Theory of the Beautiful in nature, and that of the Modifications of Beauty.
The post-Hegelian metaphysical Æsthetic is chiefly noteworthy for the fuller development of two theories or, to speak more accurately, of two very curious combinations of arbitrary assertion and fanciful caprice: the so-called theory of Natural Beauty, and the theory of Modifications of the Beautiful. Neither of the two had any intimate or necessary connexion with this philosophical movement, to which they are rather linked by historical or psychological causes; by the relationship between facts of pleasure and pain and the inclination towards mysticism; by the confusion arising from the really æsthetic (imaginative) quality of some representations wrongly described as observation of natural beauties; or by the scholastic and literary tradition of discussing these cases of pleasure and pain and extra-æsthetic natural beauties in books devoted to the discussion of art.[19] These metaphysicians were sometimes rather grotesque and remind one of the story told of Paisiello, that in the fury of composition he set even the stage directions of his libretto to music; bitten with the rage for construction and dialectic, they did not spare even the indexes of chaotic old books, but seized on them as suitable material for a dialectical exercise.
Development of the first theory. Herder.
Beginning with the theory of Natural Beauty, observations on beautiful natural objects are found among the inquiries of the ancient philosophers on beauty, and especially among the mystical effusions of neo-Platonists and their followers in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.[20] Less frequently such questions were introduced into treatises on Poetics: Tesauro (1654) is among the first who, in his Cannochiale aristotelico, discusses not only the conceits of men, but also of God, the angels, nature and animals; and somewhat later (1707) Muratori speaks of "the beauty of matter," of which examples are "the gods, a flower, the sun, a rivulet."[21] Observations on that which is outside art and is merely natural, are made by Crousaz, by André, and especially by those authors of the eighteenth century who wrote on Beauty and Art in an empirical and gallant style.[22] It was the influence of these persons that led Kant, as we have seen, to sever the theory of beauty from that of art, specially connecting free beauty with objects of nature and those productions of man which reproduce natural beauties.[23] When the adversary of Kant's theory of Æsthetic, Herder (1800), in his sketch of an ethical system united spirit and nature, pleasure and value, feeling and intellect, he inevitably made much of natural beauty, and affirmed that everything in nature has its own beauty, the expression of its own greatest content, and that this accounts for the ascending scale of beautiful objects: beginning with. outlines, colours and tones, light and sound, and proceeding by way of flowers, water and sea, to birds, terrestrial animals, and man himself. For instance "a bird is the sum of the properties and perfections of its element, a representation of its potency, a creature of light, song and air"; amongst terrestrial animals, the ugliest are those resembling man, as the melancholy moping monkey; the most beautiful, those of perfect build, well proportioned, noble, free in action; those which express sweetness; those, in fine, which live in harmony and happiness, endowed with a perfection of their own, harmless to man.[24]
Schelling, Solger, Hegel.
Schelling, on the contrary, utterly, denies the concept of beauty in nature, and considers that such beauty is purely accidental and that art alone supplies the norm by which it can be discovered and judged.[25] Solger also excludes natural beauty;[26] so does Hegel, who distinguishes himself not by denying it but by proceeding with the utmost inconsequence to deal at length with the beautiful in nature. It is in fact not clear whether he means that really no beauty exists in nature and that man introduces it in his vision of things, or whether natural beauty really exists though inferior in degree to the beauty of art. "The beauty of art," he says," stands higher than that of nature; it is beauty born and reborn by the work of the spirit, and spirit alone is truth and reality; hence beauty is truly beauty only when it participates in spirit and is produced therefrom. Taken in this sense, the beauty of nature appears as a mere reflexion of the beauty appertaining to spirit, as an imperfect and incomplete mode, which substantially is contained within the spirit itself." In confirmation, he adds that nobody has attempted a systematic exposition of natural beauties, whereas there actually is, from the point of view of the utility of natural objects, a materia medica[27] But the second chapter of the first part of his Æsthetic is devoted precisely to natural Beauty on the ground that, in order to grasp the idea of artistic beauty in its entirety, three stages must be traversed: beauty in general, natural beauty (whose defects show the necessity for art), and, lastly, the Idea; "the first existence of the Idea is nature, and its first beauty is natural beauty." This beauty, which is beauty for us and not for itself, has several phases, from that in which the concept is immersed in matter to the point of disappearing, such as physical facts and isolated mechanisms, to that higher phase in which physical facts are united in systems (e.g. the solar system); but the Idea first reaches a true and real existence in organic facts, in the living creature. And even the living creature is liable to the distinction between beautiful and ugly; for example, among animals, the sloth, trailing itself laboriously and incapable of animation or activity, displeases us by its apathetic somnolence; nor can beauty be found in amphibians or in many kinds of fish, or in crocodiles, or toads, as well as in many insects and especially in those equivocal creatures which express a transition from one i class to another, such as the ornithorhyncus, a mixture of bird and beast.[28] These samples may suffice to show the general trend of Hegel's doctrine of natural beauty; elsewhere he discusses the external beauty of abstract form, regularity, symmetry, harmony, etc., which are; precisely the concepts which the formalism of Herbart placed in the heaven of the Ideas of the Beautiful.
Schleiermacher.
Schleiermacher, who praised Hegel for his attempt to exclude natural beauty from his Æsthetic, excluded it from his own not verbally but actually, by confining his attention to the artistic perfection of the internal image formed by the energy of the human spirit.[29] But the so-called Feeling for Nature which came in with Romanticism, and the Cosmos and other descriptive works of Humboldt,[30] directed attention increasingly to the impressions awakened by natural facts.
Alexander Humboldt.
This led to the compilation of those systematic lists of natural beauties whose impossibility had been proclaimed by Hegel, though he himself had furnished an example of them; amongst others, Bratranek published an Æsthetic of the Vegetable World.[31]