What Is Art? by graf Leo Tolstoy
CHAPTER III
5264 words | Chapter 25
I begin with the founder of æsthetics, Baumgarten (1714-1762).
According to Baumgarten,[10] the object of logical knowledge is Truth,
the object of æsthetic (_i.e._ sensuous) knowledge is Beauty. Beauty is
the Perfect (the Absolute), recognised through the senses; Truth is the
Perfect perceived through reason; Goodness is the Perfect reached by
moral will.
Beauty is defined by Baumgarten as a correspondence, _i.e._ an order of
the parts in their mutual relations to each other and in their relation
to the whole. The aim of beauty itself is to please and excite a desire,
“_Wohlgefallen und Erregung eines Verlangens._” (A position precisely
the opposite of Kant’s definition of the nature and sign of beauty.)
With reference to the manifestations of beauty, Baumgarten considers
that the highest embodiment of beauty is seen by us in nature, and he
therefore thinks that the highest aim of art is to copy nature. (This
position also is directly contradicted by the conclusions of the latest
æstheticians.)
Passing over the unimportant followers of Baumgarten,—Maier, Eschenburg,
and Eberhard,—who only slightly modified the doctrine of their teacher
by dividing the pleasant from the beautiful, I will quote the
definitions given by writers who came immediately after Baumgarten, and
defined beauty quite in another way. These writers were Sulzer,
Mendelssohn, and Moritz. They, in contradiction to Baumgarten’s main
position, recognise as the aim of art, not beauty, but goodness. Thus
Sulzer (1720-1777) says that only that can be considered beautiful which
contains goodness. According to his theory, the aim of the whole life of
humanity is welfare in social life. This is attained by the education of
the moral feelings, to which end art should be subservient. Beauty is
that which evokes and educates this feeling.
Beauty is understood almost in the same way by Mendelssohn (1729-1786).
According to him, art is the carrying forward of the beautiful,
obscurely recognised by feeling, till it becomes the true and good. The
aim of art is moral perfection.[11]
For the æstheticians of this school, the ideal of beauty is a beautiful
soul in a beautiful body. So that these æstheticians completely wipe out
Baumgarten’s division of the Perfect (the Absolute), into the three
forms of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty; and Beauty is again united with
the Good and the True.
But this conception is not only not maintained by the later
æstheticians, but the æsthetic doctrine of Winckelmann arises, again in
complete opposition. This divides the mission of art from the aim of
goodness in the sharpest and most positive manner, makes external beauty
the aim of art, and even limits it to visible beauty.
According to the celebrated work of Winckelmann (1717-1767), the law and
aim of all art is beauty only, beauty quite separated from and
independent of goodness. There are three kinds of beauty:—(1) beauty of
form, (2) beauty of idea, expressing itself in the position of the
figure (in plastic art), (3) beauty of expression, attainable only when
the two first conditions are present. This beauty of expression is the
highest aim of art, and is attained in antique art; modern art should
therefore aim at imitating ancient art.[12]
Art is similarly understood by Lessing, Herder, and afterwards by Goethe
and by all the distinguished æstheticians of Germany till Kant, from
whose day, again, a different conception of art commences.
Native æsthetic theories arose during this period in England, France,
Italy, and Holland, and they, though not taken from the German, were
equally cloudy and contradictory. And all these writers, just like the
German æstheticians, founded their theories on a conception of the
Beautiful, understanding beauty in the sense of a something existing
absolutely, and more or less intermingled with Goodness or having one
and the same root. In England, almost simultaneously with Baumgarten,
even a little earlier, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Home, Burke, Hogarth, and
others, wrote on art.
According to Shaftesbury (1670-1713), “That which is beautiful is
harmonious and proportionable, what is harmonious and proportionable is
true, and what is at once both beautiful and true is of consequence
agreeable and good.”[13] Beauty, he taught, is recognised by the mind
only. God is fundamental beauty; beauty and goodness proceed from the
same fount.
So that, although Shaftesbury regards beauty as being something separate
from goodness, they again merge into something inseparable.
According to Hutcheson (1694-1747—“Inquiry into the Original of our
Ideas of Beauty and Virtue”), the aim of art is beauty, the essence of
which consists in evoking in us the perception of uniformity amid
variety. In the recognition of what is art we are guided by “an internal
sense.” This internal sense may be in contradiction to the ethical one.
