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Signs of revival. H. Paul.

fluence on Linguistic, which of late years has been wholly lacking in such profound research as that inaugurated by Humboldt and followed up by Steinthal. But Steinthal never succeeded in founding a school. Max Müller, popular and inaccurate, maintained the indivisibility of speech and thought, confounding, or at least not distinguishing, æsthetic and logical thought; although at one time he had noted that the formation of names had a closer connexion with wit, in the sense of Locke, than with judgement. He maintained, moreover, that the science of language is not a historical but a natural science, because language is not the invention of man: the dilemma of "historical" and "natural was canvassed and resolved over and over again with little result.1 Another philologist, Whitney, attacked the "miraculous" theory of Müller and denied that thought is indivisible from speech: "The deaf-mute does not speak, but he can think," he observes; "thought is not function of the acoustic nerve." By this means Whitney relapsed into the ancient doctrine that speech is a symbol or means of expression, of human thought, subject to the will, the result of a synthesis of faculties and of a capacity for intelligent adaptation of means to end.2

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Philosophical spirit reappeared in Paul's Principles of the History of Language (1880), though the author's efforts to defend himself from the terrifying accusation of being a philosopher led him to hunt out a fresh title to replace the scandalous Philosophy of Language." But if Paul is vague about the relation of Logic to Grammar, he must be given every credit for identifying, as Humboldt had already done, the question of the origin of language with that of its nature; and reasserting that language is created afresh whenever we speak. He must also be given credit for having conclusively criticized the 1 Lectures on the Science of Language, 1861 and 1864 (Fr. tr., Paris, 1867).

2 William Dwight Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language, London, 1875 (It. tr., Milan, 1876).

3 Hermann Paul, Principien der Sprachgeschichte, 1880 (2nd ed., Halle, 1886).

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Ethnopsychology (Völkerpsychologie) of Steinthal and Lazarus, showing that there is no such thing as collective psyche and that there can be no language other than of the individual. Wundt 1 on the other hand attached the The linguistic of Wundi. study of language, mythology and customs to this nonexistent science of Ethnopsychology; in his latest work, on this very subject of language, he foolishly echoes Whitney's gibes and denounces as a "miracle theory (Wundertheorie) that glorious doctrine inaugurated by Herder and Humboldt, whom he accuses of "mystical obscurity" (mystiche Dunkel): he observes that this view may have had some justification before the principle of evolution had reached its triumphant application to organic nature in general and to man in particular. He has not the faintest notion of the function of imagination, or of the true relation between thought and expression; he finds no substantial difference between expression in the naturalistic, and expression in the spiritual and linguistic sense; he considers language as a special highly developed form of the vital psychophysical manifestations and of the expressive movements of animals. Out of these facts language is developed by imperceptible gradations; so that, beyond the general concept of expressive movement (Ausdrucksbewegung) “ there is no specific mark by which language can be distinguished in any but an arbitrary manner." The philosophy of Wundt betrays its own weakness by showing its inability to master the problem of language and art. In his Ethics æsthetic facts are presented as a complex of logical and ethical elements; the existence of æsthetic as a special normative science is denied, not for the good and sufficient reason that there are no such things as "normative sciences," but because this special science is said by him to be absorbed by the two sciences of Logic and Ethics, which amounts to denying the existence of Esthetic and the originality of art.

1 Wilh. Wundt, Über Wege u. Ziele d. Völkerpsychologie, Leipzig, 1886. 2 Die Sprache, Leipzig, 1900, 2 vols. (part i. of Völkerpsychologie, eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte). • Die Sprache, passim; cf. i. p. 31 seqq., ii. pp. 599, 603-609. Ethik, ed. 2, Stuttgart, 1892, p. 6.

XVIII

ÆSTHETIC PSYCHOLOGISM AND OTHER

RECENT TENDENCIES

Neo-criticism THE neo-critical or neo-Kantian movement was powerless to make headway against hedonistic, psychological

and

empiricism. and moralistic views of the æsthetic fact, although it

Kirchmann.

made every effort to save the concept of spirit from the invading rush of naturalism and materialism.1 Kant bequeathed to neo-criticism his own failure to understand creative imagination, and the neo-Kantians do not seem to have had the faintest notion of any form of cognition other than the intellectual.

