Having proceeded thus far, he might have gone further,
and realized that the material of history is always the particular in
its particularity, that of art what is and always is identical. But he
preferred to execute a variation on the general motive that was in
fashion at this time.
The fashion of the day! It rules in philosophy as elsewhere, and we are
now about to see the most rigid and arid of analysts, the leader of the
so-called _realist_ school, or school of _exact science_ in Germany in
the nineteenth century, plunge headlong into aesthetic mysticism.
G.F. Herbart (1813) begins his Aesthetic by freeing it from the
discredit attaching to Metaphysic and to Psychology. He declares that
the only true way of understanding art is to study particular examples
of the beautiful and to note what they reveal as to its essence.
We shall now see what came of Herbart's analysis of these examples of
beauty, and how far he succeeded in remaining free of Metaphysic.
For Herbart, beauty consists of _relations_. The science of Aesthetic
consists of an enumeration of all the fundamental relations between
colours, lines, tones, thoughts, and will. But for him these relations
are not empirical or physiological. They cannot therefore be studied in
a laboratory, because thought and the will form part of them, and these
belong as much to Ethics as to the external world.
Pages:
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317