It is only natural that, in times so inopportune, general speculations on art and beauty have been more and more abandoned in favour of detailed studies in the technicalities of art, historical researches in which works of art are considered chiefly as documents bearing on culture, and experiments on the physiology and psychology of æsthetic perception. For art itself and its development it would perhaps be unimportant if a science which has never exercised any great positive and direct influence on artistic production should completely disappear. But from the theoretical point of view it would be matter for regret if artistic activities ceased to be considered as a whole. And so also would it be if æsthetic feelings, judgments of taste, and ideals of beauty came to be treated only in appendices to works on psychology. It is true that all these notions have irremediably lost their former metaphysical and philosophical importance. But in compensation, art and beauty have for modern thinking acquired a social and psychological significance. To determine the part which the production and the enjoyment of works of art play in their relation to the other factors of individual and social life—that is indeed a task which is momentous enough to be treated in a science of its own. Modern æsthetic, therefore, has still its own ends, which, if not so ambitious as those of the former speculative science of beauty, are nevertheless of no small importance. These ends, however, can no longer be attained by the procedure of the old æsthetic systems. As the problems have changed with changing conditions, so too the methods must be brought into line with the general scientific development. Historical and psychological investigation must replace the dialectic treatment of the subject. Art can no longer be deduced from general, philosophical, and metaphysical principles; it must be studied—by the methods of inductive psychology—as a human activity. Beauty cannot be considered as a semi-transcendental reality; it must be interpreted as an object of human longing and a source of human enjoyment. In æsthetic proper, as well as in the philosophy of art, every research must start, not from theoretical assumptions, but from the psychological and sociological data of the æsthetic life.