two great forms of beauty. In short, the Absolute Being as absolute
unity and absolute variety is necessarily the ultimate principle, the
extreme basis, the finished ideal of all beauty. This was the marvellous
beauty which Diotimus had seen, and which is described in the Banquet of
Socrates.

It is our purpose after the previous discussion to attempt to elucidate
still further the idea of art by following its historic development.

Many questions bearing on art and relating to the beautiful had been
propounded before, even as far back as Plotinus, Plato, and Socrates, but
recent times have been the real cradle of aesthetics as a science.
Modern philosophy was the first to recognize that beauty in art is one of
the means by which the contradictions can be removed between mind
considered in its abstract and absolute existence and nature constituting
the world of sense, bringing back these two factors to unity.

Kant was the first who felt the want of this union and expressed it, but
without determining its conditions or expressing it scientifically. He
was impeded in his efforts to effect this union by the opposition between
the subjective and the objective, by his placing practical reason above
theoretical reason, and he set up the opposition found in the moral
sphere as the highest principle of morality. Reduced to this difficulty,
all that Kant could do was to express the union under the form of the
subjective ideas of reason, or as postulates to be deduced from the
practical reason, without their essential character being known, and
representing their realization as nothing more than a simple you ought,
or imperative "Du sollst."

In his teleological judgment applied to living beings, Kant comes, on the