And yet the followers of the imaginative school of aesthetics saw it with different eyes.
Since the time of Lessing, aesthetics have formed a prominent branch of philosophy with the Germans, and they have been no less successful as historians of art than of metaphysics.
In the "Critique of Practical Reason" the subject of morals is treated, and that of aestheticsin the "Observations on the Sublime and Beautiful.
The statues of the ancients make this principle of aesthetics sensible to us; but it is difficult to reduce to conceptions and express in words what the very inspection of ancient statues makes the senses feel in so lively a manner.
Many questions bearing on art and relating to the beautiful had been propounded before, even as far back as Plotinus, Plato, and Socrates, but recent times have been the real cradle of aesthetics as a science.
Two more reflections appear completely to meet the objection that art or aestheticsis not entitled to the name of science.
Aesthetics requires the knowledge that mind is the creative force and unity of all that is extended and developed in time and space.
It has appeared expedient to conclude this introduction with a summary of the latest and highest theory of art and aesthetics issuing from Kant and Schiller, and developed in the later philosophy of Hegel.
First, then, aesthetics has for its object the vast realm of the beautiful, and it may be most adequately defined as the philosophy of art or of the fine arts.
Nevertheless, art is worthy of science; aesthetics is a true science, and the office of art is as high as that assigned to it in the pages of Schiller.
Hence aesthetics requires as its basis the system in which God is known as indwelling in the world, that He is not far distant from any one of us, but that He animates us, and that we live in Him.
These two circumstances sufficiently separate the sphere of aestheticsfrom that of ethics.
In aesthetics the thing has no name, but is nevertheless very common; for it is found whenever we speak of what ought to please, rather than of what actually pleases.
If criticism is too narrow a word, pointing exclusively to our more artificial judgments, aesthetics seems to be too broad and to include within its sphere all pleasures and pains, if not all perceptions whatsoever.
Both ethics and aesthetics have suffered much from the prejudice against the subjective.
But the recognition of the superiority of aesthetics in experience to aesthetics in theory ought not to make us accept as an explanation of aesthetic feeling what is in truth only an expression of it.
And retaining the word "aesthetics," which is now current, we may therefore say thataesthetics is concerned with the perception of values.
The third method in ethics andaesthetics is psychological, as the other two are respectively didactic and historical.
Morality has to do with the avoidance of evil and the pursuit of good: aesthetics only with enjoyment.
This may help us to understand better the relations between aesthetics and hedonics, and the nature of that objectification in which we have placed the difference between beauty and pleasure.
On the professorship ofAesthetics becoming vacant in 1872, it was taken as a matter of course that Brandes would be appointed.
The authorities refused to elect him, but his fitness for the post was so obvious that the chair ofAesthetics in the university of Copenhagen remained vacant, no one else daring to place himself in comparison with Brandes.
Theories in aesthetics generally being obscure, the ideal paragon, the model, is joined to them.
Aesthetics has also become a personal talent; no one has the right to impose it upon others.
He should create his own aesthetics, and we should admit as many aesthetics as there are original minds, judging them according to what they are not.
Moreover, aesthetics tends to specialization in as many forms as there are talents: among many vanities are admissible arrogances to which we cannot refuse the right to create into normal characters.
With regard to aesthetics proper, it might be contended, without too much rashness, that the history of Ruskinism has not been different; but to some observers it seems to have described rather a curve than a steady ascent.
His position among writers onaesthetics is anomalous and incredible: no merchant traffics in his heart, yet he commands a large, an eager, an affectionate public.
His contribution to aesthetics in The Beautiful Necessity is suggestive, and on the purely technical side valuable.
His chamber compositions and orchestral works reveal a considerable amount of originality and knowledge of effect, allied to consistently elevated notions with regard to the aesthetics of his art.
Every art has traversed a period of degeneration, when true aesthetics have been neglected and men of undoubted talent, or even genius, have been unable to free themselves from the shackles of a vitiated taste.
