Amid the ruin of idealist metaphysics, is to be desired a healthy return to the doctrine of Baumgarten, corrected and enriched with the discoveries that have been made since his time, especially by romanticism and psychology. C. Hermann (1876) announced this return, but his book is a hopeless mixture of empirical precepts and of metaphysical beliefs regarding Logic and Aesthetic, both of which, he believes, deal not with the empirical thought and experience of the soul, but with the pure and absolute. B. Bosanquet (1892) gives the following definition of the beautiful, as "that which has a characteristic or individual expressivity for the sensible perception, or for the imagination, subject to the conditions of general or abstract expressivity for the same means." The problem as posed by this writer by the antithesis of the two German schools of form and content, appears to us insoluble. Though De Sanctis left no school in Italy, his teaching has been cleared of the obscurities that had gathered round it during the last ten years; and the thesis of the true nature of history, and of its nature, altogether different from natural science, has been also dealt with in Germany, although its precise relation to the aesthetic problem has not been made clear. Such labours and such discussions constitute a more favourable ground for the scientific development of Aesthetic than the stars of mystical metaphysic or the stables of positivism and of sensualism. We have now reached the end of the inquiry into the history of aesthetic speculation, and we are struck with the smallness of the number of those who have seen clearly the nature of the problem. No doubt, amid the crowd of artists, critics, and writers on other subjects, many have incidentally made very just remarks, and if all these were added to the few philosophers, they would form a gallant company. But if, as Schiller truly observed, the rhythm of philosophy consist in a withdrawal from public opinion, in order to return to it with renewed vigour, it is evident that this withdrawal is essential, and indeed that in it lies the whole progress of philosophy. During our long journey, we have witnessed grave aberrations from the truth, which were at the same time attempts to reach it; such were the hedonism of the sophists and rhetoricians of antiquity, of the sensualists of the eighteenth and second half of the nineteenth centuries; the moralistic hedonism of Aristophanes and the Stoics, of the Roman eclectics, of the writers of the Middle Age and of the Renaissance; the ascetic and logical hedonism of Plato and the Fathers of the Church; the aesthetic mysticism of Plotinus, reborn to its greatest triumphs, during the classic period of German thought.