THE PHILOSOPHY 
 -OP SCHILLER '^ 
 
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BOOKS BY E. C. WILM 
 
 @ 19 S) 
 
 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 The Problem of Religion 
 
 The Culture of Religion 
 
 The Gist of Bergson (In preparation) 
 
 Translation of Klemm: Geschichte der 
 Psyehologie (In preparation) 
 
-\'i 
 
The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 IN 
 
 Its Historical Relations 
 
 BY 
 
 Emil Carl Wilm, Ph. D. 
 
 Professor of Philosophy in Washburn College, Sometime Fellow 
 
 in the Sage School of Philosophy, Cornell University, and 
 
 Assistant in Philosophy, Harvard University 
 
 JOHN W. LUCE AND COMPANY 
 BOSTON ::::::: 1912 
 
\ fXA^ 
 
 ^hi. 
 
 Copyright, 1912 
 By L. E. Bassett 
 
 /^i> 
 
Preface 
 
 The work presented here is not intended to 
 be a technical or exhaustive treatment of Schil- 
 ler's philosophy. I have sought, rather, to 
 give an account, which would be fairly intel- 
 ligible to the non-philosophical reader, of those 
 main stages of Schiller's reflective thought, in 
 their historical relations, an understanding of 
 which is necessary for the complete compre- 
 hension of the great poet's character, and of 
 his literary productions. To do this has not 
 been a very easy task, as the reader acquainted 
 with the character of Schiller's theoretical wri- 
 tings can easily imagine. It is perhaps due to 
 the fact that I have had the literary and gen- 
 eral student rather than the technical philoso- 
 pher in mind while writing the essay that a cer- 
 tain lack of completeness in the scope of the 
 work will be evident to the reader who has been 
 accustomed to think of Schiller as a writer 
 whose main speculative interest was in historical 
 and SBsthetical subjects. Interesting and valu- 
 able as the ffisthetical writings are from a 
 scientific point of view, they do not throw 
 much light on the more purely literary pro- 
 
vi Preface 
 
 ductions upon which Schiller's fame mainly 
 rests, and in relation to which my essay was 
 more particularly conceived. 
 
 I have endeavored, in working out my sub- 
 ject, to avail myself, as far as possible, of the 
 large and valuable literature which has accumu- 
 lated about it during more than a century. I 
 am especially indebted to the admirable trea- 
 tises of tJberweg, Tomaschek and Kuno 
 Fischer. Whatever value may attach to the 
 innovations I have made in the traditional 
 treatment (if there be any such) it is more 
 appropriate to call attention to the large debt 
 I owe to these and other writers than to any 
 inaccuracies I may have detected, or new views 
 I may have advanced, which may commend 
 themselves to the reader. For a good part of 
 the present material, therefore, I claim no 
 other merit than that of having presented it 
 for the first time in English, and thus having 
 made it accessible to those readers who, every- 
 thing else equal, prefer the English book when 
 it is available. I should say, however, in jus- 
 tice to myself, that I have never merely repro- 
 duced or translated. All the chapters have 
 been based upon a careful and often a repeated 
 reading of the writings under discussion. 
 
 The reader who wishes to get at the heart of 
 Schiller's philosophy without delay can do so 
 by omitting chapters III, IV and VI, whicK 
 
Peeface vii 
 
 deal either with immature or with transitional 
 phases of the poet's thought, and are, there- 
 fore, primarily of historical or antiquarian in- 
 terest. 
 
 E. C. WiLM. 
 Hakvabd University, January, 19111, 
 
Contents 
 
 I. LlTEBATTTEE AND PHILOSOPHY .... 1-16 
 
 The types of temperament, 1. Philosophy 
 and literature: analogies, 3. Distin- 
 guishing features of literature: beauty of 
 diction, 4. Its noble redundancy, 6. Lit- 
 erature as normative, and relation to re- 
 ligion, 7. The problems of Schiller's phi- 
 losophy, and his relation to Kant, 8. His 
 obscurity, 11. Aim and standpoint of the 
 present work, 13. Chronological, 14. 
 
 II. The Historical Backgeound: Leibniz 
 
 AND THE British Moralists . . . 17-34 
 The metaphysics of Leibniz: reality as 
 monads or individual centres of energy, 17. 
 Energy as rational or telle, 18. The prob- 
 lem of evil: optimism, 31. Ethics, 33. 
 Virtue and happiness, 33. Shaftesbury. 
 World harmony, 33. The primitive pro- 
 pensities and their organization, 34. The 
 utility of virtue, 34. The doctrine of the 
 moral sense, 35. Shaftesbury and Schiller, 
 35. Hutcheson, 36. Permanent value of 
 the ethics of proportion, 38. 
 
 III. Early Vnjws 35-68 
 
 (a) The Relation of Body and Mind: The 
 
 Psychophysical Problem 
 The Master's dissertation, 36. General 
 world-view, 37. The problem of body 
 and mind, 41. Schiller's solution of the 
 problem: Mittelkraft, 43. The sense 
 organ and the organ of thought, 44. 
 Association of ideas, 45. Attention and 
 action, 46. The function of bodily feel- 
 ing, 48. 
 
X Contents 
 
 CHAPTEK PAGE 
 
 (6) The Connection Between the Animal 
 and the Spiritual 'Nature in Man: The 
 Psychophysical and the Human Problem 
 Relation of the two essays, 49. The 
 function of feeling, continued, 50. Evo- 
 lution, individual and social: heterogony 
 of ends, 43. Reaction of mental states 
 on the body, 56. Physiognomy, 57. 
 (c) The Stage as a Moral Institution 
 More modern tone of the essays, 59. 
 The function of art, 60. The relation of 
 the stage to religion and to law, 62. 
 One-sidedness of the essays, 63. Sum- 
 mary of early views, 64. 
 
 IV. Awakening 69-86 
 
 The Philosophical Letters and Belated 
 Poems 
 
 The significance of the Letters and re- 
 lated poems, 69. Origin of the Letters, 
 TH. Authorship and dates, 76. The 
 attitude of feeling and the attitude of 
 reflection, 78. Kantian influence, 82. 
 
 V. The Study or Kant 87-99 
 
 First acquaintance with the Kantian phi- 
 losophy, 87. Schiller at Jena, and his rela- 
 tion to Reinhold, 88. Illness and philo- 
 sophical studies, 93. Influence of the 
 study of philosophy upon Schiller's 
 poetry, 94. 
 
 VI. First Fkotts 100-114 
 
 The Essays on the Tragic 
 Composition of the essays, 100. The 
 function of art to please, 103. Natural 
 and moral fitness, 106. Kantian ele- 
 ments in the essays, 108. The aesthetic 
 value of tragedy, 110. 
 
 VII. Independent Development . . . 115-156 
 Retrospect: the fundamental motives of 
 Schiller's philosophy, 115. The concept of 
 beauty: freedom-in-the-appearance, 123. 
 Beautiful conduct and the beautiful soul 
 
Contents xi 
 
 CHAPTEK ^ PAGE 
 
 /(die schdne Seele),] 134. Criticism of 
 Kant, 126. Beauty of conduct and moral 
 worth: the merely legal and the moral, 
 135. The limitations of humanity: Wilrde, 
 145. Art and moral culture, 149. 
 
 VIII. Relatios- to Post - Kantian Idealism . 157-173 
 Lack of appreciation of Schiller's true 
 metaphysical affiliations. Reasons for 
 this, 157. Materials for the determina- 
 tion of his relation to Post-Kantian Ideal- 
 ism, 160. Contact with Fichte and relation 
 between the two men, 161. Literary con- 
 troversy between Fichte and Schiller, 164. 
 Hegel's misconception of Schiller's philos- 
 ophy, 167. Conclusion, 170. 
 
 Notes 173 
 
 BlBLIOGBAPHT 179 
 
The Philosophy 
 of Schiller 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
 That everj man is bom either a Stoic or an 
 Epicurean, a remark attributed, I believe, to 
 Mr. Lecky, is one of those facile generaliza- 
 tions whose attractiveness to the average man 
 seems to depend more upon the boldness and 
 simplicity with which it is stated than upon 
 the actual truth which it embodies. The dis- 
 tinguishing trait of the Stoic mind is reason ; 
 that of the Epicurean, feeling. The funda- 
 mental impulse of the Stoic temperament is the 
 logical impulse; that of the Epicurean, the 
 eudffimonistic or aesthetic impulse. The former 
 may be said to represent the universal, or the 
 whole ; the latter, the individual, the part. But 
 as nature itself represents a curious commin- 
 gling of order and eccentricity, and as social 
 life is a peculiar product of individual and col- 
 lective interests, of acquiescence to rule and of 
 individual initiative, so man, the integral part 
 1 
 
2 The Philosophy or Schttj.kr 
 
 of nature and of the social order that he is, 
 represents in himself at his completest, as Plato 
 long ago suggested, a mixture of passion and 
 reason, of wilful impulse and restraint. In his 
 outlook on life he is both poet and philosopher, 
 dreamer and realist, prophet and seer. The 
 deepest truth concerning life and man is not 
 reached by the cold dialectic of the philosopher 
 with his sense for fact and truth, nor through 
 the emotional promptings of the poet, with his 
 sense for harmony and beauty. Indeed, the 
 great teachers and leaders of humanity, Job 
 and Isaiah, ^schylus and Sophocles, Shake- 
 speare and Browning, Goethe and Schiller, 
 have not been poets merely, or philosophers 
 merely, but both. Perhaps the most striking 
 example of this composite type of character, 
 too versatile to be forced into any convenient 
 rubric, is Robert Browning, who, according to 
 a widely prevalent opinion, is the most univer- 
 sal interpreter of our modern life, representing 
 and reflecting in himself " its confused strength 
 and chaotic wealth." -^ Primarily a poet, with 
 a poet's feeling for beauty and artistic fitness, 
 he is also a philosopher, holding a theory of 
 life which he is ready to defend with all the 
 resources of a lavishly endowed intellect. No 
 other English poet lends himself more readily 
 to poetic apprehension and interpretation ; at 
 the same time there is probably no other great 
 
LiTEEATTJEE AND PHILOSOPHY 3 
 
 English poet whose ruling ideas are so readily 
 disengaged from the poetic forms in which they 
 find expression. 
 
