point that the Nature of Beauty must be determined by philosophy;
but the general definition having been fixed, the meaning of the
work of art having been made clear, the only possible explanation
of our feelings about it--the aesthetic experience, in other
words--must be gained from psychology. This method is not open
to the logical objections against the preceding. No longer need
we ask what has a right to be included in the aesthetic experience.
That has been fixed by the definition of Beauty. But how the
beautiful object brings about the aesthetic experience, the
boundaries of which are already known, is clearly matter for
psychology.

The first step must then be to win the philosophical definition
of Beauty. It was Kant, says Hegel, who spoke the first rational
word concerning Beauty. The study of his successors will reveal,
I believe, that the aesthetic of the great system of idealism
forms, on the whole, one identical doctrine. It is worth while
to dwell somewhat on this point, because the traditional view of
the relation of the aesthetic of Kant, Schiller, Schelling, and
Hegel is otherwise. Kant's starting-point was the discovery of
the normative, "over-individual" nature of Beauty, which we have
just found to be the secret of the contradictions of empirical
aesthetics. Yet he came to it at the bidding of quite other
motives.

Kant's aesthetics was meant to serve as the keystone of the
arch between sense and reason. The discovery of all that is
implicit in the experience of the senses had led him to deny
the possibility of knowledge beyond the matter of this experience.
Yet the reason has an inevitable tendency to press beyond this