The first half of the nineteenth century was for Germany a period of many fine-sounding philosophical formulæ: subjectivism, objectivism, subjective--objectivism; abstract, concrete, abstract-concrete; idealism, realism, idealism--realism; between pantheism and theism Krause inserted his pan-en-theism. In the midst of this uproar, in which the second-rate men shouted down the first-rate and made good their claim to their only true property, namely words, it is not surprising that a few modest clear thinkers, philosophers who preferred to think about realities, should have the worst of it and remain unheard and unnoticed, lost among the roaring crowd or labelled with a false ticket. [Sidenote: _Friedrich Schleiermacher._] This, at least, seems to have been the lot of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose æsthetic doctrine is amongst the least known although it is perhaps the most noteworthy of the day. [Sidenote: _Wrong judgements concerning him._] Schleiermacher delivered his first lectures on Æsthetic at Berlin University in 1819, and from that date he began to study the subject seriously with a view to writing a book on it. He repeated his lectures on two occasions, in 1825 and 1832-1833; but his death, which occurred in the following year, prevented him from carrying out his plan, and all we know of his thoughts on Æsthetic comes from his lectures, as collected by his pupils and published in 1842.[1] A Herbartian historian of Æsthetic, Zimmermann, attacks the posthumous work of Schleiermacher with real ferocity; after twenty pages of invective and sarcasm he concludes by asking, how could his pupils so dishonour their great master by publishing such a mass of waste paper, "all play upon words, sophistical conceits and dialectical subtleties"?[2] Nor was the idealistic historian Hartmann much more benevolent when he describes the work as "a confused mess in which, among much that is merely trivial, many half-truths and exaggerations, one can detect a few acute observations"; and says that, in order to make bearable "such unctuous afternoon sermons delivered by a preacher in his dotage," it must be shortened by three-quarters; and that, "as regards fundamental principles," it is simply useless, offering no innovations upon concrete idealism as presented by Hegel and others; and that, in any case, it seems impossible "to attach it to any line of thought except the Hegelian, to which Schleiermacher's contribution is only of second-rate importance." He further observes that Schleiermacher was primarily a theologian, and in philosophy more or less an amateur.[3] Now it cannot be denied that Schleiermacher's doctrine has reached us in a hazy form, by no means free from uncertainties and contradictions; and, which is more important, it is here and there affected for the worse by the influence of contemporary metaphysics. But, side by side with these defects, what excellent method, really scientific and philosophical; what a number of