These defects and uncertainties may perhaps be attributable in part to the fact that his thoughts on æsthetic have reached us in an inchoate form, very far from a mature development. But if on the other hand we wish to cast up the sum of his very striking merits, it will suffice to run over the list of accusations heaped upon him by the two historians before mentioned, Zimmermann and Hartmann. Schleiermacher has denuded Æsthetic of its imperative character; he recognizes in it a form of thought differing from logical thought; he gives this science a non-metaphysical and merely anthropological character; he denies the concept of beauty, substituting that of artistic perfection, and actually affirms the æsthetic equivalence of small and great works of art, so long as each is perfect in its own sphere; he considers the æsthetic fact as pure human productivity: and so on and so forth. All these criticisms are meant for blame and are really praise; for what is blame to the mind of a Zimmermann or a Hartmann, is to ours praise. In the metaphysical orgy of his day, in the perpetual building and pulling down of more or less arbitrary systems, Schleiermacher the theologian, with philosophic acumen, fixed his eye upon what was really characteristic of the æsthetic fact and succeeded in defining its properties and connexions; when he failed to see clearly and wandered from the track, he never abandoned analysis for fantastic caprice. By his discovery that the obscure region of immediate consciousness is also that of the æsthetic fact, he seems to bid his distracted contemporaries listen to the old adage: _Hic Rhodus, hic salta._ [1] _Vorlesungen üb. Ästhetik_ published by Lommatsch, Berlin, 1842 (_Werke,_ sect. iii. vol. vii.). [2] Zimmermann, _G. d. A._ pp. 608-634. [3] E. von Hartmann, _Deutsche Ästh. s. Kant,_ pp. 156-169. [4] _Vorles. üb. Ästhetik_ pp. 1-30. [5] _Op. cit._ pp. 35-51. [6] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ pp. 51-54. [7] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ pp. 55-61. [8] _Op. cit._ pp. 61-66; cf. _Dialektik,_ ed. Halpern, pp. 54-55, 67. [9] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ pp. 67-77. [10] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ pp. 79-91. [11] _Op. cit._ pp. 123, 143-150. [12] _Op. cit._ p. 505; cf. p. 607. [13] _Op. cit._ p. 505. [14] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ pp. 506-508. [15] _Op. cit._ pp. 156-157. [16] _Op. cit._ pp. 550-551. [17] _Op. cit._ p. 608. [18] _Op. cit._ pp. 684-686. [19] _Op. cit._ pp. 191-196; cf. pp. 364-365. [20] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ pp. 209-219; of. pp. 527-528. [21] _Op. cit._ pp. 98-111. [22] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ pp. 635-648. [23] Cf. _e.g._ p. 467 _seqq._ XII THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE: HUMBOLDT AND STEINTHAL [Sidenote: _Progress of Linguistic._]