dead matter so as to make it become an expression of itself. This creative reason is the transcendentally beautiful; matter transformed by it is the empirically beautiful. Artistic production is not, however, necessarily limited to the copying of the natural products of the supreme reason. The human reason, by virtue of its participation in the divine, may so transform objects that they shall become more beautiful than they are in their naturalness. Art is thus raised from the stage of imitation to that of idealization, although idealization is taken mystically.
No important aesthetic speculations come from mediaeval writers. Mr. Bosanquet, in his History of Æsthetic, has satisfactorily explained this comparative barrenness of the Middle Ages in æsthetis theory. It was not due, as the traditional view of mediævalism would seem to imply, to the deadness of that period in things intellectual and spiritual, but to the enormous tension of the higher life, which busied itself so absorbingly in practical creative activity as to leave no leisure for reflection upon its own work. Media;valism was engaged in the problem of building the foundations for a new life, and, therefore, for a new art. The art of classical antiquity was comparatively simple; the perfection of its form was made possible so early by its limited ambition. In general, it sought to do justice merely to the beauty of form. It was a successful criticism of life, only because it criticised one aspect of life, leaving the richness and variety of its contents to the one side. But Romanticism as a creative principle in art began to work early in the Middle Ages. The wilder, more turbulent spirit of the Teutonic barbarians would not brook confinement within the narrow lines drawn by classic masters, and for a whole millennium was wrestling with the practical problem of making art richer by the incorporation within it of all the phases of nature and of human life, which classic art, with true instinct for its own essential limitations, had ignored ; and just as ancient æsthetic theory was not constructed until the returns from ancient practice were all in, so modern aesthetic theory could not be supplied with its data till modern art had become to a great extent a completed achievement, challenging reflection to concern itself with the discovery of the principles involved. Mr. Bosanquet is, perhaps, right in representing Shakespeare as being the last of the great artists in the long succession that began with the architect of St. Sophia; Shakespeare succeeded in the great common endeavor to render into art life and nature in all their infinite complexity, and yet to make the rendition as unitary in its effect as were the art products of the golden age of Ælschylus and Pheidias. In him the wheel of artistic creation had come full circle, and after him, therefore, the wheel of fpsthetic theory could begin to turn. But there was another reason why, after the time of Shakespeare, aesthetic theory should have become a great need. Not only did all the richness of mcdiawal and modern artistic achievement challenge the theorist to study it, but the art of classical times had come to life again in the great archæologieal discoveries of the eighteenth century. The literary renaissance of antiquity in the fifteenth century was now followed by the resurrection of the plastic arts of Greece and Kome. The striking contrast between the formal severity of the antique and the freedom of the modern demanded that an inquiry should be instituted which should succeed in correlating, and, by correlating, succeed in justifying the two strikingly different types. This demand that theory should do justice to the principles of beauty incorporated in art was reenforced from the side of philosophical speculation.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time of tremendous philosophical energy; and as the idealism of modern philosophy became more and more concrete, it was inevitable that aesthetic questions should force themselves more and more upon the attention of philosophy. Thus, as we find Lessing and Winckelmann representing predominantly an interest in art for art's sake, so we find Baumgarten and Kant representing an interest in art for philosophy's sake. These two tendencies united in working out a modern aesthetic theory, which was finally to be based on solid scientific grounds with the aid of experimental psychology. The appreciation of the aesthetic significance of all these contribvitions cannot be attempted here. Suffice it to say that Lessing made an important addition to aesthetic theory by marking ofl' the boundaries of poetry from the plastic arts. The medium of the former is time, and that of the latter is space. The former can represent action, and is, therefore, capable of expressiveness, whereas the plastic arts are limited to the treatment of formal beauty and of the beauty of colors. The ugly is out of place in the plastic arts, because, once represented in painting or statuary, it gets a permanence that becomes revolting. This thought might be illustrated by referring to a line of Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, "Forever wilt thou love and she be fair." There is a subtle but powerful delight ministered by this insistence upon the immortality of youth and love, caught and made perpetual by the ceramic art. But change the motif; let it be: "Forever wilt thou loathe and she be foul," how quickly the thought of the abidingness of the unpleasant creates disgust with the pottery, however skillful may be the representation of this phase of life! Baumgarten's significance was more that of a pioneer and name-giver than that of an important contributor. Carrying out the Cartesian idea that sense is confused thought, he added to the Wolflian (see Wolff) philosophical encyclopaedia, which included ontology, cosmology, ethics, and psychology—all sciences of clear thought—a new discipline dealing with obscure thought; and he gave to the work in which he treats this new subject the title Æsthetica. This was the first time that the term was employed to designate the science which has since Baumgartcn's day quite constantly been called by this name. But great as is the convenience of having a name to give to a science, an advance in the way of a satisfactory handling of this science could hardly be expected from a thinker who appreciated beauty only as an imperfect imaging of what is intellectual.
Kant (q.v.) has been an important factor in determining the speculations of modern philosophical aesthetics, although what he calls aesthetics in his famous Critique of Pure Reason is something entirely dilTerent from what to-day passes under that name. He strikes, in his Critique of the Faculty of Judgment, a distinctly modern note in emphasizing the affective
