View of Plato.—Among the ancients, Plato was, perhaps, the first to distinguish the idea of the beautiful from other kindred ideas, and to point out its affinity with the true and the good, thus recognizing in it something immutable and eternal. In making the good and the beautiful identical, however, he mistakes the true character and end of art, Previously to Plato, and even by him, art and the beautiful were treated only in connection with ethics and politics' æsthetics, as a distinct department of science, was not known to the ancients.
Of Aristotle.—Aristotle has not treated of the beautiful but only of dramatic art. Poetry, he thinks, originates in the tendency to imitate, and the desire to know. Tragedy is the imitation of the better. Painting should represent, in like manner, not what is, but what ought to be. In this sense, may be understood his profound remark, that poetry is more true than history.
Plotinus and Augustine.—After Aristotle, Plotinus and Augustine alone, among the ancients, have treated of the beautiful. The work of Augustine is not extant. It is known that he made beauty consist in unity and fitness of parts, as in music. The treatise of Plotinus is regarded as at once beautiful and profound. Material beauty is, with him, only the expression or reflection of spiritual beauty. The soul alone, the mind, is beautiful, and in loving the beautiful, the soul loves its own image as there expressed. Hence, the soul must, itself, be beautiful, in order to comprehend and feel beauty. The tendency of this theory is to mysticism.
Longinus and Quintilian.—Longinus, and Quintilian, treat of the sublime, only with reference to eloquence and oratory; so, also, Horace, of art, as having to do with poetry.
Bacon.—Among the moderns, Bacon recognizes the fine arts as among the sciences, and poetry as one of the three chief branches of human knowledge, but nowhere, that I am aware, treats of the beautiful, distinctly, as such.
School of Leibnitz.—It was the school of Leibnitz and Wolf in Germany that first made the beautiful a distinct science. Baumgarten, disciple of Wolf, first conceived this idea. Like Plato, however, he makes the beautiful too nearly identical with the good and with morals.
School of Locke.—In England, the school of Locke have much to say of beauty. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, while they do not clearly distinguish between the beautiful and the good, adopt the theory of unity in variety, as already explained. Hogarth falls into the same class, his idea of beauty being represented by the waving line. Burke does not distinguish sufficiently between the sublime and the terrible.
French Encyclopedists.—In France, the Encyclopedists coincide, essentially, with the school of Locke, and treat of the beautiful, chiefly in its moral aspect.
The later Germans.—In Germany, again, Winckelman, an artist, and not a philosopher, seizing the spirit of the Greek art, ascribes, as Plato had done, the idea of beauty to God, from whom it passes into sensible things, as his manifestations.
In opposition to this ideal and divine aspect, Lessing takes a more practical view, regarding the beautiful from the stand-point of the real. Herder and Goethe contribute, also, much to the science of æsthetics. All these do little more than prepare the way for Kant, who goes more profoundly into the philosophy of the matter. He makes beauty a subjective affair, a play of the imagination.