 The commingling of poetic and philosophical 
 elements in the works of the most representa- 
 tive writers is entirely natural when we remem- 
 ber the relations between philosophy and liter- 
 ature, which are more numerous and intimate 
 than might, at first sight, seem to be the case. 
 The problems of philosophy and literature are 
 common problems. Both aUke differ from the 
 special sciences in the respect that they do not 
 seek, through observation and experimental in- 
 vestigation, to add to the stock of knowledge 
 already accumulated. Both differ from the 
 special sciences in the respect that they do not 
 confine themselves to special aspects of reality, 
 or to particular classes of facts, but deal with 
 experience or life in its broadest signification. 
 Literature, no more than philosophy, can be 
 unfaithful to the truth of things. " No great 
 art could ever live," says the late Edward 
 Caird, " if it ceased to regard beauty as one 
 with truth and goodness. No poet ever 
 touched the deepest springs of human emotion, 
 who regarded himself as the idle singer of an 
 empty day." ^ 
 
 Nor is the approach of philosophy and liter- 
 ature to their problems so different as is fre- 
 quently supposed. Philosophy, for example, is 
 
4 The Philosophy or Schiller 
 
 often said to approach its problems by the 
 method of purely intellectual analysis and in- 
 terpretation, while literature is said to approach 
 its problems through intuition or immediate in- 
 sight, " gaining God by first leap." But, evi- 
 dently, every legitimate method of reaching 
 truth is open to philosopher and poet alike. 
 The solution of the poet's problems probably 
 involves vastly more intellectual labor than the 
 highly finished product of his pen suggests. 
 On the other hand, the thought of the gifted 
 philosopher, like that of the poet, often leaps, 
 lightning-like, from peak to peak of the intel- 
 lectual realm, clearing many intermediate 
 points which a less practised or powerful 
 thinker must laboriously surmount. What 
 Professor Santayana has so finely said of re- 
 ligion ^ is of course eminently true of poetry, 
 but it is true to a large degree of philosophy 
 as well. It too has its instinctive and bhnd 
 side, " feeling its way, however, steadily 
 toward the heart of things, and from whatever 
 quarter it may come, veers in the direction of 
 the ultimate." * 
 
 If the difference between philosophy and lit- 
 erature is not to be sought in the problems 
 with which they deal, nor in the method by 
 which they approach and deal with these prob- 
 lems, in what does the difference between them 
 consist? It consists mainly, as I conceive the 
 
Literature and Philosophy 6 
 
 matter, in the form through which philosophy 
 and literature are expressed. With philosophy, 
 the matter is of fundamental importance: the 
 form in which its truths are expressed is of 
 subsidiary interest only. Not so with litera- 
 ture, which, as a branch of fine art, must give 
 the truth an ideally beautiful expression. Like 
 the clever artificer who takes a " sliver of pure 
 gold . . . mere oozings from the mine," and 
 subjects it to 
 
 "... the file's tooth and the hammer's tap: 
 Since hammer must needs widen out the round, 
 And file emboss it fine with Uly-flowers, 
 Ere the stuff grow a ring-thing right to wear," "^ 
 
 SO the poet takes the " pure crude fact " of 
 life, " melts up wax with honey, so to speak," 
 and forms it into a thing of power and beauty, 
 which is no sooner conceived than it glows and 
 pulsates in the soul, raising its energy and 
 swelling the tide of its life. 
 
 A leading condition of the emotional and 
 pedagogical effectiveness of literature is of 
 course that its exposition of truth be through 
 the concrete rather than the conceptual, ma- 
 king its appeal to the imagination rather than 
 to the logical understanding. Thus, " where 
 truth in closest words shall fail," the 
 
 "... truth embodied in a tale 
 Shall enter in at lowly doors." 
 
6 The Philosophy of Schujler 
 
 No doubt, the poet, with his strong sense 
 for unity and artistic completeness, will often 
 exceed the stricter limits of truth which phi- 
 losophy sets itself. What is " left abrupt " in 
 philosophy is often ideally completed in poetry. 
 The poet, laboring under emotional stress, 
 will often be tempted to thrust aside the veil 
 that separates him from the ultimate reali- 
 ties which the more cautious methods of phi- 
 losophy fail to disclose. And, where knowledge 
 entirely fails, the poet, like the plain man, will 
 " cling to the sunnier side of doubt," " believ- 
 ing where he cannot prove. If, strictly speak- 
 ing, he is guilty of untruth, it is of that noble 
 untruth whose very appeal to man proves him 
 to be something more than a mere child of 
 earth, content with what earth offers. 
 
 This suggests what seems to me to be per- 
 haps the principal office of poetry, namely to 
 soften down the hard lines and the harsh dis- 
 tinctions in nature to which natural science and 
 a mechanistic philosophy have too much accus- 
 tomed us. Under the natural-scientific and 
 mechanistic view of the world, matter, not 
 spirit, is the sole reality, and man, and the 
 various interests associated with his life, ap- 
 pear rather as incidents, important indeed for 
 man, but entirely unimportant otherwise, in 
 the process of universal evolution. The iron- 
 shod universe described by natural science is 
 
LiTERATUEE AND PHILOSOPHY 7 
 
 one in which the higher life of man must expire 
 for want of appropriate support and suste- 
 nance. If science has disillusioned man, it is 
 the function of poetry to re-iUusion him, and 
 to quiet his misgivings by pointing out the 
 unity and beauty of the world, and by giving 
 to it an ultimately spiritual interpretation. 
 
 This suggests a second characteristic of lit- 
 erature which broadly differentiates it from 
 science and philosophy. While the standpoint 
 of the latter is primarily that of description 
 and interpretation, the standpoint of literature 
 is that of ethical demand as well. In this re- 
 spect it closely resembles that other great in- 
 terest, so closely related to both philosophy 
 and literature, religion. Religion, too, is fun- 
 damentally a theory of life, offering an illumi- 
 nation of life.''^ But besides being a theory of 
 life, religion is also a force in life. Its solu- 
 tion of the world problem is not theoretical 
 merely, it is also practical. Religion is not 
 merely speculative, it is remedial as well. It 
 is an ethical imperative, a call to duty, a pro- 
 gramme of salvation. So also with poetry. It 
 declares not merely what is, but what shall be. 
 Facing the evil and ugly aspects of reality, it 
 recognizes them only as temporary forms, and 
 as ideally non-existent. It acknowledges them 
 only to condemn them. The poet is not so 
 much a discoverer of what is, as he is a re- 
 
8 The Philosophy of S chiller 
 
 vealer and a creator of what ought to be. His 
 will and word are productive forces, making 
 over the mind of man, and, with it, the world. 
 
 In the writings of Schiller the literary and 
 philosophical motives are inextricably inter- 
 woven, a circumstance completely explained by 
 the composite character of his personality. 
 Indeed, it would be quite impossible to gain an 
 adequate view of Schiller's ethical thought or 
 of the poet's significance in the development of 
 modem ethical speculation unless the poetic 
 quality of his temperament, and the aesthetic 
 point of view, which was such a striking char- 
 acteristic of his reflective activity, were clearly 
 apprehended and constantly kept in view. 
 There was in his make-up, to quote the words of 
 a distinguished modem writer,® " that wonder- 
 ful blending of the artistic spirit, in which lay 
 his affinity with Goethe, and of the strenuous 
 character, in which he resembled Fichte, and 
 which prepared him, as it did Fichte, for the 
 understanding of Kant." The deep vein of 
 the heroic in his nature was tempered and re- 
 fined by close contact with the Greek spirit, 
 into which his sympathetic study of classical 
 literature had brought him; and, while he al- 
 ways retained what seems almost an inspired 
 enthusiasm for the morally heroic, he also de- 
 veloped that exquisite sensitiveness for the ex- 
 
LiTEEATUEE AND PHILOSOPHY 9 
 
 ternal shapes of beauty, a shock to which 
 could not be atoned for by any act or situa- 
 tion, no matter how self-forgetful or sublime. 
 
 It is this quality of Schiller's genius, already 
 discoverable in the earliest writings of his school 
 period, but reaching greater maturity under 
 the influence of Hellenism and of Goethe, to 
 which must be attributed the advance upon the 
 harsh rigorism of the ethical system of Kant 
 which it is unquestionably the merit of SchiUer 
 to have inaugurated. For in spite of the 
 verbal coincidence of many passages in the two 
 men's writings, and notwithstanding the opin- 
 ion of careful writers like Drobisch and Meurer, 
 and, more recently, of Kiihnemann,^ we have 
 not, I think, a mere reproduction in Schiller, in 
 a more rhetorical dress, of the round of Kant- 
 ian ethical conceptions, but a real advance of 
 first importance — an advance which consists, 
 on the psychological side, in a fuller recogni- 
 tion of the essential unity of human nature, of 
 the significance and rights, in the moral hfe, 
 too much neglected by Kant, of the desiderative 
 or sensuous side of man's nature, and of the 
 possibility of educating this to the point where 
 it will not be the antagonist of reason, but an 
 integral part of the complete moral character; 
 on the moral side, in the concrete synthesis of 
 law and end, the dutiful and the good, a syn- 
 thesis which, speaking broadly, characterizes 
 
10 The Philosophy of Schillee 
 
 the whole trend of post-Kantian and of con- 
 temporary ethical thought. When a recent 
 writer ^^ speaks of the end of life as " an ideal 
 of character, to be realized by the individual; 
 and his attitude to it one of obligation to real- 
 ize it . . . not something to be got or to be 
 done but to be or to become," he but restates 
 the favorite thought of Schiller that " man's 
 destiny is not to perform individual moral ac- 
 tions, but to be a moral being ; virtue, not vir- 
 tues, is his task, and virtue is nothing but an 
 inclination to duty." The ideal of the har- 
 monious unfolding of the soul, then, as the 
 supreme end of life, the ever memorable basic 
 idea of Greek ethics, as Hoifding calls it,^* 
 constitutes Schiller's contribution to modern 
 ethical philosophy. 
 
 Nor is it in the critical insight into the de- 
 fects of the Kantian ethics, and the fuller rec- 
 ognition of the rights and possibilities of 
 human nature, that the main merit of Schiller 
 lies. Through his lofty exposition, in prose 
 and in verse, of the principles and ideals of art 
 and morality these have become the common 
 possession of the German people, and are des^ 
 tined to exert their influence wherever the 
 knowledge of German letters extends.-'^ 
 
 The somewhat dogmatic statement of the 
 central significance of Schiller's philosophy 
 made above may seem somewhat hazardous in 
 
Literature and Philosophy 11 
 
 view of the fact that there is perhaps no other 
 philosophical writer in recent times whose wri- 
 tings have been so variously interpreted. 
 
 This variety of opinions is accounted for 
 partly by the fact that Schiller did not always 
 have a clear understanding with himself as to 
 which was the higher term, beauty or subUmity 
 of action, " grace " or " dignity." The ideal" 
 towards which he strove was " beautiful con- 
 duct " (die schone Sittlichkeit), the free ex- 
 pression of the " beautiful soul " {die schone 
 Seele), in which the sensuous and rational na- 
 tures are reconciled, and duty and inclination 
 coincide. Yet he retains the Kantian distinc- 
 tion between legal and moral, and grants that 
 occasions arise when duty and inclination do 
 not harmonize, and when the agent, in order 
 to meet the demands of his nature as an intel- 
 ligible and moral being, must subordinate the 
 solicitations of sense to the imperative of the 
 moral law. In the painful struggle between 
 sense and reason which ensues, man must act 
 with " dignity," and so express the want of 
 harmony as to let it be seen that the victory 
 remains with the nobler power. 
 
 As has often been remarked by his critics, 
 SchiUer was not a systematically trained phi- 
 losopher, and it would not be difficult to quote 
 passages from different writings that would be 
 hard to reconcile with each other. It is often 
 
 ■\ ^ 
 
12 The Philosophy of Schillee 
 
 at the crucial point of his argument that he 
 expresses himself with greatest hesitation. His 
 general style, too, is not such as to relieve the 
 difficulties of interpretation. Rhetorical and 
 poetic, even in his scientific writings, we miss 
 the clear-cut definitions and sharp distinctions 
 so indispensable to clear thought and presenta- 
 tion; and the vacillation of his terminology, 
 the indefiniteness of his concepts, and the bold- 
 ness of his antitheses are the source of endless 
 trouble to the student of his philosophical 
 writings. 
 
 Another source of confusion has been the 
 fact that in certain of his writings Schiller 
 often develops one line of thought to the ex- 
 clusion of another, and that these writings 
 have been taken apart from the rest and studied 
 out of connection with the whole body of his 
 works. It is thus that Schiller has been shown 
 to advocate several incompatible views, and to 
 belong to as many different parties. Now, no 
 adequate view of his philosophy will be ob- 
 tained by this method of study. The develop- 
 ment of his views must be traced stage by 
 stage, and each writing must be treated, not 
 as an isolated phenomenon, and complete in it- 
 self, but as belonging both to the past and to 
 the future, as illuminated by, and shedding 
 light on, every other. It is this service that 
 the present work is intended to render. It is 
 
LlTEEATURE AND PHILOSOPHY 13 
 
 intended to do for the whole of Schiller's 
 philosophy what has recently been done for 
 his aesthetics : ^* to exhibit it in its histor- 
 ical development. Its method is entwicke- 
 lungshistorisch: it is the growth of Schiller's / 
 reflective genius and the evolution of his phil- 
 osophical concepts, particularly with reference 
 to the influence of Kant, that will demand our 
 special attention. The vexing problems of the 
 Schiller philosophy, whether Schiller changed 
 his attitude on fundamental problems, what he 
 regarded as the highest good, and to what ex- 
 tent he was influenced by the reigning philoso- 
 phy, can be best understood by this method of 
 study and presentation. 
 