So that, according to Hutcheson, beauty does not always correspond with
goodness, but separates from it and is sometimes contrary to it.[14]
According to Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782), beauty is that which is
pleasant. Therefore beauty is defined by taste alone. The standard of
true taste is that the maximum of richness, fulness, strength, and
variety of impression should be contained in the narrowest limits. That
is the ideal of a perfect work of art.
According to Burke (1729-1797—“Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of
our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful”), the sublime and beautiful,
which are the aim of art, have their origin in the promptings of
self-preservation and of society. These feelings, examined in their
source, are means for the maintenance of the race through the
individual. The first (self-preservation) is attained by nourishment,
defence, and war; the second (society) by intercourse and propagation.
Therefore self-defence, and war, which is bound up with it, is the
source of the sublime; sociability, and the sex-instinct, which is bound
up with it, is the source of beauty.[15]
Such were the chief English definitions of art and beauty in the
eighteenth century.
During that period, in France, the writers on art were Père André and
Batteux, with Diderot, D’Alembert, and, to some extent, Voltaire,
following later.
According to Père André (“Essai sur le Beau,” 1741), there are three
kinds of beauty—divine beauty, natural beauty, and artificial
beauty.[16]
According to Batteux (1713-1780), art consists in imitating the beauty
of nature, its aim being enjoyment.[17] Such is also Diderot’s
definition of art.
The French writers, like the English, consider that it is taste that
decides what is beautiful. And the laws of taste are not only not laid
down, but it is granted that they cannot be settled. The same view was
held by D’Alembert and Voltaire.[18]
According to the Italian æsthetician of that period, Pagano, art
consists in uniting the beauties’ dispersed in nature. The capacity to
perceive these beauties is taste, the capacity to bring them into one
whole is artistic genius. Beauty commingles with goodness, so that
beauty is goodness made visible, and goodness is inner beauty.[19]
According to the opinion of other Italians: Muratori
(1672-1750),—“_Riflessioni sopra il buon gusto intorno le science e le
arti_,”—and especially Spaletti,[20]—“_Saggio sopra la bellezza_”
(1765),—art amounts to an egotistical sensation, founded (as with Burke)
on the desire for self-preservation and society.
Among Dutch writers, Hemsterhuis (1720-1790), who had an influence on
the German æstheticians and on Goethe, is remarkable. According to him,
beauty is that which gives most pleasure, and that gives most pleasure
which gives us the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time.
Enjoyment of the beautiful, because it gives the greatest quantity of
perceptions in the shortest time, is the highest notion to which man can
attain.[21]
Such were the æsthetic theories outside Germany during the last century.
In Germany, after Winckelmann, there again arose a completely new
æsthetic theory, that of Kant (1724-1804), which more than all others
clears up what this conception of beauty, and consequently of art,
really amounts to.
The æsthetic teaching of Kant is founded as follows:—Man has a knowledge
of nature outside him and of himself in nature. In nature, outside
himself, he seeks for truth; in himself he seeks for goodness. The first
is an affair of pure reason, the other of practical reason (free-will).
Besides these two means of perception, there is yet the judging capacity
(_Urteilskraft_), which forms judgments without reasonings and produces
pleasure without desire (_Urtheil ohne Begriff und Vergnügen ohne
Begehren_). This capacity is the basis of æsthetic feeling. Beauty,
according to Kant, in its subjective meaning is that which, in general
and necessarily, without reasonings and without practical advantage,
pleases. In its objective meaning it is the form of a suitable object in
so far as that object is perceived without any conception of its
utility.[22]
Beauty is defined in the same way by the followers of Kant, among whom
was Schiller (1759-1805). According to Schiller, who wrote much on
æsthetics, the aim of art is, as with Kant, beauty, the source of which
is pleasure without practical advantage. So that art may be called a
game, not in the sense of an unimportant occupation, but in the sense of
a manifestation of the beauties of life itself without other aim than
that of beauty.[23]
Besides Schiller, the most remarkable of Kant’s followers in the sphere
of æsthetics was Wilhelm Humboldt, who, though he added nothing to the
definition of beauty, explained various forms of it,—the drama, music,
the comic, etc.[24]
After Kant, besides the second-rate philosophers, the writers on
æsthetics were Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and their followers. Fichte
(1762-1814) says that perception of the beautiful proceeds from this:
the world—_i.e._ nature—has two sides: it is the sum of our limitations,
and it is the sum of our free idealistic activity. In the first aspect
the world is limited, in the second aspect it is free. In the first
aspect every object is limited, distorted, compressed, confined—and we
see deformity; in the second we perceive its inner completeness,
vitality, regeneration—and we see beauty. So that the deformity or
beauty of an object, according to Fichte, depends on the point of view
of the observer. Beauty therefore exists, not in the world, but in the
beautiful soul (_schöner Geist_). Art is the manifestation of this
beautiful soul, and its aim is the education, not only of the mind—that
is the business of the _savant_; not only of the heart—that is the
affair of the moral preacher; but of the whole man. And so the
characteristic of beauty lies, not in anything external, but in the
presence of a beautiful soul in the artist.[25]
Following Fichte, and in the same direction, Friedrich Schlegel and Adam
Müller also defined beauty. According to Schlegel (1772—1829), beauty in
art is understood too incompletely, one-sidedly, and disconnectedly.
