cornerstones well and truly laid; what wealth of new truths, and of difficulties and problems not suspected or discussed before his day! [Sidenote: _Schleiermacher contrasted with his predecessors._] Schleiermacher considered Æsthetic as an essentially modern line of thought, and drew a sharp distinction between the _Poetics_ of Aristotle, which never shakes itself free from the empirical standpoint of the maker of rules, and what Baumgarten tried to do in the eighteenth century. He praised Kant for having been the first truly to include Æsthetic among the philosophical sciences, and recognized that in Hegel artistic activity had attained the highest elevation by being brought into connexion and almost into equality with religion and philosophy. But he was not satisfied either with the followers of Baumgarten when they degenerated into the absurd attempt to construct a science or theory of sensuous pleasure, or with the Kantian point of view which made its principal aim the consideration of taste; or with the philosophy of Fichte, in which art became a means of education; or with the more widely received opinion which placed at the centre of Æsthetic the vague and equivocal concept of Beauty. Schiller pleased him by having called attention to the moment of artistic spontaneity or productiveness, and he praised Schelling for having laid stress on the importance of the figurative arts, which lend themselves less easily than poetry to facile and illusory moralistic interpretations.[4] Having with the utmost clearness excluded from Æsthetic the study of practical rules as empirical, and therefore irreducible to a science, he assigned to Æsthetic the task of determining the proper position of artistic activity in the scheme of ethics.[5] [Sidenote: _Place assigned to Æsthetic in his Ethics._] To avoid falling into error over this terminology, we must call to mind that the philosophy of Schleiermacher followed the ancient traditions in its tripartite division into Dialectic, Ethics and Physics. Dialectic corresponds with ontology; Physics embraces all the sciences of natural facts; Ethics includes the study of all free activities of mankind (language, thought, art, religion and morality). Ethics represented to him not only the science of morality but what others name Psychology or, better still, the Science or Philosophy of the Spirit. This explanation once given, Schleiermacher's point of departure seems to be the only one just and permissible, and we shall not be surprised when he talks of will, of voluntary acts and so on, where others would have simply spoken of activity or spiritual energy; he even endows such expressions with a broader meaning than that conferred upon them by practical philosophy. [Sidenote: _Æsthetic activity as immanent and individual._]