Amongst German philosophers of any renown who clung to æsthetic sensationalism and psychologism was Kirchmann, promoter of a so-called realism, and author of Esthetic on a Realistic Basis (1868).2 In his doctrine the æsthetic fact is an image (Bild) of a real; an animated (seelenvolles) image, purified and strengthened, that is, idealized, and divided into the image of pleasure, which is the beautiful, and that of pain, which is the ugly. Beauty admits of a threefold series of varieties or modifications, being determined according to the content as sublime, comic, tragic, etc.; according to the image, as beauty of nature or of art; and according to the idealization as idealistic or naturalistic, formal or spiritual,

1 A. F. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, u. Kritik seiner Bedeutung i. d. Gegenwart, 1866.

2 J. F. v. Kirchmann, Ästhetik auf realistischer Grundlage, Berlin, 1868.

symbolical or classical. Not having grasped the nature of æsthetic objectification, Kirchmann takes the trouble to draw up a new psychological category of ideal or apparent feelings, arising from artistic images and being attenuations of the feelings of real life.1

To the evolution or involution of the Herbartians into Metaphysic physiologists of æsthetic pleasure corresponds a similar translated into

Psychology. evolution or involution of the idealists into adherents of Vischer. psychologism. The first place must be given to the veteran Theodor Vischer, who in a criticism of his own work pronounced Esthetic to be "the union of mimics and harmonics" (vereinte Mimik und Harmonik), and Beauty the "harmony of the universe," never actually realized because realized only at infinity, so that when we think to seize it in the Beautiful, we are under an illusion: a transcendent illusion, which is the very essence of the æsthetic fact.2 His son Robert Vischer coined the word Einfühlung to express the life with which man endows natural objects by means of the æsthetic process.3 Volkelt, when treating of the Symbol and joining symbolism to pantheism, opposed associationism and favoured a natural teleology immanent in Beauty. The Herbartian Siebeck (1875) abandoned the formalistic theory and tried Siebeck. to explain the fact of beauty by the concept of the appearance of personality. He distinguishes between objects which please by their content alone (sensuous pleasures), those which please by form alone (moral facts), and those which please by the connexion of content with form (organic and æsthetic facts). In organic facts the form is not outside the content, but is the expression of the reciprocal action and conjunction of the constitutive elements whereas in æsthetic facts the form is outside the content, and as it were its mere surface; not a means to the end, but an end in itself. Esthetic intuition is a 1 Asth. auf real. Grund. vol. i. pp. 54-57; see above, pp. 80-81.

2 Kritische Gänge, vol. v. pp. 25-26, 131.

3 R. Vischer, Über das optische Formgefühl, Leipzig, 1873.

• Der Symbol-Begriff in der neuesten Asth., Jena, 1876.

Das Wesen d. ästh. Anschauung, Psychologische Untersuchungen z.

Theorie d. Schönen u. d. Kunst, Berlin, 1875.

M. Diez.

relation between the sensible and the spiritual, matter and spirit, and is thus form regarded as the appearance of personality. Esthetic pleasure arises from the spirit's consciousness of discovering itself in the sensible. Siebeck borrows the theory of modifications of the beautiful from the metaphysical idealists, who held that only in such modifications can beauty be found in the concrete, just as humanity can only exist as a man of determinate race and nationality. The sublime is that species of beauty wherein the formal moment of circumscription is lost, and is therefore the unlimited, which is a kind of extensive or intensive infinity; the tragic arises when the harmony is not given but is the result of conflict and development ; the comic is a relation of the small to the great; and so

These traces of idealism, together with his firm hold on the Kantian and Herbartian absoluteness of the judgement of taste, make it impossible to regard Siebeck's Esthetic as purely psychological and empirical and wholly devoid of philosophical elements. It is the same with Diez, who, in his Theory of Feeling as Foundation of Esthetic (1892),1 tries to explain the artistic activity as a return to the ideal of feeling (Ideal des fühlenden Geistes), parallel with science (ideal of thought), morality (ideal of will) and religion (ideal of personality). But whatever is this so-called feeling? is it the empirical feeling of the psychologists, irreducible to an ideal, or the mystic faculty of communication and conjunction with the Infinite and the Absolute? the absurd" pleasure-value" of Fechner, or the "judgement" of Kant? One is inclined to say that these writers, and others like them, still under the influence of metaphysical views, lack the courage of their opinions they feel themselves to be in an atmosphere of hostility and speak under reservations or compromises. The psychologist Jodl asserts the existence of elementary æsthetic feelings, as discovered by Herbart, and defines them as " immediate excitations not resting upon associative or reproductive activity or on the fancy," although

1 Max Diez, Theorie des Gefühls z. Begründung d. Ästhetik, Stuttgart,

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