Beauty exists not only in art, but also in nature and in love; so that
the truly beautiful is expressed by the union of art, nature, and love.
Therefore, as inseparably one with aesthetic art, Schlegel acknowledges
moral and philosophic art.[26]
According to Adam Muller (1779-1829), there are two kinds of beauty; the
one, general beauty, which attracts people as the sun attracts the
planet—this is found chiefly in antique art—and the other, individual
beauty, which results from the observer himself becoming a sun
attracting beauty,—this is the beauty of modern art. A world in which
all contradictions are harmonised is the highest beauty. Every work of
art is a reproduction of this universal harmony.[27] The highest art is
the art of life.[28]
Next after Fichte and his followers came a contemporary of his, the
philosopher Schelling (1775-1854), who has had a great influence on the
æsthetic conceptions of our times. According to Schelling’s philosophy,
art is the production or result of that conception of things by which
the subject becomes its own object, or the object its own subject.
Beauty is the perception of the infinite in the finite. And the chief
characteristic of works of art is unconscious infinity. Art is the
uniting of the subjective with the objective, of nature with reason, of
the unconscious with the conscious, and therefore art is the highest
means of knowledge. Beauty is the contemplation of things in themselves
as they exist in the prototype (_In den Urbildern_). It is not the
artist who by his knowledge or skill produces the beautiful, but the
idea of beauty in him itself produces it.[29]
Of Schelling’s followers the most noticeable was Solger
(1780-1819—_Vorlesungen über Aesthetik_). According to him, the idea of
beauty is the fundamental idea of everything. In the world we see only
distortions of the fundamental idea, but art, by imagination, may lift
itself to the height of this idea. Art is therefore akin to
creation.[30]
According to another follower of Schelling, Krause (1781-1832), true,
positive beauty is the manifestation of the Idea in an individual form;
art is the actualisation of the beauty existing in the sphere of man’s
free spirit. The highest stage of art is the art of life, which directs
its activity towards the adornment of life so that it may be a beautiful
abode for a beautiful man.[31]
After Schelling and his followers came the new æsthetic doctrine of
Hegel, which is held to this day, consciously by many, but by the
majority unconsciously. This teaching is not only no clearer or better
defined than the preceding ones, but is, if possible, even more cloudy
and mystical.
According to Hegel (1770-1831), God manifests himself in nature and in
art in the form of beauty. God expresses himself in two ways: in the
object and in the subject, in nature and in spirit. Beauty is the
shining of the Idea through matter. Only the soul, and what pertains to
it, is truly beautiful; and therefore the beauty of nature is only the
reflection of the natural beauty of the spirit—the beautiful has only a
spiritual content. But the spiritual must appear in sensuous form. The
sensuous manifestation of spirit is only appearance (_schein_), and this
appearance is the only reality of the beautiful. Art is thus the
production of this appearance of the Idea, and is a means, together with
religion and philosophy, of bringing to consciousness and of expressing
the deepest problems of humanity and the highest truths of the spirit.
Truth and beauty, according to Hegel, are one and the same thing; the
difference being only that truth is the Idea itself as it exists in
itself, and is thinkable. The Idea, manifested externally, becomes to
the apprehension not only true but beautiful. The beautiful is the
manifestation of the Idea.[32]
Following Hegel came his many adherents, Weisse, Arnold Ruge,
Rosenkrantz, Theodor Vischer and others.
