with meaning — this problem being first a practical one and only afterwards a theoretical one.
Mr. Bosanquet treats the aesthetic of the nineteenth century under three rubrics: first there is a chapter devoted to "exact aesthetic," understanding by this an attempt to get at the formal features which constitute any object beautiful. This chapter includes writers seemingly as diverse as Schopenhauer and Stumpf, Herbart and Fechner. Then comes a chapter dealing, under the caption of "methodical completion of objective idealism," with such authors as Rosenkranz, Shasler (to whom an amount of space is given seemingly disproportionate to his real importance), and Hartmann. The concluding chapter is upon recent English aesthetic, and is occupied largely with Ruskin and Morris. The general significance of this movement is found to be in an attempt to get a better conception of how in the work of art the content and expression are united, in a return to life as the real medium, for German aesthetic has in its later days fallen into scholasticism, over-refinement, and formalism through the touch of life. The signs of this return to life are found in Mr. Ruskin's study of the details of the beautiful in nature as against the more general formulations of the Germans, and in both Ruskin's and Morris's insistence upon the place of the individual workman in all art, the necessity that art be a genuine expression of the joy of the worker in his work, and the consequent greater attention to the minor arts, so-called.
It is significant that Mr. Bosanquet expects the next fruitful movement to come from England rather than from Germany. "As the true value of German idealism in general philosophy was never understood till the genius of English naturalists had revolutionized our conception of the organic world, so the spirit of German aesthetic will not be appreciated until the work of its founders shall have been renewed by the direct appreciative sense of English art and criticism."
There are a number of points in the implied or expressed philosophy of the book which I should like to see developed by themselves. The entire conception, for example, of a fixed distinction between the realm of art and that of commonplace reality seems to me to need a good deal of explanation. That there is such a distinction there can be of course no doubt, but Mr. Bosanquet makes something positive and rigid of the distinction; he makes it a datum which can be used in marking off regions of experience and deciding questions. I should have thought, on the contrary, that the distinction was a problem and a problem lying at the very heart of aesthetic. Instead of accounting for Plato's treatment of art by saying that he failed to distinguish between common reality and the artistic image, it seems to me more philosophical as well as more historical to say that man was then becoming conscious of ideas
