Herbart's psychology, to which Steinthal adhered, did not afford him any
means for this identification. Herbart separated logic from psychology,
calling it a normative science; he failed to discern the exact limits
between feeling and spiritual formation, psyche or soul, and spirit, and
to see that one of these spiritual formations is logical thought or
activity, which is not a code of laws imposed from without. For Herbart,
Aesthetic, as we know, was a code of beautiful formal relations. Thus
Steinthal, following Herbart in psychology, was bound to look upon Art
as a beautifying of thought, Linguistic as the science of speech,
Rhetoric and Aesthetic as the science of beautiful speech.
Steinthal never realized that to speak is to speak well or beautifully,
under penalty of _not_ speaking, and that the revolution which he and
Humboldt had effected in the conception of language must inevitably
react upon and transform Poetic, Rhetoric, and Aesthetic.
Thus, despite so many efforts of conscientious analysis on the part of
Humboldt and of Steinthal, the unity of language and of poetry, and the
identification of the science of language and the science of poetry
still found its least imperfect expression in the prophetic aphorisms of
Vico.
The philosophical movement in Germany from the last quarter of the
eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth, notwithstanding
its many errors, is yet so notable and so imposing with the philosophers
already considered, as to merit the first place in the European thought
of that period.
Pages:
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329