absolute unities,—to conceive an unconditioned totality. Thus the reason presents us with the ideas—beyond all possibility of knowledge—of the Soul, the World, and God. In the words of Kant, the Ideas of Reason lead the understanding to the consideration of Nature according to a principle of completeness, although it can never attain to this. Can there be a bridge across this abyss between sense and reason? then asks Kant; which bridge he believes himself to have found in the aesthetic faculty. For on inquiring what is involved in the judgment, "This is beautiful," he discovers that such a judgment is "universal" and "necessary," inasmuch as it implies that every normal spectator must acknowledge its validity, that it is "disinterested" because it rests on the "appearance of the object without demanding its actual existence," and that it is "immediate" or "free," as it acknowledges the object as beautiful without definite purpose, as of adaptation to use. But how does this judgment constitute the desired bond between sense and reason? Simply in that, though applied to an object of the senses, it has yet all the marks of the Idea of Reason,—it is universal, necessary, free, unconditioned; it is judged as if it were perfect, and so fulfills those demands of reason which elsewhere in the world of sense are unsatisfied.

The two important factors, then, of Kant's aesthetics are its reconciliation of sense and reason in beauty, and its reference of the "purposiveness" of beauty to the cognitive faculty.

Schiller has been given the credit of transcending Kant's "subjective" aesthetic through his emphasis on the significance of the beautiful object. It is not bound by a conception to which it must attain, so that it is perceived as if it were free. Nor do we desire the reality of it to use for ourselves or for others; so that we are free in relation to it. It, the object, is thus "the vindication of freedom in the world of phenomena," that world which is otherwise a binding necessity. But it would seem that this had been already taught by Kant himself, and that Schiller has but enlivened the subject by his two illuminating phrases, "aesthetic semblance" and the "play-impulse," to denote the real object of the aesthetic desire and the true nature of that desire; form instead of material existence, and a free attitude instead of serious purpose. Still, his insistence on Beauty as the realization of freedom may be said to have paved the way for Schelling's theory, in which the aesthetic reaches its maximum of importance.