Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/47



Heydenreich, K. H. In attempting to estimate this author's numerous writings, one must take account of his character. He was a man of many-sided capability, but too superficial to achieve greatness in any subject,—lacking the necessary endurance and self-denial, and the wisdom of self-restraint. He was susceptible to the beautiful in every shape, and easily roused to enthusiasm, but too much inclined to set eulogistic phrasing in the place of thought; of a religious disposition, though rather subject to momentary outbreaks of religious feeling, of a more or less aesthetic kind, than endowed with a consistently religious temperament, which would manifest its increasing influence on the conduct of the affairs of life, as life went on; and gifted with a lively imagination, which never failed to render the march of his style stately and imposing, but without the habit of self-correction, which just this gift renders so necessary, because it alone can guard the writer from the sacrifice of content to attractiveness of form. His facility in giving expression to his thoughts combined with perpetual shortness of money to make him a failure. To satisfy booksellers, who had made him advances, and other creditors, he made a business of religion and enthusiasm. He was by nature but little competent to treat of meta-physico-epistemological problems or the last questions of philosophy, but in the fields of aesthetics, ethics and philosophy of religion his performance is often worthy of notice, and he could undoubtedly have left behind him work of lasting value in these departments, had not his heedlessness and lack of character led to physical and mental break-down in early life. Historically most important are his labours in aesthetics. He applied to them Kant's fundamental thought, of looking everywhere for formal a priori, and therefore universally valid elements, at a time when Kant, had, it is true restricted (R. Vb), but not yet publicly recanted his hard saying as to the criteria of our judgment of the beautiful (at the commencement of the Aesthetik of R. Va),—a saying which excluded not only these criteria, but also every separate aesthetic judgment from the domain of science proper.

674) Heydenreich, K. H.: Grundriss einer neuen Untersuchung über die Empfindungen des Erhabenen. In the N. Ph. Mg. 1789. I, I, pp. 86-96.

675) Heydenreich: Entstehung der Aesthetik, Kritik der Baumgartenschen, genaue Prüfung des Kantischen Einwurfs gegen die