 It is particularly in view of the Schiller- 
 Kant problem that the somewhat detailed sum- 
 mary of Schiller's early essays will be justified. 
 It would be diflicult to say just what Schiller 
 owed to Kant unless we knew precisely what 
 problems occupied his mind and what attitude 
 he took toward them before the Kantian period. 
 Besides, it will be found that they are not with- 
 out scientific significance in themselves. An 
 extended criticism, however, of these early 
 views will not be called for. Schiller moved, 
 for the most part, in well beaten paths, and we 
 may content ourselves with simple exposition, 
 and with pointing out the sources of his inspi- 
 ration on the one hand, and the bearings of 
 
14 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 the thoughts, here vaguely conceived and inad- 
 equately expressed, upon his future develop- 
 ment, on the other. It is in the later and 
 more independent movement of his thought that 
 a more critical attitude will be taken, and that 
 some evaluation, in the light of the more re- 
 cent development of philosophical reflection, of 
 the innovations proposed in the fields of morals 
 and art, will be attempted. 
 
 It will be convenient, before we undertake 
 the more detailed account of his philosophical 
 works, to recall briefly the main points of 
 Schiller's biography, and to sketch in broad 
 outlines the principal periods in his develop- 
 ment. 
 
 Friedrich Schiller was bom in 1759 and died 
 in 1805. His literary activity extends over 
 about twenty-five years, — from 1780, in 
 round numbers, until his death, — and falls 
 into three periods, as follows: From 1780 to 
 1785, in which were written Die Rduber, Fiesco, 
 Kabale und Liebe, the lyrics of the Anthologie, 
 and the beginning of Don Carlos; the period 
 of scientific activity, from 1785 to 1794, in 
 which he abandoned poetic production almost 
 altogether and devoted himself to the study of 
 history and the Kantian philosophy. In this 
 period belong, besides most of the philosophical 
 writings, presently to be enumerated, Don 
 Carlos, Geschichte des dreissigjahrigen Krieges, 
 
LlTERATUKE AND PHILOSOPHY 15 
 
 Geschichte des Ab falls der veremigten Nieder- 
 lande, and translations from the Greek. Fi- 
 nally, the period of his connection with Goethe, 
 17941-1805, in which his poetic genius reached 
 the height of its development. Here belong 
 his philosophical poems (Ideendichtung), 
 most of his ballads, and the great dramas, — 
 Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, Die Jungfrau von 
 Orleans, 'Die Braut von Messina, and Wilhelm 
 Tell. 
 
 With the exception of the Ideendichtung, the 
 philosophical writings all fall within the first 
 two periods of Schiller's literary activity. But 
 it will be more convenient to consider them in 
 three groups again, corresponding to the three 
 stages of Schiller's philosophical development. 
 I have distinguished a pre-critical period, ex- 
 tending from 1779 to, say, 1785, in which fall 
 the two early medical essays. Die Philosophie 
 der Physiologie, and Uher den Zusammenhang 
 der thierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner 
 geistigen, two dramaturgical essays, tJber das 
 gegenwartige deutsche Theater and Die Schau- 
 biihne als moralische Anstalt betrachtet, and a 
 few poems of philosophical significance, the 
 Lauraoden and Die FreundscTiaft. Then fol- 
 lows a period of transition, 1785-1792, in 
 which were written Der Geisterseher, Die philo- 
 sopMschen Briefe, Der Kampf, Resignation, 
 Die Kwnstler, Uber den Grund des Vergnugens 
 
16 The Philosophy of Schillee 
 
 an tragischen Gegenstanden and ijher die tror 
 gische Kwnst. Finally, a period of criticism 
 and independent development, 1792-1796, in 
 which fall the essays on the Sublime and the 
 Pathetic, Anmut und Wiirde, the Brief e iiber 
 die dsthetische Erziehung des Menschen, tlber 
 naive wnd sentimentalische Dichtung, and a 
 group of philosophical poems of which Das 
 Ideal und das Leben is the most typical and the 
 most important. 
 
CHAPTER n 
 
 THE HISTOKICAL BACKGEOUND : LEIBNIZ AND 
 THE BRITISH MOKALISTS 
 
 It will be desirable, before we undertake the 
 discussion of Schiller's pre-Kantian views, to 
 sketch briefly the main outlines of the philo- 
 sophical systems from which Schiller's earher 
 ideas were mainly derived. It is hoped that in 
 the course of our study the real affiliation of 
 Schiller's metaphysical and ethical views, both 
 in their earlier development and in their matur- 
 est expression, will become increasingly obvious. 
 
 The lines of philosophical speculation in the 
 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which 
 mainly interest us here are the optimistic ra- 
 tionalism of Leibniz and his school, on the one 
 hand, and the ethics of projKytion, traceable, 
 indeed, to classic antiquity, of Shaftesbury, 
 Hutcheson and their followers, on the other. 
 
 The leading ideas of the Leibnizian philoso- 
 phy are of such intrinsic and historical impor- 
 tance that we shall be obliged to examine them 
 somewhat carefully.'^* The fundamental nature 
 of reality, according to Leibniz, is not express- 
 ible in terms of extension (materialism) nor in 
 17 
 
18 The Philosophy oi' Schiller 
 
 a double set of terms, extension and conscious- 
 ness (Cartesian dualism), but in terms of activ- 
 ity or force. Reality exists in the form of 
 1 monads, which are indivisible centers of energy, 
 
 ' and are, accordingly, psychical rather than 
 [^ physical in their ultimate constitution. They 
 are entirely independent, or non-equatable. 
 These monads, or punctual entities, are, more- 
 over, spontaneous in their activity. Their be- 
 havior is not due to forces impinging upon 
 them from without ; it is a constitutional trait. 
 Monads, in the language of Leibniz, arc im- 
 penetrable, that is, they are incapable of being 
 influenced from the outside. They contain in 
 themselves the complete ground for their 
 changing states. Monads, that is, are not only 
 active, they are self-active. The monads ma- 
 king up the body and the mind, for example, do 
 not act upon one another when I will to raise 
 my hand, or when a physical stimulus gives 
 
 — rise to a state of consciousness. Body and 
 mind do not interact. They merely act in uni- 
 
 1 son according to a pre-established harmony 
 
 1 among all monads. To use the language of 
 technical philosophy, there is no such thing as 
 transeunt causality, — a compulsive force slip- 
 ping out of one thing into another thing, — 
 all causality is immanent causality. 
 
 An objection might here be raised to the 
 apparently divisive and disrupting tendency of 
 
The HisTOEicAi, Background 19 
 
 this theory of the ultimate supremacy of the 
 monad. Do we not have here, the objection 
 might run, a plurahstic universe, or, to avoid 
 a contradiction in terms, a mere multiverse? 
 How can we ever build a genuine universe or 
 world out of mutually repellent, or, at any rate, 
 independent atoms? Instead of the wonder- 
 fully contrived organism, or at least the stu- 
 pendous mechanism, that we have taken the 
 universe to be, we have here only a rope of 
 sand, or, still worse, a host of warring elements. 
 This criticism, so disconcerting at first, can 
 be successfully met by endowing the individual 
 monad with essential rationality. It will find 
 its rightful place within the larger whole, not 
 by being forced into it by some extraneous 
 power, law, or abstract reason, operating upon 
 it from without, but in virtue of its own in- 
 trinsic rationality. The monad has a habit of 
 harmonious cooperation. For this theory we 
 have indeed in Leibniz the pregnant sugges- 
 tion. Every monad, we have seen, is a psychical 
 being because gifted with the psychical quality 
 of appetition or will. It is a psychical being 
 or soul for still another reason: it is gifted 
 with perception or sentiency. Appetition or 
 will is, in fact, only a modification of percep- 
 tion ; it is the name for the tendency of per- 
 ceptions to pass into each other. " L'appetit 
 est la tendance d'une perception a une autr£." 
 
20 The Philosophy of Schhxee 
 
 Thus, while ideas are essentially dynamic or 
 active, will is essentially rational in character. 
 The universe is rational in every part. Reason 
 does not exist in some disembodied form, ex- 
 ternal to the individual, but is immanent in the 
 very heart of things. The reason of the whole 
 is exhibited by each finite part, though perhaps 
 in varying degrees of explicitness. 
 
 We have thus arrived at three far-reaching 
 conclusions: (1) Monads, or the ultimate con- 
 stituents of reality, are fundamentally charac- 
 terized by activity or energy. The whole of 
 reality is thus will or power, and the part 
 shares in the will or power of the whole. (2) 
 The seat of power or energy is plural or indi- 
 vidual. The monad does not borrow its energy ; 
 it is itself the source of energy. The part 
 shares in the freedom of the whole. (3) Real- 
 ity is essentially and immanently rational. The 
 part shares in the rationality of the whole. 
 The monad is self-active, intrinsically rational 
 and free. 
 
 It would, of course, be difficult to say just to 
 what extent Schiller derived his philosophical 
 and poetic inspiration from the profound gen- 
 eralizations of Leibniz which fairly dominated 
 European philosophy until the advent of Kant. 
 That Schiller became familiar with the salient 
 features of the Leibnizian philosophy in the 
 Stuttgart Academy is certain; that this phi- 
 
The Historical Backgeound 21 
 
 losophy was such as to prove congenial to his 
 highly speculative intellect and his eager and 
 freedom-loving temperament is also sufficiently 
 obvious. At any rate, we have in the ingenious 
 and bold generahzations of Leibniz the philo- 
 sophical groundwork for all that was most 
 characteristic in the philosophical and literary 
 productions of the future poet of freedom : his 
 metaphysical and practical idealism, his theory 
 of the ethical ^rights of sensibility against the ^ 
 domination of reason, and of the rights of the 
 individual against social and political oppres- 
 sion. 
 
 The doctrine of the immanence of reason in 
 the universe is apparently contradicted by the 
 presence of evil in the world. This difficulty 
 Leibniz meets with, the well known argument 
 
 "thatevil exists only in the details, and that it 
 disappears when the details are given their 
 proper setting in the larger context of experi- 
 ence. The rationality of the universe, we 
 might say, is not evident if we view the indi- 
 vidual being in its separate life, but only if we 
 view it as a part of the larger life of the uni- 
 verse in which it shares. So physical and 
 moral evil finds its justification in that it makes 
 for good. Like the minor strain in a musical 
 masterpiece, it contributes to the beauty and 
 perfection of the whole. Evil, then, is merely 
 a finite fact, a superficial appearance. Viewed 
 
22 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 more comprehensively, its rationality and 
 meaning are obvious. The world is the best 
 of all possible worlds. 
 
 Although Leibniz's ethical views were not so 
 influential as his metaphysics in the develop- 
 ment of subsequent philosophy, they are in 
 themselves sufficiently noteworthy, and furnish 
 natural points of contact with the ethical sys- 
 tem of Shaftesbury and his school, from which 
 Schiller's ethical views were more directly 
 drawn. MoraKty, according to Leibniz, is a 
 natural growth, provided for by the tendency 
 to activity or self-perfection inherent in every 
 individual, as in reality everywhere. The self- 
 perfection of the individual consists, on the 
 intellectual side, in a striving for clearer knowl- 
 edge. In man, as his enlightenment increases, 
 the originally blind impulse, aimed at transi- 
 tory pleasures of sense, will give place to an 
 impulse to enduring delight in spiritual perfec- 
 tion ; and, as the interdependence of all beings 
 becomes obvious with enlightenment, the indi- 
 vidual will seek the perfection of others as well 
 as his own. Metaphysical insight thus con- 
 tributes to the moralization and ethical perfec- 
 tion of man. He will perform his individual 
 function well in proportion to his appreciation 
 of his place in the world order. 
 
