gion of the Esthetic. To prove this, he considers in one view the nature of Man and of the State, and finds that if man would exchange the state of nature or need for the moral state, he must possess that totality of the ancients, in whom there was a distinct harmony of thought, perception and action, both in Art and Polity; while our bodies politic display rudeness in the lower, and relaxation in the higher classes. We cannot suppose that the State, which has induced this evil, can of itself obviate it; where the upper classes do not use their freedom, they need not be deprived of it, and it need not be given to the great mass who blindly abuse it. All political improvement can result only from ennoblement of the character; but how can that take place under a barbarous polity? For this design we must seek an instrument which is independent of the State, and lay open sources which preserve themselves pure through every political depravation. This instrument is the Fine Arts. The Artist may secede from his age and elevate himself above it.

This carries us to the Tenth Letter; and the whole range of German Literature cannot afford a composition equal to the Ninth, in dignity of statement, nobility of idea, aptness of language. Schiller emerges from the relations of his century, and stands upon the peak of time he gives law to his

age, he utters that which must be an inspiration not to be withstood, for all the true-hearted, for those who are now breaking ground for our Future. There is hope for our young country only if we succeed in acclimating the principles of the poet.

Schiller then proceeds to consult experience for the effects of Beauty upon the character. History declares that nations have declined in proportion to their æsthetic culture, that enervation and loss of freedom have followed close upon refinement. But perhaps, he says, experience is not the arbitress in the decision of this question; at least it remains to be proved that the Beauty against which all historical examples seem to testify, is the same Beauty concerning which he intends to speak. He then proceeds to evolve the conception of Beauty from the Reason, and to establish something necessary and absolute which shall be independent of the old declarations of history, and whose realization in life shall create history anew. This is certainly a more satisfactory process than if Schiller had postponed his interrogation of the Reason, and had sought to present history as a sure, but hitherto imperfect and fragmentary, development of the pure idea of Beauty. More satisfactory, because he is thereby able to demonstrate that which no history has yet displayed, and to prophecy surely and hopefully a better fu

ture. To show how the State must finally represent his idea of Beauty, is better than merely to show how or why the State has hitherto misrepresented it, or how a philosophy of history might explain and combine isolated and incongruous phenomena. The new Beauty which Schiller discovers is equivalent to a philosophy of history, and he returns to the order of nature in the Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Letters. The three different moments, passivity under nature's force, freedom in the æsthetic state, and government of that force in the moral state, are the three epochs for the development of humanity in the mass and in the individual, just as they are the condition of every cognition we receive through the senses: we pass to the Real through the Ideal, to the deeds of manhood through the wishes of youth.

It is, however, the opinion of Gervinus that Schiller would have simplified the matter by confining himself wholly to the historical method, and by showing how experience contradicted in no wise his principles. "That Schiller did not return to his problem, in the course of the Letters, and that he did not carry out the idea he started of the relation between æsthetical and political culture, but left it as a fragment, permits us to regard it as one of those interruptions caused by circumstances, and

from Subject, while the latter only made it dependent upon Subject. Fichte's metaphysical formula which has provoked so much burlesque1 and has excited so many good-natured suspicions of insanity, I= I, is certainly the first term of any genuine metaphysical theory, because thereby the Not-I, that is, World, in the widest sense of that word, is left as a quantity independent of our own Subject. Therefore the operation of Subject and Object is reciprocal. It is not true, with Kant, that the outward is only a projection of the modes of our Understanding, which position admits nothing absolute, nothing positive and independent, save the categories into which the Understanding is divided: neither is it true, with Hume and others, that the source of all our knowledge is empirical, and only the efflorescence of the five senses. There is a point between the two,

and in a plane higher than both, an union of fact and idea, induction from, and anticipation of, Nature, a distinct appreciation of the respective capacities of Subject and Object, which is the only true starting-point for metaphysics and the only safe ground for science. Schiller attempted to throw himself into that position: the result was that he made Kant's theory of Esthetics available, or more strictly speaking, he rejected the process of pure speculation, and sought to give contents to Form; his plastic spirit wrought in Matter and the world of sense, and was not content with Kant's " pure abstract method of deduction from conceptions." He was a Kantian only so far as Kant was practical, and only where his ideas "extricated from their technical form, appear as the prescriptive claims of the common reason," and are the common sense of humanity.

But it was Kant's stern morality which first attracted Schiller, and which, after all, is the only genuine bond of union between the two philoso