Most astounding of all is the fact that a dry intellectualist, the avowed enemy of idealism, of dialectic and of speculative constructions, head of the school calling itself realistic or the school of exact philosophy, Johann Friedrich Herbart, when he turns his attention to Æsthetic, turns mystic too, though in a slightly different way. How weightily he speaks when expounding his philosophical method! Æsthetic must not bear the blame of the faults into which metaphysic has fallen; we must make it an independent study, and detach it from all hypothesis about the universe. Nor must it be confounded with psychology or asked to describe the emotions awakened by the content of works of art, such as the pathetic or the comic, sadness or joy; its duty is to determine the essential character of art and beauty. In the analysis of particular cases of beauty and in registering what they reveal lies the way of salvation. These proposals and promises have misled numbers of people as to the nature of Herbart's Æsthetic. But _ce sont là jeux de princes_; by paying attention we shall see what Herbart meant by analysis of particular case; and how he held himself aloof from metaphysics. [Sidenote: _Pure Beauty and relations of form._] Beauty, for him, consisted in relations: relations of tone, colour, line, thought and will; experience must decide which of these relations are beautiful, and æsthetic science consists solely in enumerating the fundamental concepts (_Musterbegriffe)_ in which are summarized the particular cases of beauty. But these relations, Herbart thought, were not like physiological facts; they could not be empirically observed, _e.g._ in a psycho-physical laboratory. To correct this error it is only necessary to observe that these relations include not only tones, lines and colours, but also thoughts and will, and that they extend to moral facts no less than to objects of external intuition. He declares explicitly "No true beauty is sensible, although it frequently happens that sense-impressions precede and follow the intuition of beauty."[12] There is a profound distinction between the beautiful and the pleasant; for the pleasant needs no representation, while the beautiful consists in representation of relations, followed immediately in consciousness by a judgment, an appendix (_Zusatz)_ which expresses unqualified approbation ("_es gefällt!_"). And while the pleasant and the unpleasant "in the progress of culture gradually become transient and unimportant, Beauty stands out more and more as something permanent and possessed of undeniable value."[13] The judgment of taste is universal, eternal, immutable: "the complete representation (_vollendete Vorstellung_) of the same relations is always followed by the same judgment; just as the same cause always produces the same effect. This happens at all times and in all circumstances, conditions and complications, which gives to the particularity of certain cases the