As in metaphysics and in ethics, so also in esthetics it is the great genius of Kant (q.v. 1724-1804), which unites the twin streams of British and of Continental thought into a single mighty current. He combines the apriorism of Baumgarten with the empiricism of Home. Like Home, he finds the criterion of the beau tiful in some kind of pleasure which it excites, but he does not consider this pleasure as a mere feeling. Beauty, he maintains, is that which universally and necessarily arouses dis interested satisfaction by its own form. Or again, he states that whatever pleases univer sally and without a concept is beautiful. Beauty then is determined by the pleasure it excites in us, but this pleasure must not apply to the sensory qualities of the object, but rather to their mere arrangement, and must be universally and necessarily determined by this arrangement. The nature of the arrangement in question is indicated by Kant when he says that a thing is beautiful when it corresponds to the nature of the cognitive faculty, or when it brings harmony among human faculties. Kant denies that an absolute a priori treatment of the various types of beauty is possible, but he nevertheless attempts what practically amounts to this. One of his most important contributions to aesthetics is that of making the way for a true appreciation of the sublime. He finds that the sublime is that which by its quantitative or qualitative mightiness shocks us and fills us with pain at our own smallness, but then fills us with a feeling of the exaltation of the greatness of our moral nature, which is mightier and loftier than all the splendors of the outer world.
While Kant emphasizes the formal side of the beautiful to the exclusion of the material, the poet Schiller (q.v., 1759-1805) finds the na ture of the artistic activity in a mediation be tween the matter-impulse and the form-impulse, between desire and reason. Art, then, consists of a sort of balancing or play of all the mental faculties. This suggestion was adopted by Spencer (q.v., 1820-1903), who attributes to this play the function of preventing thi higher faculties from disuse and the atrophy conse quent thereon. The fact that the higher we go in the scale of life the less completely do the bare necessities of life consume the energies of the individual furnishes both the need and the opportunity for a progressive increase in the attention given to play and to esthetic appre ciation.
In the great schools of idealistic philosophy which immediately follow Kant aesthetics plays a large part. According to Hegel (q.v., 1770 1831), art is a synthesis of theoretical and prac tical action, or subject and object, of cognition and action, of conscious and unconscious ac tivity, of freedom and necessity, of genius and deliberation. Beauty is the shining of the Ab solute (cf. the One of Plotinus) through the veil of sense-experience. It is through this in
tervention of a sensuous medium that beauty differs from truth. The further developments of the Hegelian aesthetics are essentially Platonic.
That arch-pessimist Schopenhauer (q.v., 1788-1860) finds in beauty his respite from the toil and trouble of the world. Beauty is for him the expression of an Idea. Everything is in some measure beautiful. When we con template the beautiful we lose our individ uality and will, and in so far our dependence on the World-Will. The appreciation of art gives us a partial attainment of the Buddhist Nirvana. The disappearance of will from con sciousness takes place on the contemplation of the sublime by an active effort on our part; while when we devote our attention to the beautiful, will merely vanishes of itself.
In Herbart (q.v., 1776-1841) we find a cer tain affinity both to British subjectivism and to Kant. Beauty, he considers, arouses an in voluntary and disinterested judgment of ap proval. We transfer this predicate of the judg ment to the object and call it beauty. This ca pacity of judgment, or taste, differs from de sire in that it can judge that which is present as well as that which is absent. The essential character of the beautiful is its form.
In Britain the early and middle part of the last century received relatively little influence from Kant. Dugald Stewart (1753-1828) and Bain (q.v., 1818-1903) develop a view which shares in all the hedonism of Home and Burke. Bain follows Alison and Jeffrey in attributing to association an important place in the genesis of the sense of beauty. Although in all these writers there is much that is relevant to the modern discussion, this is so bound up with a false and unwieldy psychology that it is hard to isolate.
It is not worth while to arrange the writers of the middle and latter thirds of the last cen tury historically. In England we have that great, paradoxical, sincere genius Ruskin (q.v., 1819-1900). °Art for art's sake' is a doctrine essentially repugnant to him. According to him, the three functions of art are to enforce the religious sentiments of mankind, to perfect their ethical state, and to do them material serv ice. It will be that his opinion agrees closely with the practice of that period which furnished so much of his inspiration, the Mid dle Ages, for then art, like philosophy, was ancilla Theologize.
In Taine (q.v., 1828-93) as in Spencer, the biological, anthropological consideration comes strongly to the front. Art is largely a matter of environment, and there can be, for example, no talk of the Flemish type of art as bad art, or of the Italian type as good art. The func tion of art is to make predominant the essential character of the object it depicts. A Dutch landscape is excellent in so far as it truly veys to us the misty, foggy air, the rich, marshy fields, the careful husbandry of the Rhine delta.