 Further, progress in intellectual insight and 
 in goodness is connected with pleasure, and 
 
The Historical Backgbound 23 
 
 retrogression with pain. Leibniz reiterates the 
 classic identification between goodness and hap- 
 piness, and the notion, in the degenerate form 
 of the principle of the expediency of virtue, 
 rules the ethical thought of the entire Illumina- 
 tion period. The great words, enlightenment, 
 perfection, virtue and happiness, become, in the 
 period of intellectual sterility succeeding Leib- 
 niz, empty catchwords which are repeated with 
 tiresome frequency until the harsh duty ethics 
 of Kant forced men to ponder anew the ancient 
 and profound problems for which they stood. 
 
 The concept of harmony, already in Leibniz 
 of large metaphysical and . ethical importance, 
 is raised into even larger prominence by 
 Shaftesbury.^'* It underlies his metaphysics, 
 and forms the philosophical basis for his the- 
 ism. It likewise determines the fundamental 
 character of his ethical system, which was des- 
 tined to become of first importance in the de- 
 velopment of English ethics. 
 
 Order and harmony, according to Shaftes-~7 
 bury, characterize the universe throughout, / 
 each thing or being taking its place in a uni-/ 
 versal system. The telic character of the^ 
 world, shown in the beautiful articulation of 
 its parts, argues the existence of a power to . 
 whose formative activity the universal order 
 must be attributed. This is the world soul, or 
 deity. Like Leibniz, Shaftesbury finds evil 
 
24 The Philosophy of Schuxek 
 
 only in the part. It disappears when the part 
 is fitted into the larger context of life where 
 it properly belongs. AU apparent imperfec- 
 tions contribute to the perfection of the whole. 
 The world is not only infinitely orderly, exhibit- 
 ing law and reason throughout, it is also ethical 
 in its ultimate constitution. God is infinite 
 intelligence and power. He is also infinite love. 
 The notion of harmony is carried over by 
 Shaftesbury into ethics, and rules his ethical 
 theory throughout. Man is characterized by 
 three kinds of j)rimary propensities or affec- 
 tions, the social or natural affections, in virtue 
 of which he takes pleasure m" the well-being 
 of others, without any ulterior aim; the self 
 
 or egoistic affections, directed towards private 
 wilfare ; and thejiinsocial affections. The lat- 
 ter, like hatred, envy and malevolence, are al- 
 ways evil. Virt ue consis ts in the balance or 
 harmony of the egoistic and social affections. 
 The individual and society, this is the epoch- 
 making thought of Shaftesbury, form an or- 
 ganic unit. The interest in the individual's 
 own welfare is just as essential in the organi- 
 zation of man's moral nature as is the interest 
 in the welfare of others. And, on the other 
 hand, private welfare can be attained only as 
 the health and welfare of the social organism 
 becomes an object of individual care.^® 
 
 A leading characteristic of Shaftesbury's 
 
The Histoeical Background 25 
 
 ethical writings, as of Leibniz's, is his insistence 
 on the utility of virtue to the individual. This 
 does not consist in any precarious outward ad- 
 vantages which might accrue to the agent, but 
 in a permanent delight, which, though not the 
 deliberate end of moral activity, is its essential 
 concomitant. A state of inner blessedness is 
 inseparable from the good life. Affection is 
 its own reward, and ill will its own punishment. 
 
 Perhaps the most significant feature of 
 Shaftesbury's theory is his ascription to man 
 of the disinterested impulses, aimed at the 
 good of the species, as a part of the original 
 equipment of human nature, instead of deri- 
 ving them from self-love, in the manner of 
 Hobbes, Locke and their followers. This for- 
 mulation of the ethical problem differs also 
 radically from Kant's, of which more anon. 
 In another respect, also, Shaftesbury's ethics 
 reveals a marked divergence from Kant's. 
 The moral character of an act is determined, 
 according to Kant, by the criterion of abstract 
 reason. Shaftesbury proposes instead his 
 theory of the moral sense, a faculty aldn to the 
 aesthetic sense, in which the active or mandatory 
 features, so prominent in Kant, are almost 
 completely eliminated. 
 
 Goodness as a natural inchnation ; virtue as 
 a harmony of man's various powers; morality 
 as essentially a manifestation of the beautiful; 
 
26 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 the organization of all human powers as the 
 goal of moral progress; and the judgment of 
 a character or a moral situation as, at least in 
 part, an sesthetic judgment: we have found in 
 Shaftesbury the whole round of ethical ideas 
 which we shall later encounter in Schiller. 
 That we have in Schiller a type of ethical 
 theory affiliated with Shaftesbury rather than 
 Kant seems beyond dispute, and will become 
 more obvious as our study advances. 
 
 The Scottish Hutcheson, although supple- 
 menting Shaftesbury at important points, does 
 not furnish many additional ideas which are of 
 interest for our purposes, and will therefore 
 not call for extended notice. He reiterates the 
 doctrine of the primitive or underived charac- 
 ter of the social impulses, viewing man as by 
 nature a social being. He emphasizes even 
 more prominently than did Shaftesbury the 
 doctrine of the moral sense, a faculty of emo- 
 tional response to moral situations. So much, 
 indeed, does he stress the emotional character 
 of this response that he represents, according 
 to Wundt, the culmination of the ethics of feel- 
 ing. " Reason has not, as the intellectual 
 ethics supposes, any primary significance for 
 morals ; its influence is secondary, in that it 
 teaches us how to discriminate between what is 
 ethically valuable and what is worthless, and 
 helps us to reach a knowledge of the moral 
 
The Histoeicai. Backgeound 27 
 
 world-order and the power and goodness of the 
 God who preserves that order." ^'' 
 
 One further point of divergence from 
 Shaftesbury is noteworthy, and represents a 
 deviation from the more strictly aesthetic view 
 of his predecessor. The only object of un- 
 qualified moral approbation, according to 
 Hutcheson, is benevolence. This generous er- 
 ror he carried to the point of denying that self- 
 regard is ever morally meritorious. Morality, 
 in other words, does not consist, as Shaftes* 
 bury had maintained, in the mere balance of 
 egoistic and other-regarding impulses, but in 
 the predominance of disinterested love over all 
 other impulses. The doctrine of the disinter- 
 ested character of love seems to represent a real 
 advance on Shaftesbury, since the latter ap- 
 pears to rest the reasonableness of benevolence 
 on its conduciveness to the happiness of the 
 individual, and thus, in spite of his formal 
 definition of virtue in terms of complete har- 
 mony, to advocate a subtle form of hedonistic 
 theory.-'^ 
 
 Hutcheson seems to have been the first writer 
 in modem times to mention a principle which 
 we shall encounter in Schiller, and which has 
 come to play a leading role in the more recent 
 development of the psychology of conduct, the 
 principle of the heterogony of ends. " There 
 must arise," says Hutcheson, " in consequence 
 
2S The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 of our original desires, secondary desires of 
 everything useful to gratify the primary de- 
 sires. Thus, as soon as we apprehend the use 
 of wealth or power to gratify our original de- 
 sires, we also desire them. From their univer- 
 sality as means arises the general prevalence 
 of these desires of wealth and power." ^® In 
 other words, what is originally desired merely 
 as a means, may come eventually to be desired 
 as an end in itself. 
 
 It may not be out of place, before we leave 
 the discussion of the historical background of 
 Schiller's philosophical and ethical ideas, to 
 call attention to the permanent significance of 
 the central ethical doctrines, especially, of 
 Leibniz, Shaftesbury and their followers. 
 
 A problem as complex as that of morality 
 is, of course, capable of a number of different 
 formulations. And the value of any particular 
 ethical theory or formula must be determined 
 in the same way as the value of any general 
 theory is determined, by its ability to sum- 
 marize most completely the phenomena of the 
 moral life. The various schools of ethical 
 thought which have been prevalent in the his- 
 tory of ethics are reducible to three funda- 
 mental types: (1) formalistic or jural ethics, 
 which regards conformity to some law or rule, 
 formulated by reason, by the state or by God, 
 as the ultimate goal of conduct; (2) hedonism. 
 
The Histokical, Background 29 
 
 which sees the end of striving in the attainment 
 of a state of f eehng, like pleasure or happiness ; 
 (3) perfectionism, which interprets the end in 
 terms of some particular constitution of char- 
 acter or of personaHty. A favorite way of de- 
 fining morality from the last point of view is 
 to say that it consists in the proper organiza- 
 tion of various desires and impulses of our 
 nature. The ethical task is essentially to in- 
 troduce into life organization, order, unity. 
 In the child, or the individual of low moral de- 
 velopment, the single impulse, acting with the 
 intensity due to its isolation from the rest of 
 Hfe, carries the day. Now what moral educa- 
 tion does is to bring the various impulses into 
 relation with one another ; to unify the other- 
 wise fragmentary interests of life by subordi- 
 nating them to some ruling ideal or purpose. 
 The warring and divided self must yield to the 
 conciliated self. The problem of morahzation 
 is thus a problem of organization or mutual 
 adaptation. And this is true whether we look 
 at the matter from the point of view of the in- 
 dividual merely, or from the point of view of 
 the relation of the individual to the social or- 
 ganization. Society, as Plato long ago taught, 
 is but the individual writ large. The essential 
 problem here too is the successful adjustment 
 of rival interests and claims. This is indeed 
 the ever-recurring social problem. Special in- 
 
30 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 terests and the welfare of the whole: these are 
 the two terms of the antithesis the resolution 
 of which constitutes, both in the individual life 
 and in the social and political sphere, our com- 
 mon and unending human task. Nor can 
 common welfare be defined except in relation 
 to human desire. It is still that which satisfies 
 desire. Only desire is not now some isolated 
 desire, detached from the larger interests of 
 the whole; it is a universe of desires, in which 
 each particular element gets the satisfaction 
 belonging to it as a part of a larger whole. 
 
 If the objection is here made that reconcilia- 
 tion of rival interests spoken of above is not 
 due to the voluntary cooperation of individuals, 
 as would seem to be suggested by the meta- 
 physics of Leibniz and the psychology of 
 Shaftesbury, and that the stem imperative of 
 the law must ever be resorted to in order to 
 bring the eccentric individual into line, the re- 
 ply is that this may occur as the exception, not 
 as the rule. The moral order, if it is to have 
 stability, must be self-sustaining; that is, it 
 must be upheld by the active cooperation of the 
 individuals constituting it. The perpetuation 
 of the state, for example, depends upon the 
 loyalty of its citizens, and law is impossible 
 except as it receives the support of those over 
 whom it extends.^" The moment the social 
 order loses the support of the majority of its 
 
The Histoeicajl Backgeound 31 
 
 members (not, of course, the numerical major- 
 ity, but the faction holding the balance of 
 power) its future is in jeopardy. The same 
 applies to the individual. The law of reason 
 is not, as Kant seemed to maintain, an external 
 force, operating upon the individual from 
 without; it must be an expression, in some 
 sense, of the individual's nature in its entirety. 
 This is not the place to argue at length the 
 comparative merits of the competing ethical 
 views mentioned above, but some of the advan- 
 tages of the theory of perfection or self-reali- 
 zation over the jural and hedonistic views may 
 here be indicated. (1) It has the advantage 
 over the formalistic or legal view, whether in 
 the rationalistic, political or theological form, 
 of making morality a natural and autonomous 
 phenomenon; it is (2) a teleological form of 
 ethics : ethics is a science of value, Giiterlehre, 
 a science of goods; (3) its formulation of the 
 good is definite and intelligible, and its suggest- 
 ive force is correspondingly great; (4) the 
 good, because conceived in personal terms, has 
 a high emotional value; (5) the good is non- 
 competitive, and is in this respect preferable 
 to hedonism or utilitarianism, whose goods are 
 often more clearly unsharable; (6) it brings 
 ethics into organic connection with logic and 
 aesthetics, inasmuch as it interprets the good, 
 the beautiful and the true alike in terms of 
 
32 The Philosophy of Schillee 
 
 inner harmony or consistency. The view thus 
 satisfies the most fundamental of philosophical 
 instincts, the monistic or synthetic instinct. 
 
