relation of conformity to its end,
but in such a way that this conformity may be grasped without the idea
of the end being offered to our mind.
4. Though it be not accompanied by an abstract idea, beauty ought to
be acknowledged as the object of a necessary enjoyment.
A special feature of all this system is the indissoluble unity of what is
supposed to be separated in consciousness. This distinction disappears
in the beautiful, because in it the general and the particular, the end and
the means, the idea and the object, mentally penetrate each other
completely. The particular in itself, whether it be opposed to itself or to
what is general, is something accidental. But here what may be
considered as an accidental form is so intimately connected with the
general that it is confounded and identified with it. By this means the
beautiful in art presents thought to us as incarnate. On the other hand,
matter, nature, the sensuous as themselves possessing measure, end,

and harmony, are raised to the dignity of spirit and share in its general
character. Thought not only abandons its hostility against nature, but
smiles in her. Sensation and enjoyment are justified and sanctified, so
that nature and liberty, sense and ideas, find their justification and their
sanctification in this union. Nevertheless this reconciliation, though
seemingly perfect, is stricken with the character of subjectiveness. It
cannot constitute the absolutely true and real.
Such is an outline of the principal results of Kant's criticism, and Hegel
passes high praise on the profoundly philosophic mind of Schiller, who
demanded the union and reconciliation of the two principles, and who
tried to give a scientific explanation of it before the problem had been
solved by philosophy. In his "Letters on Aesthetic Education," Schiller
admits that man carries in himself the germ of the ideal man which is
realized and represented by the state. There are two ways for the
individual man to approach the ideal man; first, when the state,
considered as morality, justice, and general reason, absorbs the
individualities in its unity; secondly, when the individual rises to the
ideal of his species by the perfecting of himself. Reason demands unity,
conformity to the species; nature, on the other hand, demands plurality
and individuality; and man is at once solicited by two contrary laws. In
this conflict, aesthetic education must come in to effect the
reconciliation of the two principles; for, according to Schiller, it has as
its end to fashion and polish the inclinations and passions so that they
may become reasonable, and that, on the other hand, reason and
freedom may issue from their abstract character, may unite with nature,
may spiritualize it, become incarnate, and take a body in it. Beauty is
thus given as the simultaneous development of the rational and of the
sensuous, fused together, and interpenetrated one by the other, an union
that constitutes in fact true reality.
This unity of the general and of the particular, of liberty and necessity
of the spiritual and material, which Schiller understood scientifically as
the spirit of art, and which he tried to make appear in real life by
aesthetic art and education, was afterwards put forward under the name
of idea as the principle of all knowledge and existence. In this way,
through the agency of Schelling, science raised itself to an absolute

point of view. It was thus that art began to claim its proper nature and
dignity. From that time its proper place was finally marked out for it in
science, though the mode of viewing it still labored under certain
defects. Its high and true distinction were at length understood.
In viewing the higher position to which recent philosophical systems
have raised the theory of art in Germany, we must not overlook the
advantages contributed by the study of the ideal of the ancients by such
men as Winckelmann, who, by a kind of inspiration, raised art criticism
from a carping about petty details to seek the true spirit of great works
of art, and their true ideas, by a study of the spirit of the originals.
It has appeared expedient to conclude this introduction with a summary
of