Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/81

Rh In Kant, Schiller, and Goethe, or rather through them, the data of aesthetic were brought face to face with the metaphysical problem, and the union of Kant's abstract aesthetic with the appreciation of art as an expression of the human spirit, sharing its development, gave rise to modern concrete theory. This highly abstract summary introduces us to that portion of Mr. Bosanquet's work which by its very familiarity and present interest is most difficult to reproduce in a review. I can only call attention to a few of its salient features. In the first place the general method of treatment cannot be too highly commended. After an excellent account of the Critique of Judgment in its aesthetic part, Mr. Bosanquet goes on to Schiller and Goethe. He shows how Schiller being interested in the same problem from aesthetic reasons that appealed to Kant from metaphysical reasons, went on to remove the essential limitation of Kant, and thus opened the way for a further development in metaphysics as well as in aesthetic and concrete criticism. Certainly one of our greatest needs at present is a closer connection between what is now relegated on one side to technical histories of philosophy, and on the other to histories of literature and general 'culture.' The need is equally pressing in order to save the human and practical interest of the history of philosophy, now tending under the influence of floods of monographs to degenerate into purely 'scientific' material divorced from human life, and to save histories of literature from a sentimental character, because of their divorce from the main current of the intellectual development of humanity. It is not too much to say that Mr. Bosanquet in his allignment of Kant, Schiller, Goethe, and Hegel, has done more than any English writer to put these matters on their right footing. Were it not for the inexplicable omission of Herder's name, this statement could be broadened still further. In the second place, I wish to call particular attention to Mr. Bosanquet's conception of idealism, since the detail of his treatment is obviously controlled by his general agreement with the positions of objective idealism. "The central principle of idealism is that nothing can be made into what it is not capable of being. Therefore when certain syntheses and developments are actual, it is idle to deny that they are objective or immanent in the nature of the parts developed." Or, if I may venture to enlarge upon the definition, when it is shown that beauty or morality are products of a purely 'natural' development, their reality is in nowise impugned; the reality is neither in the first state merely as such, nor in the latter in its isolation, but in the law or movement which holds all in one unity. Finally the terms with which the specific problem common to both metaphysic and aesthetic may be expressed, are how to reconcile feeling and reason; how sense material may be pregnant