 Two objections of a general nature are sure 
 to be made. The first is to the individualistic 
 character of the theory. The good, it will be 
 said, which is proposed as the goal of action, 
 is merely private in character. This, however, 
 is a misunderstanding of a fundamental as- 
 sumption of the theory, which is that the social 
 or altruistic proclivities of man are essential 
 and native traits, and that these will be included 
 in the harmonization of character contemplated. 
 The common good will in that way be provided 
 for. It may, of course, be claimed, as it is by 
 Bradley, Professor A. E. Taylor, and appar- 
 ently by Sidgwick, that the egoistic and the 
 altruistic duties are so discrepant in the acts 
 to which they prompt, that their reduction to a 
 common conception is impossible. There are, 
 however, equally competent writers who do re- 
 gard the reconciliation of these deep-lying 
 traits as possible. At any rate, this is pro- 
 posed by many, Schiller himself, for example, 
 as the very task of moral education, and it 
 would seem hazardous to limit in advance the 
 possibilities of moral progress.^^ Our own 
 view has been already sufficiently indicated. 
 The case has been admirably stated by a recent 
 writer. " The two spheres of life (the private 
 
The Histoeicai. Background 33 
 
 and the common) are inseparable. The inter- 
 ests and the claims of the social and the indi- 
 vidual life overlap, and are reciprocally inclu- 
 sive. They are not two lives, but two sides or 
 aspects of one undivided life. You cannot iso- 
 late the moral individual; to do so would be 
 to de-morahze him, to annihilate his moral na- 
 ture. His very life as a moral being consists 
 in a network of relations which link his indi- 
 vidual life with the wider life of his fellows." ^^ 
 It may be said, in the second place, that the 
 end proposed in the theory of self-culture is 
 merely formal in character, and cannot there- 
 fore furnish definite guidance, or aid us in 
 deaHng with specific situations. We are not 
 told in what precise proportions, for example, 
 egoistic and altruistic traits are to be com- 
 bined.^^ A sufficient answer to this is that the 
 objection applies to every ethical end that has 
 ever been proposed. We cannot expect more 
 than merely formal guidance from any type 
 of ethical theory. Ethics as a science cannot, 
 in the nature of the case, deal with specific cases, 
 but only with typical situations. Concrete 
 guidance can be given only by the spiritual ad- 
 viser who is acquainted with the special circum- 
 stances surrounding the concrete moral situa- 
 tion. In the absence of such special knowledge, 
 any moral ideal or prescription must inevitably 
 remain merely formal or general in its nature. 
 
34 The Philosophy of Schillee 
 
 The view of the moral end proposed here is 
 not by any means a novel or untried one. It 
 has come down the history of moral philosophy 
 through a long line of thinkers, and claims, in 
 fact, some of the most celebrated names in the 
 history of philosophy for its exponents. From 
 Heraclitus of antiquity, who proclaimed the 
 harmony of opposites as a universal aspect of 
 things, through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, 
 Butler, Shaftesbury, Schiller and the modern 
 Hoffding, not to mention scores of lesser 
 names, the theory of self-conciliation and self- 
 development has come down in unbroken suc- 
 cession from the beginning of ethical reflection 
 in Greece to our own time. And the final 
 formulation of ethical theory, if such is ever 
 reached, will doubtless conform to the present 
 theory in two important respects : it will con- 
 ceive of the moral good as a personal good ; it 
 will, in the second place, so define it as to recog- 
 nize the rights of the individual as well as the 
 rights of the social organism of which the in- 
 dividual forms an essential part. Self-asser- 
 tion as well as self-surrender will find their 
 rightful place. Tolstoi and Friedrich Nietz- 
 sche will each come into his own. Each will 
 be seen to have proclaimed one half of the truth, 
 the right resting with two poet-philosophers, 
 the Greek Plato, and a kindred spirit in our 
 newer time, the German SchiUer. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 EARLY VIEWS 
 
 (a) The Relation of Body and Mimd: The 
 Psychophysical Problem 
 
 When the youthful Schiller entered the 
 Stuttgart Military Academy in January, 1773, 
 nearly a generation after the deaths of Leibniz 
 and Shaftesbury, the interests and ideas 
 sketched in the last chapter had, under the 
 name of Aufklarimgsphilosophie, the philoso- 
 phy of Enlightenment, become the common 
 possession of the academic world of Germany, 
 and of a large part of Europe. In fact, the 
 characteristic ideas of Leibnizianism, often 
 loosely combined with ideas derived from Eng- 
 lish empiricism and the Scottish moralists, were 
 everywhere received with an avidity well-nigh 
 unparalleled in the history of philosophical 
 systems. Introduced into Wiirtemberg by 
 Bilfinger (1693-1748), professor of philosophy 
 at the University of Tubingen, the tradition 
 was continued at the Stuttgart Academy by a 
 line of excellent teachers. Bock, Plouquet and 
 Abel, under whose tuition SchiUer came during 
 3S 
 
36 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 the years 1775-80. It was particularly 
 through the eclectic Abel, a vital and inspiring 
 teacher, according to all accounts, that Schiller 
 received the main stimulus to philosophical 
 reflection.^* 
 
 The essay, Philosophie der Physiologie,^^ 
 represents Schiller's first attempt to work his 
 way through some of the problems typical of 
 his time, and, with the paper to be discussed 
 next in order, which is really a re-statement 
 and a continuation of this essay, forms the 
 most important source for our knowledge of 
 the poet's early speculation. The essay dates 
 from the year 1779, and was offered as a 
 master's dissertation to the faculty of the 
 Stuttgart Academy. The subject was chosen 
 by Schiller himself, and the document may 
 therefore be regarded as representing the true 
 bent of his mind, and the free expression of the 
 views matured under the influence of his phil- 
 osophical and medical studies in the Academy. 
 To what extent Schiller drew upon his reading 
 and to what extent we have the results of inde- 
 pendent reflection; in how far the views sug- 
 gested or expressed here are found in his later 
 writings, are important questions for the stu- 
 dent of Schiller's philosophical development, 
 and will be constantly kept in mind during the 
 discussion of these early writings. It will ap- 
 pear that the germs of much of his later phi- 
 
Eaely Views (37^, 
 
 losophy were already contained in the writings 
 of the pre-Kantian period, and that the stream 
 of his thought, rising from many sources, was 
 only clarified and deepened, rather than directed 
 into other channels, by contact with the Crit- 
 ical Philosophy. 
 
 The essay ^® opens with reflections which at ' 
 once reveal Schiller's philosophical kinship. 
 The universe, he declares, is a divine work of 
 art, and it is in fathoming the world-plan that 
 man finds his true destiny, which consists in his 
 enlightenment and perfection. And quoting 
 almost word for word from Garve's translation 
 of Ferguson's Moral Philosophy, a text-book 
 used in the Military Academy, he adds that theA 
 soul which thus dwells in the contemplation of I 
 the plan of divine providence will be supremely 
 happy. For, according to an eternal law, per- 
 fection and happiness, imperfection and pain, 
 are indissolubly bound together. But another 
 beautiful and wise law, he continues, drawing 
 heavily upon the fourth part of Ferguson's 
 Moral Philosophy, has bound the perfection of 
 all to the happiness of each, and this with the 
 sole purpose of advancing human kind toward 
 its perfection and goal, which, he repeats, is 
 " the comprehension and admiration of the 
 great plan of nature." And here he closes these 
 opening reflections with a significant sentence 
 to the efi'ect that even the pleasures of sense. 
 
38 The Philosophy of Schillee 
 
 though they appear to lead through devious 
 paths and seeming contradictions, finally lead 
 man to his true destiny, i. e., to perfection and 
 happiness.^^ There are no fundamental con- 
 tradictions in the universe: happiness, virtue 
 and perfection are identical; the whole is a 
 grand harmony which even the pleasures and 
 inclinations of sense can not disturb, but even 
 these must be an integral part of the harmoni- 
 ous whole. In this sentence, and in the idea 
 running throughout this whole opening para- 
 graph, of the perfection of man through con- 
 templation of the divine work of art, the uni- 
 verse, we have the beginning, however vaguely 
 expressed, of all Schiller's subsequent ethical 
 and artistic striving. It was his feeling for the 
 completeness, the orgamc'~unity of "the whole 
 of nature, in which there could be no devious 
 byways leading to irrationality, no fundamental 
 and irreconcilable contradictions, which led him 
 nearly fifteen years later _ to raise Jiis voice 
 against the dualism and the ascetic rigorism of 
 the Kantian morality. Inclination and duty, 
 I sense and reason, powers which nature has 
 i joined together, had been artificially forced 
 j asunder; and it is in the reassertion of the 
 I fundamental unity of these fundamental oppo- 
 sites, in championing the rights of human 
 nature in its entirety, that Schiller's main sig- 
 , nificance lies. Schiller had throughout his life 
 
Eauly Views 39 
 
 two great theoretical interests, ethics and 
 esthetics. They are both manifested in these 
 early and somewhat immature attempts, and the 
 lines of his development are clearly indicated. 
 They find their complete expression in the two 
 typical works of his prime, the essay on Grace 
 and Dignity and the /Esthetic Letters. 
 
 After defining his general position on philo- 
 sophical problems, his Weltanschauung in the 
 large, he passes somewhat abruptly to the sub- 
 ject proper of his dissertation, the relation of 
 mind and body. The student of Schiller versed 
 in the history of philosophy will at once notice 
 that the problem presented itself to SchiUer 
 essentially in the form bequeathed to philoso- 
 phy by Descartes, rather than by his more pro- 
 found successor Leibniz. Descartes' histor- 
 ical significance in the history of psychophys- 
 ics consists', as every one knows, in having 
 clearly formulated the problem of the relation 
 betweerTmind and body, not in having satisfac- 
 torily solved it. The various special forms of 
 reality which we encounter in the world cannot 
 be reduced to a common denominator, according 
 to Descartes, as we have already seen. There 
 are, according to him, ultim ately two forms of 
 existence, which are^esse ntiaUy un equatable a,nd 
 irr educible, nam ely matter and mind. The 
 bottom properties of these entities, extension 
 and thought, are so discrepant in their nature 
 
40 The Philosophy of Schillee 
 
 that the merging of these entities into each 
 other, or into some third and more fundamental 
 entity, would seem to be impossible. Leibniz^ 
 however, as we have also seen, refused to ac- 
 cept this antithesis of matter and mind as final. 
 To the Cartesian dualism of extended and un- 
 conscious substance, on the one hand, and in- 
 extended and conscious substance, on the other, 
 he opposed his theory of monads, inextended 
 and more or less conscious substances. The 
 essence of all reality is force or will, and what 
 we call matter is really immaterial in its ulti- 
 mate essence. 
 
