“Dein Wissen theilest du mit vorgezogenen Geistern;
Die Kunst, o Mensch, hast du allein.”
Schiller’s Kunstlehre.—Trans.
[12] That by geist, spirit, and not mind merely, is here meant, will be doubted by no one who considers the scriptural basis of these Lectures. Schlegel seems to have had in view 1 Thess., v., 23. In the German geist stands both for mind and spirit, which, however, in English are equivalent neither in use nor meaning. Whenever, therefore, the translator is compelled by the English idiom to translate geist and its derivatives by mind and its cognates, and it is essential to keep in view the identity of the matter by the sameness of expression, he will indicate it by adding the German original in a bracket.
[13] St. John, iii., 8.—Trans.
[14] Leibnitz.—Trans.
[15] It is clear from what follows, that Schlegel used the term Fancy in a wide and general sense, which embraces, first, its original use in ancient philosophy, as the faculty of conception (φαντασια), which reproduces the images of objects whether present or absent; secondly, imagination, which is essential to all authors; and thirdly, fancy, in a narrow sense—or the poetic fancy. It is in this wide sense that the translator employs it after Milton who uses it, as more extensive than imagination, when he says of fancy,
“Of all the external things
Which the five watchful senses represent,
She forms imaginations, aery shapes.”
Par. Lost, Book V.
Indeed the whole of the speech of Raphael in this fifth book contains a striking affinity of thought and idea with Schlegel. We have there man’s triple constituents, body, soul, and spirit—reason and fancy in the soul, of which reason is the being or essence—while discursive reason is appropriated to man, but intuitive reason is made the prerogative of the “purest spirits”—“the pure intelligential substances.”—Trans.
[16] In the original zugetheilte, said of a matter assigned for investigation to a particular judge, or of the judge appointed to examine and report upon it.—Trans.
[17] Vernunft, from Vernehmen.