Some do so without knowing anything of aesthetics and with no pretence to be Stoics; but, then, they are Christians.
Ethics and aesthetics have to do with objects in which an immediate evidence appears, but this is foreign to the whole nature of metaphysics, which can only gain its knowledge as errors have been removed.
Kant comprises the whole problem of the Transcendental AEsthetics in the question--how are pure mathematical sciences possible?
The Transcendental AEsthetics closes with the discussion of space and time, i.
I did not feel the slightest enthusiasm about the aesthetics of the work, which appeared to me to be a retrogression to the out-of-date Beardsley cult.
At this date theaesthetics and the whole spirit of this kind of scenic display seem so stale that I have not the least desire to discuss them further.
To his American discoverers he had first appeared as an essayist, a serious essayist who wrote about aesthetics and Oriental thought and national character and poets and painting.
He had ideas in the utmost profusion about races and empires and social order and political institutions and gardens and automobiles and the future of India and China and aesthetics and America and the education of mankind in general.
We were quite aware that ethics and aesthetics are different matters, and that is why the greater part of our criticism was devoted not so much to the nastiness of "The Picture of Dorian Gray," but to its dulness and stupidity.
For if a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson.
And, so far as we are at present concerned, this difference between mental processes and their results is the fact upon which psychological aesthetics are based.
A primer of aesthetics is no place for expounding any of the various psychological definitions of either of these, let us call them, faculties.
I have therefore based my explanation of the problems of aesthetics as much as possible upon mental facts familiar, or at all events easily intelligible, to the lay reader.
The new-old--that is what all aesthetics extol, for a caste must be flattered in keeping with its nerves and its erudition.
But in so far as Aesthetics deals with the emotions rather than the reason it comes into contact with Ethics in the psychological field.
In its narrower sense Aesthetics deals with beauty merely in an impersonal way; and its immediate object is not what is morally beautiful, but rather that which is beautiful in itself irrespective of moral considerations.
Both Aesthetics and Ethics have regard to that symmetry or proportion of life which fulfils our ideas at once of goodness and of beauty.
Aesthetics is the science of the laws of beauty, while Ethics is the science of the laws of the good.
If a philosopher tries to begin by thinking out the methods in accordance with which he will philosophise, he is like a poet who first writes a system of aesthetics in order to poetise in accordance with it.
On the other hand, an observation which trenches on the province of aesthetics may find its place here.
AEsthetics and methodology are, from their nature, younger than poetry and philosophy; as grammar is younger than language, thorough bass younger than music, and logic younger than thought.
We still have ethereal beings who, as the practical outcome of their etherealization, rave about music and poetry and aesthetics and culture, and horribly neglect their babies and the weekly bills.
Clearly our "Professor of aesthetics and Critic of Art" is likely to have a doleful time of it in nineteenth century London.
A weaker professor of aesthetics would have been discouraged by the monetary and other difficulties of his position and would have lost heart at the outset in front of the impenetrable blank wall of English philistinism and contempt.
This anthropological datum merits special consideration, since it plays so large a part in the aesthetics of the human body; and also preserves certain constant characteristics that serve to differentiate the races.
Our attention should next be turned to the correspondence required by aesthetics between the following three diameters: Minimum frontal.
In fact, the covering of the body frequently constitutes a characteristic of the species, and we may say that it constitutes to a large extent the aesthetics of coloration, supplementing that of form.
It should also be noted that toward the end of the fifth or the beginning of the sixth century, the painter and critic Hsieh Ho formulated the Six Canons[8] upon which the far-eastern code of Aesthetics is founded.
Stevenson, Schiller, Goethe himself; and they are the watchwords of a school in the one country where Aesthetics has flourished.
Many critics of this passage seem to forget that the subject-matter of Ethics and Aesthetics consists of matters of fact and existence.
Pagan aesthetics were purer and nobler than the system, which, under that name, finds favor with our generation.
The science of aesthetics was in its infancy when Lessing wrote.
