Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume I.djvu/173

 .ESTHETICS 153 of the patient, his disease, and the mode of re- covery. The priests of these temples formed the race of Asclepiadae, or children of ^Escu- lapius. They were the only regular physicians of antiquity. Formerly the priesthood of ^Es- culapius was hereditary, but in later times the priests took pupils and initiated them into the mysteries of medicine. J2SOP (Gr. AZo-wTTOf), the fabulist, born about the year 620 B. 0., was convicted of the crime of sacrilege while ambassador of Croesus at Delphi, and thrown from a precipice, about 564. His birthplace is not certainly known, though Phrygia is generally mentioned. While young he was brought to Athens and sold as a slave, but finally received his freedom from his mas- ter, ladmon the Samian. So high was his reputation as a writer that Croesus, king of Lydia, invited him to reside at his court. He visited Athens during the reign of Pisistratus, where he wrote the fable of "Jupiter and the Frogs." His genuine works have perished, the excellent collection going by his name being either imitations or entirely spurious. The current stories concerning him are taken from a life written by Maximus Planudes, a monk of the 14th century, and prefixed to a volume of fables ascribed to his pen. In this work he is described as hideously ugly and misshapen, which statement is doubtless entirely false, as no personal defects of the kind are mentioned by any classical author. It is rendered still more improbable by the circumstance that his statue was executed for the city of Athens by the famous sculptor Lysippus. jESOPtS, ( liMlius, a famous tragic actor at Eome, died at a great age about 50 B. C. He was the contemporary of Koscius, and with him the instructor of Cicero in oratory. He was accustomed to identify himself so com- pletely with his part, that once while enacting the character of Atreus, and plotting how to avenge himself on Thyestes, he struck dead with his truncheon one of the stage attendants. He realized a large fortune by his acting, which his son squandered in extravagance and luxury. .ESTHETICS (Gr. aladnr^, perceptive, from aiaddvofiat, I feel, or perceive by the senses), the science of the beautiful, first recognized as an in- dependent branch of philosophy about the mid- dle of the last century. Even the ancient phi- losophers had speculated upon the beautiful. Pythagoras tried to express its form in numeri- cal proportions ; Socrates and Plato united it with the good, and called the highest ideal by the compound name " kalokagathon " ; Aris- totle strove to give its laws in formulas ; and later metaphysicians, down to the recent schools, continued these attempts to define its conditions and effect. But Baumgarten, a dis- ciple of the German philosopher Wolf, and in 1740 professor of philosophy at Frankfort-on- the-Oder, first established its claims to the dig- nicy of a separate science. He held that be- sides the divisions adopted by Wolf's system, namely, the capacity of knowing (intellect), the ultimate ideal and aim of which is the true, and the capacity of acting (will), the ul- timate aim of which is the good, there exists also in the human mind a capacity of feeling, or perceiving by the senses (sensibility), the ultimate ideal and aim of which is the beau- tiful. As logic determines the laws of intellect, and ethics those of will or action, so there should be a branch of philosophy, which he called aesthetics, to determine the laws of sensibility. He made the mistake of consider- ing this faculty, by which men perceive the beautiful, a lower capacity founded in the mere exercise of sense (cognitio sensitivd) but Kant, who in his Kritik der UrtheiUJcraft accepted the general division given above, cor- rected this, and showed that the aesthetic per- ception, for which the senses form only a means, really falls within the province of the high power of judgment. After 1742 Baum- garten lectured regularly on aesthetics, and its place as a philosophical science was almost universally recognized. In this purely abstract psychological consideration of the subject he followed Kant, who held that the beautiful was the haftnony between the understanding and the imagination; and after him several other German philosophers of much less note. He- gel's great work (Aesthetik) also treats the subject from this point of view ; and Fichte belonged entirely to the ideal school of writ- ers on the aesthetic perception. But the name aesthetics soon began to be received in a more practical acceptation, and to be especially ap- plied to that part of the science of the beauti- ful which relates to the expression and em- bodiment of beauty by art. Schiller first turned speculation in this direction ; and Schelling, though devoting much study to the abstract, still contributed largely to the useful endeavor to bring the beautiful to the actual knowledge of men, rather than to analyze its psychological effects ; and from their time this approach to the identification of the ideal and real has formed the chief and ultimate aim of the study of aesthetics. Two widely different theories as to the realization of the beautiful in art have been adopted by the different schools. One, the method d priori, strives by abstract reasoning to determine the laws of the beautiful, with which artists must comply ; the other, the method d posteriori, seeks for the beautiful in existing works of art, and from the results of such investigation makes practical rules for future guidance. The for- mer has among its adherents most of the Ger- man, and the latter nearly all the English and French writers on aesthetics. Those German authors whose works best deserve study are as follows: A. G. Baumgarten, ^Esthetica (Frank- fort -on -the -Oder, 1750); Georg Friedrich Meier, Anfangsgrunde oiler schonen Wissen- schaften (1748) ; Hegel, Aesthetik (Berlin, ed. 1842-'3) ; Weisse, System der Aesthetik (Leip- sic, 1830); Schiller, Aesthetische Briefe, in Cotta's editions of his works ; Zimmermann,