According to Weisse (1801-1867), art is the introduction (_Einbildung_)
of the absolute spiritual reality of beauty into external, dead,
indifferent matter, the perception of which latter apart from the beauty
brought into it presents the negation of all existence in itself
(_Negation alles Fürsichseins_).
In the idea of truth, Weisse explains, lies a contradiction between the
subjective and the objective sides of knowledge, in that an individual
_I_ discerns the Universal. This contradiction can be removed by a
conception that should unite into one the universal and the individual,
which fall asunder in our conceptions of truth. Such a conception would
be reconciled (_aufgehoben_) truth. Beauty is such a reconciled
truth.[33]
According to Ruge (1802-1880), a strict follower of Hegel, beauty is the
Idea expressing itself. The spirit, contemplating itself, either finds
itself expressed completely, and then that full expression of itself is
beauty; or incompletely, and then it feels the need to alter this
imperfect expression of itself, and becomes creative art.[34]
According to Vischer (1807-1887), beauty is the Idea in the form of a
finite phenomenon. The Idea itself is not indivisible, but forms a
system of ideas, which may be represented by ascending and descending
lines. The higher the idea the more beauty it contains; but even the
lowest contains beauty, because it forms an essential link of the
system. The highest form of the Idea is personality, and therefore the
highest art is that which has for its subject-matter the highest
personality.[35]
Such were the theories of the German æstheticians in the Hegelian
direction, but they did not monopolise æsthetic dissertations. In
Germany, side by side and simultaneously with the Hegelian theories,
there appeared theories of beauty not only independent of Hegel’s
position (that beauty is the manifestation of the Idea), but directly
contrary to this view, denying and ridiculing it. Such was the line
taken by Herbart and, more particularly, by Schopenhauer.
According to Herbart (1776-1841), there is not, and cannot be, any such
thing as beauty existing in itself. What does exist is only our opinion,
and it is necessary to find the base of this opinion (_Ästhetisches
Elementarurtheil_). Such bases are connected with our impressions. There
are certain relations which we term beautiful; and art consists in
finding these relations, which are simultaneous in painting, the plastic
art, and architecture, successive and simultaneous in music, and purely
successive in poetry. In contradiction to the former æstheticians,
Herbart holds that objects are often beautiful which express nothing at
all, as, for instance, the rainbow, which is beautiful for its lines and
colours, and not for its mythological connection with Iris or Noah’s
rainbow.[36]
Another opponent of Hegel was Schopenhauer, who denied Hegel’s whole
system, his æsthetics included.
According to Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Will objectivizes itself in the
world on various planes; and although the higher the plane on which it
is objectivized the more beautiful it is, yet each plane has its own
beauty. Renunciation of one’s individuality and contemplation of one of
these planes of manifestation of Will gives us a perception of beauty.
All men, says Schopenhauer, possess the capacity to objectivize the Idea
on different planes. The genius of the artist has this capacity in a
higher degree, and therefore makes a higher beauty manifest.[37]
After these more eminent writers there followed, in Germany, less
original and less influential ones, such as Hartmann, Kirkmann,
Schnasse, and, to some extent, Helmholtz (as an æsthetician), Bergmann,
Jungmann, and an innumerable host of others.
According to Hartmann (1842), beauty lies, not in the external world,
nor in “the thing in itself,” neither does it reside in the soul of man,
but it lies in the “seeming” (_Schein_) produced by the artist. The
thing in itself is not beautiful, but is transformed into beauty by the
artist.[38]
According to Schnasse (1798-1875), there is no perfect beauty in the
world. In nature there is only an approach towards it. Art gives what
nature cannot give. In the energy of the free _ego_, conscious of
harmony not found in nature, beauty is disclosed.[39]
Kirkmann wrote on experimental aesthetics. All aspects of history in his
system are joined by pure chance. Thus, according to Kirkmann
(1802-1884), there are six realms of history:—The realm of Knowledge, of
Wealth, of Morality, of Faith, of Politics, and of Beauty; and activity
in the last-named realm is art.[40]
According to Helmholtz (1821), who wrote on beauty as it relates to
music, beauty in musical productions is attained only by following
unalterable laws. These laws are not known to the artist; so that beauty
is manifested by the artist unconsciously, and cannot be subjected to
analysis.[41]
According to Bergmann (1840) (_Ueber das Schöne_, 1887), to define
beauty objectively is impossible. Beauty is only perceived subjectively,
and therefore the problem of æsthetics is to define what pleases
whom.[42]
According to Jungmann (d. 1885), firstly, beauty is a suprasensible
quality of things; secondly, beauty produces in us pleasure by merely
being contemplated; and, thirdly, beauty is the foundation of love.[43]
The æsthetic theories of the chief representatives of France, England,
and other nations in recent times have been the following:—
In France, during this period, the prominent writers on æsthetics were
Cousin, Jouffroy, Pictet, Ravaisson, Lévêque.