 Schiller, however, does not seem to have prof- 
 ited from the teaching of Leibniz, but, in 
 common with the great majority of thinkers of 
 his time, he took the Wolffian interpretation of 
 Leibniz for his starting point, an interpretation 
 which on this and on other points missed the 
 very gist and genius of the teachings of the 
 master, and which carried philosophy directly 
 back into the dualism of Descartes. 
 
 On the properly metaphysical question of 
 the relation between matter and spirit, it might 
 be said here, Schiller seems never to have 
 changed his views. On this point he was from 
 the beginning and remained to the end a loyal 
 follower of Kant.^* In what respect he intro- 
 duced unity into the Kantian system we have 
 already indicated, and shall see in detail when 
 
Eaely Views 41 
 
 we come to study the independent development 
 of Schiller's thought. 
 
 At any rate, the terms in which Schiller here 
 states the psychophysical problem completely 
 duplicate the Cartesian distinctions. The fun- 
 damental difference between matter and mind, 
 he says, is that matter occupies space and is 
 impenetrable, while mind is non-spatial in char- 
 acter. Once stated in these terms, a monistic 
 theory of the universe can obviously be arrived 
 at in only two ways. One can either reduce 
 mind to a mere form or manifestation of mat- 
 ter, or he can, on the other hand, interpret 
 matter as an idea of the mind, a mental concept. 
 If neither of these views is adopted, the only 
 resource is to leave the two entities side by 
 side; in other words, to abandon altogether a 
 monistic view of the world, and frankly accept 
 duahsm. Now Schiller is clearly aware of the 
 first two alternatives, and he as clearly rejects 
 them, putting himself squarely on the side of 
 metap hysical dualism . 
 
 The problem now arises, of course, how two 
 substances so disparate can be related to each 
 other. Is the relation merely one of parallel- 
 ism, i. e., do the two entities merely lie side by- 
 side, without exerting any mutual influence, 
 like two clocks running side by side, and con- 
 nected only by a preestablished harmony.? 
 Such a thing would be indeed conceivable, but 
 
42 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 it would be inconsistent with the conception of 
 the universe as a coherent and purposive whole. 
 Under such a conception the course of mental 
 events would be determined from the outside ; 
 " freedom and moral development would be a 
 delusion, and my happiness a dream." The 
 only other possibility is that of occasionalism, 
 a theory of some of the Cartesians, according 
 to which the connection_ between matter_ and 
 , mind would be mediated by God. " God inter- 
 venes on occasion of every volition, in order to 
 excite in our bodies the movement which the soul 
 cannot communicate to it of itself, and on oc- 
 casion of each corporeal excitation, in order 
 to produce the corresponding perception in 
 the soul. Our volitions are the occasional 
 causes, God the efficient cause, of our move- 
 ments; the sense-objects are the occasional 
 causes, God the efficient cause, of our percep- 
 tions." 28 
 
 The criticism which Schiller passes upon this 
 curious theory would have done credit to a more 
 mature theologian than this youthful student 
 of medicine. Under this view, Schiller remarks, 
 each of my ideas would be a miracle, and natural 
 law would be set aside. So far from exalting 
 the deity by such a doctrine, we only degrade 
 him ; for the necessity of miraculous interfer- 
 ence betrays a defect in the design, and an 
 imperfection in the designer. He would be 
 
Early Views 43 
 
 great, but not infinite. In short, the theories 
 of materialism, subjectivism, preestabUshed 
 harmony, and occasionalism contradict either 
 fundamental principles or the plain facts of 
 experience. 
 
 A different solution from any of these must 
 be sought. There must be a substance whicTi 
 occupies an intermediate position between mat- 
 ter and spirit, a substance which is susceptible 
 of being acted upon by the material world, 
 and which can in turn act upon spirit, a sub- 
 stance at once penetrable and impenetrable, 
 material and spiritual. Schiller is not troubled 
 to give a more complete determination of this 
 mysterious somewhat. He calls it Mittelkraft, V 
 an intermediate agent or force ; fie~ suggests 
 several hypotheses concerning it, as weU. as 
 some difficulties ; he even grants that it is in- 
 conceivable. But he dismisses all his doubts 
 with a word: Experience proves its existence, 
 and no amount of theorizing can contradict the 
 plain facts of experience. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to say that the hypoth- 
 esis of an intermediate agent by the interpola- 
 tion of which Schiller so confidently proposes 
 to solve the time-honored psychophysical prob- 
 lem, " the Great Bad " in metaphysics, as it has 
 been called, is not original with our author, as 
 might be inferred from his fearless appeal to 
 the testimony of experience, by which he meant 
 
44 The Philosophy of Schhjler 
 
 nothing more nor less than the testimony of 
 his medical and philosophical teachers. Des- 
 cartes had had his " animal spirits," which, 
 coursing through the brain and nerves, gave 
 rise to ideas in the mind on the one hand, and 
 to motions of the limbs on the other. The idea 
 of " nerve spirit " played an important part in 
 the physiological writings of Haller, the great- 
 est physiologist of the time; Galenus had 
 spoken of vital spirits, and Schiller's favorite 
 teacher, Abel, discussed the nature of this mys- 
 terious substance at length in two psychological 
 treatises published seven years later, describing 
 it as a " certain firelike, spiritual substance re- 
 lated to electric or magnetic energy." Con- 
 clusive proof as to the source of Schiller's wis- 
 dom is another dissertation of the same year, 
 written by another pupil of Abel's, which is 
 taken up almost exclusively with discussing and 
 illustrating the " intermediate essence which J 
 unites the simple with the manifold, the cor- 
 poreal with the non-corporeal." ^^ 
 
 But the intermediate agent Is not yet able 
 to establish direct communication between such 
 disparate terms as the physical world and the 
 soul. The forces of the external world, such as 
 light, sound, etc., are very diverse in their na- 
 ture and in the manner of their operations. 
 Nature has accordingly provided another set of 
 intermeHiale organs in the five senses, each 
 
Eakly Views 45 
 
 suited in its structure and function to the kind 
 of physical influence it is to receive. Here 
 Schiller introduces a distinction which antici- 
 pates one of the most vexing problems of mod- 
 ern physiology, the problem of the relation of 
 the physical process in the external world to 
 the nervous process within the nervous system, 
 or, put differently, the question as to what 
 modification the physical stimulus undergoes in 
 its passage through the sense organs and other 
 structures of the nervous system. The sense 
 organs, Schiller observes, are of two kinds, ac- 
 cording as the " object " undergoes modifica- 
 tion in its transmission through the media of 
 the sense organs, or reaches the Mittelkraft 
 unchanged. The first class comprises the 
 senses of sight, hearing and taste; the second 
 those of smell and touch.^-*^ Through these 
 media the external world is able to throw its 
 image upon the soul. This image or representa- 
 tion forms the basis of all mental life. All | 
 higher knowledge, the young empiricist would 
 seem to say, is only an elaboration of materials 
 received through the medium of the physical 
 senses. 
 
 Images of objects, however, would disappear 
 with their external causes were there not some 
 provision for their preservation, and thought, 
 in the proper sense, could never occur. For 
 thinking means comparing {Gegeneinander- 
 
 // 
 
46 The Philosophy of Schhjler 
 
 halten), bringing the representations furnished 
 by sense perception into relations with each 
 other. This is accomplished through another 
 organ in which- the fleeting impressions of 
 sense are held fast and stored, as it were, in a 
 common receptacle. This is the sensorium or 
 the organ of thought, the microcosm in which 
 the great world, in so far as it has been the 
 object of sense perception, finds its counter- 
 part. 
 
 Here Schiller plunges headlong into certain 
 philosophical difficulties involved in the associa- 
 tion of ideas. Ideas, of course, do not lie side 
 by side in the mind, like so many bricks in a 
 wall, the subject being conscious of all of them 
 at once. They rather run their course accord- 
 ing to certain laws of association, so that the 
 ideas before consciousness tend to call up others 
 related to them in certain specific ways. Now 
 the interesting question arises, Is the flow of 
 ideas determined by the mechanical action of 
 the brain, or has the soul the ability to direct 
 or control the stream of thought independently 
 of brain action? If we adopt the mechanical 
 theory of association, then the will, which de- 
 pends upon ideas, would not be free. Freedom 
 can be rescued only by attributing to the soul 
 some power to control the course of conscious- 
 ness. This power the soul possesses in the 
 power of attention, in virtue of which certain 
 
Early Views 47 
 
 ideas are isolated and emphasized, while others 
 are repressed or sufficiently weakened to be 
 robbed of their efficiency in determining action. 
 The processes of mental combination, abstrac- 
 tion, retention and will are all alike possible 
 through voluntary attention. 
 
 The importance of attention in guiding 
 perception and in controlling the higher syn- 
 thetic processes and the will, which, so far as 
 the present writer is aware, was first clearly 
 brought out and emphasized in this fragment 
 of Schiller's, has in more recent psychology 
 received very full recognition. Not only is 
 " the degree of apperception not to be meas- 
 ured according to the strength of the external 
 impression, but according to the subjective ac- 
 tivity by which the consciousness is applied to 
 a definite stimulus," ^^ so that the material fur- 
 nished by sense impression is largely deter- 
 mined by the subjective activity which applies 
 the consciousness to this or that sense stimulus, 
 but the subjective activity manifested in the 
 eff'ort of attention is proposed as the essential 
 phenomenon of the will. " The essential 
 achievement of the will ... is to attend to a 
 difficult object and hold it fast before the 
 mind. . . . It is a mere physiological incident 
 that when the object is thus attended to, im- 
 mediate motor consequences should ensue. . . . 
 Though the spontaneous drift of thought is all 
 
48 The Philosophy of Sptt ttt-pb 
 
 the other way, the attention must be kept 
 strained on that one object until at last it 
 grows, so as to maintain itself before the mind 
 with ease. This strain of the attention is the 
 fimdamental act of will." *^ 
 
 But man is not merely rational; he is also 
 an emotional being. He not only receives ex- 
 ternal impressions, but he feels his inner states. 
 The rational nature and the emotional nature 
 are most intimately connected, the former de- 
 pending largely on the latter. In keeping 
 with the general view expressed in the opening 
 paragraphs of the essay, feeling is given a 
 purely teleological significance. It is that 
 state of the soul by means of which it is con- 
 scious of its well-being or the opposite. What 
 makes for my well-being and perfection pleases 
 and attracts me ; what makes me less perfect 
 pains and repels me ; for according to the law 
 we so weU. know, happiness and perfection are 
 one and the same. The melodious, the beautiful, 
 minister to my interest more than the unmelo- 
 dious and the ugly. What, then, is the signif- 
 icance of aesthetic objects in human life.'' But 
 just at this point, where we promised ourselves 
 the most valuable finds in our search for the 
 beginnings of Schiller's later and most im- 
 portant thoughts, the fragment abruptly ter- 
 minates. 
 
Eart.y Views 49 
 
 (b) On the Connection between the Animal and 
 the Spiritual Nature in Man: The Psy- 
 chophysical and the Human Problem 
 
 We have observed that the essay fjber den 
 Zusammenhang der thierischen Natur des Men- 
 schen mit seiner geistigen is a continuation, and 
 doubtless a repetition, of the general line of 
 thought developed in the fragment and the lost 
 portions of the one just considered. The im- ^ 
 portance of the senses for the mental life is 
 reemphasized, and their influence in " modify- 
 ing and refining the changes in the world of 
 matter " is again alluded to. The significance 
 of the power of attention is also recalled, and 
 there is throughout the same theologico-ethical 
 point of view, according to which the world is 
 a divine work of art, to fathom which is man's 
 highest vocation and happiness. There is, 
 however, a modification of statement and a 
 shifting of emphasis in the repetition of the 
 latter proposition which is perhaps worthy of 
 notice. " Since between the measure of a 
 power and the end toward which it works there 
 must exist the completest harmony," the per- v 
 fection of man will consist in the highest pos- 
 sible activity of his powers, and, at the same 
 time, in their mutual subordination, in the ob- 
 servation of the plan of the world. To see in 
 this sentence a closer approximation to the 
 
50 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 aesthetic point of view, and an effort toward a 
 clearer formulation of future theory, as some 
 writers have done, is perhaps straining a point. 
 Certainly the terminology is neither new nor 
 strange. That there is a " harmony between 
 the measure of a power and the end toward 
 which it works " is no more than Leibniz had 
 said ; Mendelssohn had seen in activity the very 
 essence of reality, and Ferguson-Garve had 
 made the progress of evolution toward its goal 
 dependent upon the activity of the powers im- 
 manent in the universe.^* But the fact that 
 the phrasing is adhered to in later repetitions 
 of the thought shows that the change was not 
 made unconsciously, but marks a real advance 
 in the formulation of the favorite thought of 
 Schiller's early reflection. 
 
