In his _Letters Concerning the Æsthetic Education of Mankind_ (1795), he works out the idea that art and ethics belong together as far as this, that man maintains with the sensible world a relation which is free and creative. “The transition from the passive condition of feeling to the active one of thinking and willing comes about in no other way than through an intermediate condition of æsthetic freedom. . . . There is no way of making the sentient man rational other than first making him æsthetic.” In what way the capacity for freedom which is built up in man by æsthetic practice really disposes him to morality, Schiller does not work out in further detail. His treatise, in spite of all the notice it attracted and deserves, is more rhetorical than substantial. He has not gone to the bottom of the problem of the relations between the æsthetic and the ethical. In contrast to Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), stands in almost as cold an attitude to the world-view of the deepened rationalism as he does to that of ordinary rationalism. To him it is impossible to share [pg 137] the confidence with which others, looking around, regard optimistic and ethical convictions as well founded. What separates him from Kant, and Fichte, and Schiller, is reverence for the reality of nature. Nature is to him something in herself, not merely something existing with a view to mankind. He does not require from her that she shall fit herself completely into our optimistic-ethical designs. He does no violence to her either through epistemological and ethical idealism or through presumptuous speculation, but lives in her as a human being who looks at existence with wonder and does not know how to bring her relation to the world-spirit within any formula. Descartes led modern philosophy astray by cutting the world up into objects which have extension and objects which think, and by going on, moreover, to refuse to each of them the possibility of influencing the other. Following in his steps, thinkers rack their brains over the problem of these two parallel kinds of existence, and try to embrace the world in formulas. That the world is life, and that in life lies the riddle of riddles, never enters their minds. Hence they overlook in their philosophizing what is most important. Because Descartes preceded them, the two great spirits who adhere to nature-philosophy, Spinoza and Leibniz, cannot get further than a nature-philosophy which is more or less dead. Being in the line of descent from Descartes, Kant and Fichte renounce all philosophizing over the real world.