Cousin (1792-1867) was an eclectic, and a follower of the German
idealists. According to his theory, beauty always has a moral
foundation. He disputes the doctrine that art is imitation and that the
beautiful is what pleases. He affirms that beauty may be defined
objectively, and that it essentially consists in variety in unity.[44]
After Cousin came Jouffroy (1796-1842), who was a pupil of Cousin’s and
also a follower of the German æstheticians. According to his definition,
beauty is the expression of the invisible by those natural signs which
manifest it. The visible world is the garment by means of which we see
beauty.[45]
The Swiss writer Pictet repeated Hegel and Plato, supposing beauty to
exist in the direct and free manifestation of the divine Idea revealing
itself in sense forms.[46]
Lévêque was a follower of Schelling and Hegel. He holds that beauty is
something invisible behind nature—a force or spirit revealing itself in
ordered energy.[47]
Similar vague opinions about the nature of beauty were expressed by the
French metaphysician Ravaisson, who considered beauty to be the ultimate
aim and purpose of the world. “_La beauté la plus divine et
principalement la plus parfaite contient le secret du monde._”[48] And
again:—_“Le monde entier est l’œuvre d’une beauté absolue, qui n’est la
cause des choses que par l’amour qu’elle met en elles_.”
I purposely abstain from translating these metaphysical expressions,
because, however cloudy the Germans may be, the French, once they absorb
the theories of the Germans and take to imitating them, far surpass them
in uniting heterogeneous conceptions into one expression, and putting
forward one meaning or another indiscriminately. For instance, the
French philosopher Renouvier, when discussing beauty, says:—“_Ne
craignons pas de dire qu’une vérité qui ne serait pas belle, ne serait
qu’un jeu logique de notre esprit et que la seule vérité solide et digne
de ce nom c’est la beauté._”[49]
Besides the æsthetic idealists who wrote and still write under the
influence of German philosophy, the following recent writers have also
influenced the comprehension of art and beauty in France: Taine, Guyau,
Cherbuliez, Coster, and Véron.
According to Taine (1828-1893), beauty is the manifestation of the
essential characteristic of any important idea more completely than it
is expressed in reality.[50]
Guyau (1854-1888) taught that beauty is not something exterior to the
object itself,—is not, as it were, a parasitic growth on it,—but is
itself the very blossoming forth of that on which it appears. Art is the
expression of reasonable and conscious life, evoking in us both the
deepest consciousness of existence and the highest feelings and loftiest
thoughts. Art lifts man from his personal life into the universal life,
by means, not only of participation in the same ideas and beliefs, but
also by means of similarity in feeling.[51]
According to Cherbuliez, art is an activity, (1) satisfying our innate
love of forms (_apparences_), (2) endowing these forms with ideas, (3)
affording pleasure alike to our senses, heart, and reason. Beauty is not
inherent in objects, but is an act of our souls. Beauty is an illusion;
there is no absolute beauty. But what we consider characteristic and
harmonious appears beautiful to us.
Coster held that the ideas of the beautiful, the good, and the true are
innate. These ideas illuminate our minds and are identical with God, who
is Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. The idea of Beauty includes unity of
essence, variety of constitutive elements, and order, which brings unity
into the various manifestations of life.[52]
For the sake of completeness, I will further cite some of the very
latest writings upon art.
_La psychologie du Beau et de l’Art, par Mario Pilo_ (1895), says that
beauty is a product of our physical feelings. The aim of art is
pleasure, but this pleasure (for some reason) he considers to be
necessarily highly moral.
