science, is undoubtedly a mistake; but the human mind really shines the clearest when the luster of art is joined with the luster of science.
Furthermore, the same takes place here as in practical ethics. The lower the morals of an age or a people have sunk, the more talk there is about virtue. The more the native creative strength subsides and is dried up, the higher rises the flood of aesthetic theories. Hermann Lotze's History of Æsthetics in Germany[1] affords a wearisome and discouraging picture of this long and fruitless movement. The philosophers of all schools have outbid one another in framing abstract formulas for determining exactly what beauty is. It is unity in diversity, or fitness without purpose, or unconscious rationality, or the absolute in sensual existence, or the enjoyed harmony of the absolute spirit, and more of the same kind. But between these qualities ascribed to all beauty nominally constituting its essentials, and the perception of the beautiful, there is no more connection than there is between the ether and sonorous vibrations and the qualities made known to us by them. It would indeed be a vain undertaking to conceive an expression which shall equally cover the various kinds of beauty; the beauty of the Cosmos in contrast to chaos, of a mountain view, of a symphony, of a poetical work, of Ristori as Medea, of a rose; or in fine art alone, the beauty of the Cologne Cathedral, of the Hermes, of the Sistine Madonna, of a genre picture, of a landscape, of a picture of still life, or of a Japanese vine-weaving. We prefer to say that we in this as in many other points meet something in our organism that is inexplicable, something inexpressible, but something none the less certainly felt for all that, without which life would pass away grimly bare.
There is in Schiller's works a discussion concerning the beauty of the human body.[2] He distinguishes between an architectonic beauty and one that depends upon grace. Twenty years ago on Leibnitz's day, in an address on Leibnitz's ideas in later science, I attacked the rationalism in aesthetics in which the past century had been much entangled, and I ventured among other things the remark that "as little as for the effect of melody is an explanation conceivable of the charm which handsome forms of one sex have for the other."[3] We can not in fact discern in close consideration, why this form which, according to Fechner, can be represented by a plain equation between three variables, should please us more than a thousand other possibilities. It can not be
