_Plotinus and Augustine._--After Aristotle, _Plotinus_ and _Augustine_ alone, among the ancients, have treated of the beautiful. The work of Augustine is not extant. It is known that he made beauty consist in unity and fitness of parts, as in music. The treatise of Plotinus is regarded as at once beautiful and profound. Material beauty is, with him, only the expression or reflection of spiritual beauty. The soul alone, the mind, is beautiful, and in loving the beautiful, the soul loves its own image as there expressed. Hence, the soul must, itself, be beautiful, in order to comprehend and feel beauty. The tendency of this theory is to mysticism. _Longinus and Quintilian._--Longinus, and Quintilian, treat of the sublime, only with reference to eloquence and oratory; so, also, Horace, of art, as having to do with poetry. _Bacon._--Among the moderns, _Bacon_ recognizes the fine arts as among the sciences, and poetry as one of the three chief branches of human knowledge, but nowhere, that I am aware, treats of the beautiful, distinctly, as such. _School of Leibnitz._--It was the school of _Leibnitz_ and _Wolf_ in Germany that first made the beautiful a distinct science. Baumgarten, disciple of Wolf, first conceived this idea. Like Plato, however, he makes the beautiful too nearly identical with the good and with morals. _School of Locke._--In England, the school of _Locke_ have much to say of beauty. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, while they do not clearly distinguish between the beautiful and the good, adopt the theory of unity in variety, as already explained. Hogarth falls into the same class, his idea of beauty being represented by the waving line. Burke does not distinguish sufficiently between the sublime and the terrible. _French Encyclopedists._--In France, the _Encyclopedists_ coincide, essentially, with the school of Locke, and treat of the beautiful, chiefly in its moral aspect. _The later Germans._--In Germany, again, _Winckelman_, an artist, and not a philosopher, seizing the spirit of the Greek art, ascribes, as Plato had done, the idea of beauty to God, from whom it passes into sensible things, as his manifestations. In opposition to this ideal and divine aspect, _Lessing_ takes a more practical view, regarding the beautiful from the stand-point of the _real_. _Herder_ and _Goethe_ contribute, also, much to the science of æsthetics. All these do little more than prepare the way for _Kant_, who goes more profoundly into the philosophy of the matter. He makes beauty a _subjective_ affair, a play of the imagination. _Schiller_ makes it the joint product of the reason and the sensibility, but still a _subjective_ matter, as Kant.