The _Essai sur l’art contemporain, par Fierens Gevaert_ (1897), says
that art rests on its connection with the past, and on the religious
ideal of the present which the artist holds when giving to his work the
form of his individuality.
Then again, Sar Peladan’s _L’art idéaliste et mystique_ (1894) says that
beauty is one of the manifestations of God. “_Il n’y a pas d’autre
Réalité que Dieu, n’y a pas d’autre Vérité que Dieu, il n’y a pas
d’autre Beauté, que Dieu_” (p. 33). This book is very fantastic and very
illiterate, but is characteristic in the positions it takes up, and
noticeable on account of a certain success it is having with the younger
generation in France.
All the æsthetics diffused in France up to the present time are similar
in kind, but among them Véron’s _L’esthétique_ (1878) forms an
exception, being reasonable and clear. That work, though it does not
give an exact definition of art, at least rids æsthetics of the cloudy
conception of an absolute beauty.
According to Véron (1825-1889), art is the manifestation of emotion
transmitted externally by a combination of lines, forms, colours, or by
a succession of movements, sounds, or words subjected to certain
rhythms.[53]
In England, during this period, the writers on æsthetics define beauty
more and more frequently, not by its own qualities, but by taste, and
the discussion about beauty is superseded by a discussion on taste.
After Reid (1704-1796), who acknowledged beauty as being entirely
dependent on the spectator, Alison, in his _Essay on the Nature and
Principles of Taste_ (1790), proved the same thing. From another side
this was also asserted by Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), the grandfather of
the celebrated Charles Darwin.
He says that we consider beautiful that which is connected in our
conception with what we love. Richard Knight’s work, _An Analytical
Inquiry into the Principles of Taste_, also tends in the same direction.
Most of the English theories of æsthetics are on the same lines. The
prominent writers on æsthetics in England during the present century
have been Charles Darwin, (to some extent), Herbert Spencer, Grant
Allen, Ker, and Knight.
According to Charles Darwin (1809-1882—_Descent of Man_, 1871), beauty
is a feeling natural not only to man but also to animals, and
consequently to the ancestors of man. Birds adorn their nests and esteem
beauty in their mates. Beauty has an influence on marriages. Beauty
includes a variety of diverse conceptions. The origin of the art of
music is the call of the males to the females.[54]
According to Herbert Spencer (b. 1820), the origin of art is play, a
thought previously expressed by Schiller. In the lower animals all the
energy of life is expended in life-maintenance and race-maintenance; in
man, however, there remains, after these needs are satisfied, some
superfluous strength. This excess is used in play, which passes over
into art. Play is an imitation of real activity, so is art. The sources
of æsthetic pleasure are threefold:—(1) That “which exercises the
faculties affected in the most complete ways, with the fewest drawbacks
from excess of exercise,” (2) “the difference of a stimulus in large
amount, which awakens a glow of agreeable feeling,” (3) the partial
revival of the same, with special combinations.[55]
In Todhunter’s _Theory of the Beautiful_ (1872), beauty is infinite
loveliness, which we apprehend both by reason and by the enthusiasm of
love. The recognition of beauty as being such depends on taste; there
can be no criterion for it. The only approach to a definition is found
in culture. (What culture is, is not defined.) Intrinsically, art—that
which affects us through lines, colours, sounds, or words—is not the
product of blind forces, but of reasonable ones, working, with mutual
helpfulness, towards a reasonable aim. Beauty is the reconciliation of
contradictions.[56]
Grant Allen is a follower of Spencer, and in his _Physiological
Æsthetics_ (1877) he says that beauty has a physical origin. Æsthetic
pleasures come from the contemplation of the beautiful, but the
conception of beauty is obtained by a physiological process. The origin
of art is play; when there is a superfluity of physical strength man
gives himself to play; when there is a superfluity of receptive power
man gives himself to art. The beautiful is that which affords the
maximum of stimulation with the minimum of waste. Differences in the
estimation of beauty proceed from taste. Taste can be educated. We must
have faith in the judgments “of the finest-nurtured and most
discriminative” men. These people form the taste of the next
generation.[57]
According to Ker’s _Essay on the Philosophy of Art_ (1883), beauty
enables us to make part of the objective world intelligible to ourselves
without being troubled by reference to other parts of it, as is
inevitable for science. So that art destroys the opposition between the
one and the many, between the law and its manifestation, between the
subject and its object, by uniting them. Art is the revelation and
vindication of freedom, because it is free from the darkness and
incomprehensibility of finite things.[58]
According to Knight’s _Philosophy of the Beautiful_, Part II. (1893),
beauty is (as with Schelling) the union of object and subject, the
drawing forth from nature of that which is cognate to man, and the
recognition in oneself of that which is common to all nature.
