It did not attain this form with Fichte, the first great pupil of Kant; for though Fichte regarded imagination as the activity which creates the universe, effects the synthesis of the ego and the non-ego, posits the object and therefore precedes consciousness, he does not connect it with art.[13] In his æsthetic notions Fichte is influenced by Schiller, with the addition of a moralism imposed upon him by the general character of his system; hence the ethical sphere, midway between the cognitive and the æsthetic, becomes from his point of view a mere appurtenance of morality, as being the representation of, and hence reverence for, the moral ideal.[14] His subjective idealism eventually produced an æsthetic doctrine through the work of Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck; the doctrine of Irony as the basis of art. [Sidenote: _Irony: Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis._] The ego which created the universe can also destroy it; the universe is an empty appearance at which the only true reality, the ego, can smile, holding itself aloof, like an artist or a creative god, from creatures of its own which it does not take seriously.[15] Friedrich Schlegel described art as a perpetual parody of itself and a "transcendental farce." Tieck defined irony as "a power which allows the poet to dominate the matter which he handles." Another Romantic Fichtian, Novalis, dreamed of a magical idealism, an art of creation by the instantaneous act of the ego and of realizing our dreams. [Sidenote: _F. Schelling._] But it is only to the _System of Transcendental Idealism_ (1800) of Schelling, to his _Bruno_ (1802), to his celebrated course of lectures on the _Philosophy of Art_ given at Jena in 1802-1803 (repeated at Würzburg, and distributed subsequently in manuscript notes all over Germany), to the no less celebrated lecture on the _Relation between the Figurative Arts and Nature_ (1807), as well as to other works of this eloquent and enthusiastic philosopher that we owe the first great philosophical affirmation of Romanticism, and of a renewed and conscious neo-Platonism in Æsthetic. [Sidenote: _Beauty and character._]