Content is transitory, relative, subject to moral law and liable to moral judgement: form is permanent, absolute, free.[18] Concrete art may be the sum of two or more values; but the æsthetic fact is form alone. [Sidenote: _Herbart and Kantian thought._] The reader who goes behind appearances and discounts diversities of terminology will not fail to observe the close similarity of the æsthetic doctrine of Herbart to that of Kant. In Herbart we again find the distinction between free and adherent beauty, and between form and the sensuous stimulus (_Reiz)_ attached to form: we find an affirmation of the existence of pure beauty, the object of necessary and universal, but not discursive, judgements; lastly, we find a certain connexion between beauty and morality, between Æsthetic and Ethics. In these matters Herbart is perhaps the most faithful follower and propagator of the thought of Kant, whose doctrine contains the germ of his own. In one passage he describes himself as "a Kantian, but of the year 1828"; and he is quite right, even in pointing out the exact difference in date. Amidst the errors and uncertainties of his æsthetic thought, Kant is rich in suggestion and scatters fertile seed; he belongs to a period when philosophy was still young and impressionable. Herbart, coming later, is dry and one-sided; he takes whatever is false in Kant's doctrine and hardens it into a system. If they had done little else, the Romanticists and idealists had at least united the theory of beauty to that of art, and destroyed the rhetorical and mechanical view; and they had brought into relief (frequently exaggerating, doubtless) various important characteristics of artistic activity. Herbart re-states the mechanical view, restores the duality, and presents a capricious, narrow, barren mysticism, devoid of all breath of artistic feeling. [1] _Welt als Wille u. Vorstellung,_ 1819 (in _Sämmtl. Werke,_ ed. Grisebach, vol. i.). bk. iii. § 49. [2] _Ergänzungen_ (ed. Grisebach, vol. ii.), ch. 29. [3] _Welt a. W. u. V._ iii. § 35. [4] See above, p. 291. [5] _Welt a. W. u. V._ iii. §§ 42-51. [6] See above, p. 293. [7] _Welt a. W. u. V._ § 53. [8] _Op. cit._ § 34. [9] _Welt a. W. u. V._ § 32. [10] _Kritik d. kantischen Philosophie,_ in append, to _op. cit._ pp. 558-576. [11] _Ergänzungen,_ ch. 38. [12] _Einleitung in die Philosophie,_ 1813, in _Werke,_ ed. Hartenstein, vol. 1. p. 49. [13] _Einleitung in die Philosophie,_ pp. 125-128. [14] _Allgemeine praktische Philosophie,_ in _Werke,_ viii. p. 25. [15] _Einleitung,_ p. 128. [16] _Einleitung,_ p. 162. [17] _Op. cit._ pp. 129-130. [18] _Op. cit._ p. 163. XI FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER [Sidenote: _Æsthetic of content and Æsthetic of form: meaning of the contrast._]