The opinions on beauty and on Art here mentioned are far from exhausting
what has been written on the subject. And every day fresh writers on
æsthetics arise, in whose disquisitions appear the same enchanted
confusion and contradictoriness in defining beauty. Some, by inertia,
continue the mystical æsthetics of Baumgarten and Hegel with sundry
variations; others transfer the question to the region of subjectivity,
and seek for the foundation of the beautiful in questions of taste;
others—the æstheticians of the very latest formation—seek the origin of
beauty in the laws of physiology; and finally, others again investigate
the question quite independently of the conception of beauty. Thus,
Sully in his _Sensation and Intuition: Studies in Psychology and
Æsthetics_ (1874), dismisses the conception of beauty altogether, art,
by his definition, being the production of some permanent object or
passing action fitted to supply active enjoyment to the producer, and a
pleasurable impression to a number of spectators or listeners, quite
apart from any personal advantage derived from it.[59]
Footnote 10:
Schasler, p. 361.
Footnote 11:
Schasler, p. 369.
Footnote 12:
Schasler, pp. 388-390.
Footnote 13:
Knight, _Philosophy of the Beautiful_, i. pp. 165, 166.
Footnote 14:
Schasler, p. 289. Knight, pp. 168, 169.
Footnote 15:
R. Kralik, _Weltschönheit, Versuch einer allgemeinen Aesthetik_, pp.
304-306.
Footnote 16:
Knight, p. 101.
Footnote 17:
Schasler, p. 316.
Footnote 18:
Knight, pp. 102-104.
Footnote 19:
R. Kralik, p. 124.
Footnote 20:
Spaletti, Schasler, p. 328.
Footnote 21:
Schasler, pp. 331-333.
Footnote 22:
Schasler, pp. 525-528.
Footnote 23:
Knight, pp. 61-63.
Footnote 24:
Schasler, pp. 740-743.
Footnote 25:
Schasler, pp. 769-771.
Footnote 26:
Schasler, pp. 786, 787.
Footnote 27:
Kralik, p. 148.
Footnote 28:
Kralik, p. 820.
Footnote 29:
Schasler, pp. 828, 829, 834-841.
Footnote 30:
Schasler, p. 891.
Footnote 31:
Schasler, p. 917.
Footnote 32:
Schasler, pp. 946, 1085, 984, 985, 990.
Footnote 33:
Schasler, pp. 966, 655, 956.
Footnote 34:
Schasler, p. 1017.
Footnote 35:
Schasler, pp. 1065, 1066.
Footnote 36:
Schasler, pp. 1097-1100.
Footnote 37:
Schasler, pp. 1124, 1107.
Footnote 38:
Knight, pp. 81, 82.
Footnote 39:
Knight, p. 83.
Footnote 40:
Schasler, p. 1121.
Footnote 41:
Knight, pp. 85, 86.
Footnote 42:
Knight, p. 88.
Footnote 43:
Knight, p. 88.
Footnote 44:
Knight, p. 112.
Footnote 45:
Knight, p. 116.
Footnote 46:
Knight, pp. 118, 119.
Footnote 47:
Knight, pp. 123, 124.
Footnote 48:
_La philosophie en France_, p. 232.
Footnote 49:
_Du fondement de l’induction._
Footnote 50:
_Philosophie de l’art_, vol. i. 1893, p. 47.
Footnote 51:
Knight, p. 139-141.
Footnote 52:
Knight, pp. 134.
Footnote 53:
_L’esthétique_, p. 106.
Footnote 54:
Knight, p. 238.
Footnote 55:
Knight, pp. 239, 240.
Footnote 56:
Knight, pp. 240-243.
Footnote 57:
Knight, pp. 250-252.
Footnote 58:
Knight, pp. 258, 259.
Footnote 59:
Knight, p. 243.
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