 But we have here not merely a clearer and 
 more articulate formulation of the former 
 views ; there is also an advance to new prob- 
 lems. While in the Philosophy of Physiology 
 the author discusses the possibility and the 
 manner of psychophysical interaction, here, as 
 Tomaschek points out,*^ he assumes the fact of 
 interaction, and considers more explicitly the 
 significance of that fact in human life. 
 
 When we come to consider the comparative 
 importance which has been attributed to body 
 and mind, he observes, we find that men have 
 erred in assigning too great significance to the 
 
Eart.y Views 51 
 
 latter and too little to the former. Two views 
 have prevailed: some have regarded the body 
 as the prison-house of the spirit, checking its 
 flight toward perfection, while others have 
 treated knowledge and virtue only as means to 
 happiness, and have held that the whole per- 
 fection of man consists in the amelioration and 
 perfection of the body.*® Both views are one- 
 sided. But inasmuch as the latter has not 
 seldom been cast out ' with over-fanatical zeal, 
 and the mental powers have often been treated 
 in an exclusive way, i. e., in independence of 
 the body, which is accorded a subordinate posi- 
 tion, the author undertakes to champion the 
 rights of that part of our nature which has 
 been underrated, and to show, by appealing 
 to the history of the individual and of the race^ 
 " the remarkable contributions of the body to I 
 the activity of the soul, and the great and real 1 
 influence of the system of animal sensations \ 
 upon the spiritual life." ^"^ And this is as little -^ 
 Epicureanism as the adoption of virtue as the 
 highest good is necessarily Stoicism. By " ani- 
 mal sensations " the author means simply bod- 
 ily feelings, and we are back at the point of 
 the discussion where the essay of the preceding 
 year terminates. 
 
 Feeling, as we saw above, has a primarily 
 teleological significance, and is defined in teleo- 
 logical terms. Its function is twofold : self-pres- 
 
52 The Philosophy or Schiller 
 
 ervation and the development of the mental and 
 spiritual powers. The feelings of pain serve 
 as warnings against the countless unfavorable 
 influences by which the human organism is sur- 
 rounded, and which threaten its destruction. 
 
 This self-protective function of feeling will, 
 no doubt, be conceded "by liin But when we in- 
 quire whether the animal nature has any higher 
 function than that of self-preservation, objec- 
 tions will immediately arise. " Beyond this 
 point," the objection will run, " the body is but 
 the soul's inert companion, with which she must 
 sustain a constant battle, whose pleasures re- 
 duce men to the level of the beasts, and which 
 subjects them to a slavery from which death 
 only can deliver them." But this is shown to 
 be a great error when we consider the part 
 bodily feelings actually play in the develop- 
 ment of man's spiritual powers. 
 
 Let us imagine, says Schiller, the abstract 
 case of a spirit out of all connection with 
 body and hence without the feelings of bodily 
 pleasure and pain. How would such an imag- 
 inary being conduct itself? Plainly, it would 
 not conduct itself at all, for if it is to act it 
 must act with some end in view, i. e., it must 
 desire, and to desire means simply to seek to 
 obtain pleasure or escape pain. Without pleas- 
 ure and pain, then, no desire, and without de- 
 sire no volition and no activity. 
 
Eaely Views 53 
 
 Not only activity, but thought itself is con- 
 ditioned by feeHng. For what will determine 
 the spirit to think unless it be the pleasurable 
 sensation arising from the activity of the pow- 
 ers of thought? Unless we are to suppose that 
 the spirit has been active from all eternity, it 
 will forever remain inactive, just as a machine, 
 unless set in motion by a power from without, 
 will remain forever motionless. " But let the 
 soul be placed in the condition of physical pain. 
 Now we have feeling, the only thing which was 
 wanting before. The transition from pain to 
 aversion is a fundamental law of the soul. 
 Now the will is active, and the activity of a 
 single power is sufficient to set all the rest in 
 motion." ^* 
 
 The general law of development of conscious 
 life thus arrived at by abstract considerations 
 is confirmed by observation of the development 
 of the individual and the race. The child in its 
 earliest years simply feels pleasure and pain ; 
 in youth we have already reflection, but reflec- 
 tion directed only to the satisfaction of the 
 animal impulses and in the service of the phys- 
 ical body. The spiritual powers are valued 
 only as means to an animal end. But as the 
 youth approaches manhood the means come to 
 be valued for their own sake. " Through fre- 
 quent repetition of an activity it becomes it- 
 self a source of pleasure. The agent is de- 
 
54 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 lighted by the manifestation of his power, and 
 this feehng gives him an inclination for the 
 object which had heretofore been only a means. 
 Enlightenment and an increase of ideas finally 
 reveal to him the whole dignity of spiritual 
 delights. The means has become the highest 
 end." 
 
 The history of the individual is repeated in 
 the history of the race. In the beginnings of 
 civilization man's wants were few and directed 
 only to the alleviation of his physical existence 
 and the preservation of the species. Driven 
 by the pangs of hunger and by exposure to 
 the elements, he hunts, fishes, tills the soil and 
 builds himself shelter. What knowledge there 
 is is of a practical kind; it develops under the 
 stress of physical necessity, and stands in the 
 service of the physical life. The sexual instinct 
 prompts man to the establishment of the fam- 
 ily, the instinct of self-preservation leads to 
 the formation of clans and tribes for purposes 
 of common defence, the conflict of instincts 
 brings tribes into collision with one another, 
 and wars prompt inventions, and furnish the 
 conditions for the development of adventurers, 
 heroes and despots. " Cities are fortified, 
 states organized, and with states arise civic 
 duties and rights, the arts and industries, laws, 
 priests and — gods." ^® Knowledge, formerly 
 pursued only for physical ends, is now pursued 
 
Eaely Views 55 
 
 for its own sake. The instinct of curiosity 
 now serves the same end as was formerly served 
 by the pressure of physical necessity. With 
 leisure the sciences arise, superstition is crushed, 
 and philosophy smiles at human folly. The 
 influence of art and the beautiful on manners 
 and morals is already here emphasized in a 
 significant and well known passage : " Artists 
 learn to imitate the works of nature, music 
 softens the savage breast, beauty ennobles mor- 
 als and taste, and art leads man to science and 
 to virtue." *" 
 
 From all this appears the folly of under- 
 rating our bodily nature and of endeavoring 
 to crush out the animal feelings and instincts^ 
 " Man had to be an animal before he could bel 
 a spirit; he had to crawl in the dust before! 
 he could, like Newton, dare the flight through 1 
 the universe. Without the body no activity, j^ 
 and without sense no perfection." *^ 
 
 In this connection may be quoted another 
 passage which Schiller takes from Garve, and 
 which indicates clearly two tendencies of his 
 later development, the naturalistic tendency in 
 ethics and esthetics and the attitude of healthy 
 optimism which, in spite of the stress and ad- 
 versity of Schiller's Hfe, he never permanently 
 abandoned. 
 
 When man has once learned that nature did 
 not awaken instincts and impulses in him simply 
 
56 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 to gratify them, that his end is not the pleasure 
 of gratification but the activity of his powers 
 and self-perfection, " then everything, whether 
 animate or inanimate, appears to him in a dif- 
 y ferent light. At first objects and events were 
 valued only for the pleasure or pain which they 
 I caused him, but now he measures their value in 
 j proportion as they call out the activity and 
 I expression of his nature, and thus lead to self- 
 |_realization and perfection. From the first 
 point of view events are sometimes good, some- 
 times bad ; from the latter point of view they 
 are all equally good. For there is no occasion 
 or circumstance under which the exercise of 
 some virtue and the employment of some fac- 
 ulty are not possible." *^ 
 
 Indeed, the optimist who finds ground for 
 hope in every event and traces even in every 
 pain the perfection of the universe, has within 
 himself the means for the realization of his be- 
 liefs. For so intimate is the connection be- 
 tween the animal and the spiritual natures that 
 there is a mutual determination between them, 
 and the spiritual states react upon the animal 
 nature as well as the latter upon the former. 
 In other words, the spiritual is not merely acted 
 upon, but exerts the most delicate and power- 
 ful influence on the physical. Schiller's med- 
 ical and poetic lore stand him in good stead 
 he;re, and furnish him with a multitude of ex- 
 
Eaely Views 57 
 
 amples and concrete illustrations of his point. 
 Emotional states, such as cheer or mental tran- 
 quillity, tend to have a tonic effect upon certain 
 important bodily functions, such as heart ac- 
 tion and digestion, while opposite emotional 
 states, such as anxiety, grief and fear, tend to 
 depress and disturb these important functions. 
 The condition, therefore, of greatest momen- 
 tary mental pleasure is at the same time the 
 condition of the greatest bodily well-being, and 
 optimism and a hopeful mind are more effectual 
 remedies than the pharmacies can furnish." ** 
 Aside from these effects, none the less pow- 
 erful and far-reaching because not directly 
 noticeable, emotions find their external counter- 
 part in facial expression and in gesture, and 
 the most secret movements of the soul are re- 
 vealed on the exterior of the body. If a pas- 
 sion be often repeated, it will become habitual, 
 and the corresponding physical movements will 
 gradually become engraved upon the exterior 
 of the physical frame, in characters known and 
 read of all men. The good and the beautiful 
 he close together, so much so that in the deli- 
 cate interplay of the forces of man's nature 
 they are readily convertible into each other, 
 and the nobility of the spiritual nature is 
 bodied forth in the beautiful form of the phys- 
 ical. " By an admirable law of supreme Wis- 
 dom every noble and generous passion beauti- 
 
 i/ 
 
58 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 fies the body, while those that are mean and 
 detestable distort it into animal forms." ** 
 Thus man has, besides his natural form, ac- 
 quired features and characteristics ; a second 
 face, as it were, not cast in the unchangeable 
 forms of nature, but ever new and changeable 
 under the constant play of the spiritual pas- 
 sions. This acquired physiognomy Schiller 
 calls deuteropathic. 
 
 The observations here made are particularly 
 interesting to us because they meet us again in 
 the " fixed " and " movable " beauty in Anmut 
 und WUrde, and are there elaborately worked 
 out and made the basis of distinctions which 
 are rather important for the understanding of 
 Schiller's moral and aesthetic theory. 
 
 (c) The Stage as a Moral Institution 
 
 Before closing our consideration of Schil- 
 ler's early views we must notice briefly two es- 
 says of an aesthetico-critical character: tlber 
 das gegervwdrtige deutsche Theater, published 
 in the spring of 1782, and Die Schanbuhne als 
 moralische Anstalt betrachtet, which comes 
 somewhat more than two years later, in 1784.*° 
 They are both of interest here, because in them 
 the author approaches definitely the problem 
 of his lifetime, and they show quite unmista- 
 kably what function he attributed to objects of 
 
Eaely Views 
 
 aesthetic appreciation at this period of his de- 
 velopment. 
 
