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empirical verification of his categories, he falls into hopeless confusion. Greatness is pleasing, but so is smallness; unity is pleasing, but so is variety; regularity is pleasing, but so, confound it, is irregularity: uncertainties and contradictions at every step; he was aware of them and made no effort to conceal them; but they should have convinced him that the abstraction of " beautiful form,” whose qualities and quantities he had so laboriously collected, is a ghostly shape without body, since that alone gives æsthetic pleasure which fulfils an expressive function. But having illustrated the three demands of the æsthetic object, Köstlin wasted all his remaining breath in constructing a kingdom of intuitive imagination in the manner of Vischer, i.e. beauty of organic and inorganic nature; of civil life; of morality; of religion; of science; of games; of conversations; of feasts and banquets; and lastly of history, reviewing and passing æsthetic comment on its three periods, patriarchal, heroic and historical.

content.

Schasler, who had written as vast a history on Esthetic Esthetic of as Zimmermann's own, found a starting-point for a move- M. Schasler. ment toward formalism in absolute idealism, or realismidealism, as he called it. He began by defining Esthetic as "the science of the beautiful and of art" (a single science ill defined as having two different objects), and proceeded to justify his unmethodical definition by saying that beauty does not exist in art alone, nor does art concern itself solely with beauty. The sphere of Esthetic he defines as that of intuition (Anschauung) in which knowledge assumes a practical character and will a theoretical: the sphere of indivisible unity and absolute reconciliation of the theoretical and practical spirit, in which in a certain sense the highest human activities are developed. Beauty is the ideal, but the concrete ideal; this is why there is no ideal of a human body in abstraction from sex, no ideal of a mammal in general, but only of such and such species, as of horse or dog, and then only of determinate kind of horse or dog. Thus by descending from the more to the less abstract genus Schasler vainly attempted to

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reach the concrete, which inevitably escaped his grasp. In art we pass from the typical, which is natural beauty, to the characteristic, which is the typical of human feeling; hence we can frame the ideal of an old woman, a beggar or a ruffian. The characteristic of art is in closer relationship to the ugly than to the beautiful in nature. On this head (passing over the remainder, which is on familiar lines) it is well to notice that Schasler has a bias towards that version of the romaunt of Sir Purebeauty which ascribes the birth of the "modifications of Beauty" to the influence of the Ugly.1 Although," he writes, "the thought may disturb our minds, it must not be forgotten that were there no world of ugliness there could be no world of beauty; for it is only when the Ugly stirs up empty abstract Beauty, that it begins to combat the enemy and thus to produce concrete Beauty." "2 He even succeeded in converting Vischer himself, the chief supporter of the other version: "Formerly I had been accustomed to think in the old-fashioned Hegelian style," Vischer confesses, "that unrest, fermentation and strife dwelt in the essence of Beauty; that the Idea prevails and thrusts the image forth into the infinite; so arises the Sublime; that the image, offended in its finitude, makes war on the Idea; whence arises the Comic; this finished the struggle; Beauty returned to itself from the conflict of the two moments, and was created." But now, he continues, “I must acknowledge that Schasler is right, and so are his predecessors Weisse and Ruge: the Ugly has a hand in the matter; this is the principle of movement, the ferment of differentiation without such leaven we never reach the special forms of Beauty, for each single one presupposes the Ugly."

"3

Closely allied to that of Schasler is the Esthetic of Hartmann. Eduard von Hartmann (1890), preceded by a historical treatise on German Esthetic since Kant, wherein with

1 See above, pp. 348-349.

2 Asthetik, Leipzig, 1886, i. pp. 1-16, 19-24, 70; ii. p. 52: cf. Kritische Gesch. der Ästhetik, pp. 795, 963, 1041-1044, 1028, 1036-1038, 3 Kritische Gänge, v. pp. 112-115.

• Die dtsche. Asth. s. Kant, 1886 (Part i. of Asth.).

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meticulous, critical and polemical study he upholds the definition of Beauty as "the appearance of the Idea (das Scheinen der Idee). Inasmuch as he insisted on appearance (Schein) as the necessary characteristic of Beauty, Hartmann held himself justified in naming his Esthetic the "Esthetic of Concrete Idealism," and in ranging himself alongside Hegel, Trahndorff, Schleiermacher, Deutinger, Oersted, Vischer, Meising, Carriere and Schasler, against the abstract idealism of Schelling, Solger, Schopenhauer, Krause, Weisse and Lotze, all of whom, by placing beauty in the supersensible idea, overlooked the sensory element and reduced it to the rank of a mere accessory.1 By his insistence on the idea as the other indispensable and determining element, Hartmann proclaimed himself as opposed to the Herbartian formalism. Beauty is truth; neither historical, scientific nor reflective, but metaphysical or idealistic, the very truth of Philosophy: "in proportion as Beauty is in opposition to every science and to realistic truth, so much nearer is it to Philosophy and metaphysical truth": "Beauty, with its own peculiar efficacy, remains the prophet of idealistic truth in an unbelieving age that abhors Metaphysic and recognizes no value in anything but realistic truth." Esthetic truth, which leaps immediately from subjective appearance to ideal essence, is lacking in the control and method possessed by philosophical truth; in compensation, however, she possesses the fascinating power of conviction, the sole property of sensible intuition, and unattainable by gradual or reflected mediation. The higher Philosophy soars, the less does it need the gradual passage through the world of the senses and of science, and the slighter becomes the distance separating Philosophy and Art. The latter, for its part, will be well advised to start on its journey towards the ideal world as Baedeker's handbooks counsel the intending traveller, "with as little luggage as possible"; "not overloading herself with a weight which paralyses the wings and is

1 Philosophie des Schönen (Part ii. of Asth.), Leipzig, 1890, pp. 463-464; cf. Deutsche Asth. s. K. pp. 357-362.

Hartmann and

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made up of unnecessary and indifferent trifles." 1 Logical character, the microcosmic idea, the unconscious are immanent in beauty; by means of the unconscious, intellectual intuition operates in it,2 and, from its being rooted in the unconscious, it is a Mystery.3

4

In his employment of the exciting or reactionary the theory of influence of the Ugly, Hartmann exceeded Schasler himself. Lowest among the degrees of Beauty, indeed forming the lower limit of ææsthetic fact, lies sensuous pleasure, which is unconscious formal beauty; its first true degree is formal beauty of the first order, or the mathematically pleasing (unity, variety, symmetry, proportion, the golden section, etc.); its second degree is formal beauty of the second order, the dynamically pleasing; its third is formal beauty of the third order, the passive teleological, as in the case of utensils or machinery. Indeed it may here be noted that among machines and utensils, on a level with jars, plates and cups, Hartmann placed language: it is a dead thing, said he; receiving the appearances of life (Scheinleben) only at the very instant of utterance. Language a "dead thing," an "utensil" for the philosopher of the Unconscious, in the land of Humboldt, with a Steinthal still living! There follow, as formal beauty of the fourth order, the active teleological or living, and as formal beauty of the fifth order, conformity to species (das Gattungsmässige): lastly and above all, since the individual idea is superior to the specific, is beauty concrete beauty or the microcosmic individual, which is no longer formal, but beauty of content. As is to be expected, the passage from lower to higher degrees is made by means of the Ugly: nobody has laboured like Hartmann to recount in detail the services rendered by Ugliness to Beauty. From ugliness, in the form of the destruction of the beauty of equality, arises symmetry from ugliness in the case of the circle arises the ellipse; the beauty of a waterfall tumbling over rocks is caused by the mathematically ugly; destruction, that

1 Phil. d. Sch. PP. 434-437.

3 Op. cit. pp. 197-198.

Op. cit. pp. 115-116.

Op. cit. pp. 150-152.

is to say, of a fall in a parabolic curve; beauty of spiritual expression is achieved through the introduction of an ugliness relative to fleshly perfection. Beauty of a higher degree is founded on ugliness at a lower degree. When the highest degree is reached, that of individual beauty beyond which there can be nothing, even then elemental ugliness continues its work of beneficent irritation. The later phases thus produced are well known to us as the famous Modifications of the Beautiful: in this section also, nobody is so copious or detailed as Hartmann. He certainly does admit, side by side with simple or pure beauty, certain modifications free from conflict, such as the sublime or graceful; but the more important modifications can arise only through conflict. There are four cases, because the resolution must be either immanent, logical, transcendent or combined: immanent in the idyllic, the melancholy, the sad, the cheerful, the moving, the elegiac; logical in the comic in all its varieties; transcendent in the tragic; combined in the humorous with the tragi-comic and its other varieties. When none of these resolutions is possible, there arises ugliness; when an ugliness of content is expressed by an ugliness of form, we have the maximum of ugliness, the real æsthetic devil.

France.

Hartmann is the last considerable representative of the Metaphysical old æsthetic school in Germany; he inspires terror by the Esthetic in mass of his literary production, like many others of the C. Levêque. school, who seem to accept it as a dogma that art cannot be dealt with except in several volumes a thousand pages long. Those who are not afraid of giants and are able to attack this sort of Esthetic, will find it a fat goodhumoured Magog full of vulgar prejudices, and so constituted that, despite his apparent strength, a little blow will kill him.

In other countries metaphysical Esthetic had few followers. In France the celebrated competition of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1857 crowned with their approval and presented to the world the Science of Beauty by Levêque; 1 of which nobody now thinks or

1 Ch. Levêque, La Science du beau, Paris, 1862.

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