 One cannot but be impressed, in reading 
 these essays, with the more practical and, on 
 the whole, more modern point of view which 
 Schiller here assumes. The narrow walls of the 
 academy had driven his active imagination into 
 all possible and impossible channels, and he 
 took refuge from its stifling atmosphere and 
 trivial artificialities in the idealistic flights of 
 the metaphysical essays and the extravagances 
 of the Robbers. But contact with a world of 
 sober reality and practical tasks soon called 
 him back to this mundane sphere, and the ex- 
 periment, upon the stage, of the Robbers *® 
 gave definite direction to his thought. Traces 
 of metaphysical thought are, indeed, still 
 found here; but even they are utilized to fur- 
 nish a justification for artistic activity and a 
 basis for aesthetic enjoyment. 
 
 The vocation and highest happiness of man! 
 Schiller had said before, is found in the con-1 
 templation of the universe, but the full com-\^^ 
 prehension of it, he had also said, is an infinite \ 
 task to which the unaided powers of man are, J 
 at least in this life, unequal. But what the un-«^ — 
 aided mind of the ordinary man must relin- 
 quish as an impossible task, art may help him to 
 accomplish. For it is just the task of the 
 artist to reproduce the world and human life 
 
60 The Philosophy of Schillee 
 
 in miniature, — not any detail of it, for that 
 would serve no better than a fragment of the 
 
 "original, but to reproduce the effect of the 
 
 \ whole, by bringing the parts inaccessible to the 
 \ordinary eye into view, and thus to prepare 
 the mind to study and appreciate the harmony 
 
 jand symmetry of the great whole.*^ And as 
 man reaches his perfection by the exercise of 
 his functions in the contemplation of the uni- 
 verse, so he is enlightened and perfected by 
 the contemplation of the world in miniature, as 
 represented in the work of the artist. 
 
 It would be a mistake, however, to conclude 
 that the Greek ideal of scientific contemplation 
 occupied as prominent a place in these essays 
 as in the earlier writings already considered. 
 While in the passage just alluded to the exer- 
 cise of the intellectual functions in the contem- 
 plation of the universe is still recognized as one 
 of the ends of art, yet it has other functions 
 both more and less serious than the contem- 
 plation and admiration of things in general. 
 They are (1) the immediate function of relax- 
 ation and aesthetic enjoyment and (2) the ul- 
 terior one of moral and intellectual improve- 
 
 ^ment, intellectual improvement being conceived 
 in a more restricted and practical way than on 
 former occasions. Which of these is treated 
 as the more important and which as the subor- 
 dinate purpose is a question which has given 
 
Early Views 61 
 
 rise to differences of opinion,** but which, it 
 seems, hardly admits of discussion. That the 
 pure enjoyment it affords is recognized as one 
 of the ends of art is clear ; but that it is not 
 the only one, nor even the highest, is also put 
 beyond question, not only by the explicit state- 
 ment of more than one passage, but also by the 
 whole tone and tenor of both essays. That the 
 poet is speaking from the point of view of 
 the statesman, when enlarging upon the possi- 
 bihties of the stage as an instrument of educa- 
 tion and of moral improvement, is, of course, 
 true ; but that he himself adopted this stand- 
 point, and that he looked upon the natural 
 bent of man for relaxation and asthetic enjoy- 
 ment as an invaluable means to be used for 
 higher ends, he states almost in so many words. 
 After referring to the immediate effect of art 
 in inducing the harmonious activity of the vari- 
 ous powers of man's nature, thus restoring the 
 integrity which has been disrupted by the one- 
 sided employments and preoccupations of life, 
 he immediately adds : " But since it should be 
 the first object of a wise statesman to select 
 the higher of two effects, he will not be content 
 with simply disarming the inclinations of his 
 people; he will, if possible, use them as instru- 
 ments for higher uses, and endeavor to convert 
 them into sources of happiness. To this end 
 he has selected the stage as the best means of 
 
62 The Philosophy of Schillee 
 
 opening an endless sphere to the spirit craving 
 activity, and of exercising every power of the 
 soul without straining any, and combining the 
 cultivation of the understanding and the heart 
 with the noblest entertainment." 
 
 The relation which the stage sustains to the 
 other moral institutions, religion and law, is 
 indicated in clear and persuasive language, and 
 the discussion shows the finest insight into 
 moral questions. The inadequacy and uncer- 
 tainty of political laws, which render religion 
 necessary, likewise determine the moral influ- 
 ence of the stage. Laws impose only negative 
 duties ; religion enjoins positive acts. Laws 
 control only the outward manifestations of the 
 will; religion extends her jurisdiction to the 
 heart. 
 
 But can religion achieve the whole of human 
 culture? The very thing which gives religion 
 j— its power also imposes limitations upon it. The 
 ', appeal of religion is through the images of 
 sense ; but the pictures of religion are only 
 pictures of the fancy, its problems are without 
 solution, its phantoms of terror and its allure- 
 ments act only from a distance. Not so with 
 \ the stage. Here, too, you have life pictured 
 ; in the vivid images of sense ; but they are im- 
 j ages which stand for ever-present realities. 
 Ilere vice and virtue, happiness and misery, wis- 
 dom and folly, pass before the view with all 
 
Eaely Views 63 
 
 their natural and inevitable issues and conse- 
 quences, and the beauty of virtue and the hide- 
 ousness of vice are fuUy displayed. When 
 morality is no longer taught, rehgion no longer 
 believed in, and laws have ceased to exist, 
 Medea and Macbeth will stiU exert a powerful 
 influence upon the hearts of men. 
 
 The sphere of the stage is much wider than 
 that of rehgion and justice. Where these deem 
 it beneath their dignity to go the stage still 
 continues to work for culture. In jest and 
 satire it possesses more powerful weapons than 
 the tortures of law or the terrors of conscience. 
 A thousand vices unnoticed by human justice 
 are punished by the stage, and a thousand vir- 
 tues which the law does not regard are recog- 
 nized and recommended. 
 
 The stage is a school of practical wisdom 
 and civic duty. It teaches the workings of fate 
 and forttme; it makes us sympathize with and 
 judge leniently the unfortunate, and it spreads 
 the spirit of religious tolerance. It might be 
 employed to correct errors and blunders in 
 education, and if the proper subjects were 
 chosen, it could be used as an instrument to at- 
 tain national sohdarity. " If a national stage 
 should be inaugurated, the Germans might be-" 
 come a nation." *^ 
 
 It is in the sentence just quoted that the 
 explanation of the somewhat inflated estimate 
 
64 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 of the moral possibilities of the stage, in the 
 later of the two essays, must be sought. Schil- 
 ler had just been appointed theatre poet at 
 Mannheim, and Lessing's idea of a national 
 stage was seriously occupying him. He had 
 also been honored with membership in the Elec- 
 toral German Society, and it was before a pub- 
 lic session of this body that the essay was first 
 read. It is therefore a matter of no great 
 surprise that this view of the stage as an instru- 
 ment of moral and civic education should have 
 been developed in this one-sided fashion, and 
 its more purely esthetic function have been 
 somewhat neglected. That he at this time 
 recognized the independent value of art may 
 be pretty safely assumed, but cannot be defi- 
 nitely proved from his writings. At any rate, 
 the characterization of the aesthetic condition 
 as a state of repose, a harmony into which the 
 tension due to a one-sided activity of our sensu- 
 ous or our spiritual nature is resolved, is suf- 
 ficiently noteworthy. It is the formulation of 
 the aesthetic condition in the ^Esthetic Letters, 
 at the time of his greatest speculative activity. 
 
 It will be well to bring together some of the 
 main results reached in the consideration of 
 Schiller's early philosophical writings, and to 
 recall briefly the ideas which, in a developed 
 and a more explicit way, meet us again in 
 
Eaely Views 65 
 
 the later stages of the poet's development. 
 
 (1) The earliest philosophical writings of 
 SchiUer are in the spirit of the German Illumi- 
 nation, in which elements of the Leibniz-WolfBan 
 philosophy and of the Scottish school are vari- 
 ously combined and loosely held together. The 
 influence of Shaftesbury,^" Hutcheson, and the 
 eclectic Ferguson, is unmistakable. The de- 
 cided Aristotelian coloring of some of Schiller's 
 moral reflections is due to Garve, the translator 
 of Ferguson's Moral Philosophy, an apprecia- 
 tive student, also, and translator of ancient eth- 
 ical literature. Haller also exerted considerable 
 influence over Schiller, not only on his physio- 
 logical studies, but also on the psychophysical 
 views developed in the academic dissertations. 
 
 (2) A deeply moral and human interest mani- 
 fests itself throughout the early writings. The 
 nature of virtue, the vocation and end of the 
 moral agent — these are the questions which 
 occupy Schiller's most serious attention. And 
 while in the discussion of the latter question 
 the emphasis is shifted somewhat from the end 
 as pleasure or perfection to the end as activity 
 of man's powers, this must not be interpreted 
 to mean that Schiller abandoned the eudaemonis- 
 tic view of ethics, which, in a moderate form, 
 he always adhered to. As in the earlier period 
 of Greek speculation, virtue and self-interest 
 were not conceived as opposed to each other in 
 
66 The Philosophy or Schillee 
 
 the current moral philosophy, but pleasurable 
 feehng was conceived as a natural and necessary 
 consequence of the exercise of wisdom or virtue, 
 and as such held to be a constituent element of 
 the good. (3) Another striking feature of the 
 writings considered is the thoroughgoing dual- 
 ism between the natural and the spiritual, and 
 more particularly, of the sensuous and rational 
 elements in man's nature. His defence of the 
 affective life, the feelings, instincts and im- 
 pulses, and his attempt at a mediation between 
 the so-called lower and higher natures, first by 
 means of a metaphysical intermediate agent, 
 later by means of art, foreshadow the whole 
 course of his future thinking. (4) Interest- 
 ing, too, in view of future ethical and aesthetic 
 theory, in view, also, of the more distinctly lit- 
 erary work of the " poet of liberty," is his atti- 
 tude on the subject of the freedom of the will, 
 a subject which was always an attractive one 
 for the young philosopher, and which is dis- 
 cussed with more than ordinary originality and 
 acumen in the Master's Dissertation. How 
 much the subject occupied his thought during 
 the last year in the academy is shown by the 
 fact that the subject Freedom and Morality 
 was contemplated for his dissertation, and actu- 
 ally offered along with the more comprehensive 
 subject eventually chosen.^* (5) In this con- 
 nection may be recalled the view of the dynamic 
 
Eakly Views &7, ' 
 
 character of the individual. As the perfection 
 of the monad consists, according to Leibniz, in 
 the free development of its active powers, so 
 the true being of the individual and his per- 
 fection consist, according to SchiUer, in the - 
 activity of all his powers In due proportion. 
 With this view is closely connected (6) the u^ 
 theory of evolution which, in its broadest 
 aspect, was already clearly conceived and un- 
 hesitatingly accepted in the Master's Disserta- 
 tion. (7) Of interest to the student of Schil- 
 ler's ssthetic theory, especially, is the view 
 clearly indicated, though only scantily dis- 
 cussed, of the physiology of the senses. The 
 sense organs appear not as mere channels or 
 conductors through which impressions are car- 
 ried to the mind, as in the naive view of Eng- 
 lish Empiricism, but rather as t ransformin g 
 powers by which the physical ^o55sses-of the 
 'external world are modified," " soj^ttrat^^l^y I 
 may be able to awaken ideas within us." Here j 
 the influence of Leibniz's theory~of~presentatIon' 
 is clearly evident.^^ (8) Intimately connected 
 with the view of the necessary relation of the 
 affective life and human welfare, and involved 
 as a corollary, Is the view of the significance, 
 in human Hfe, of the pleasing, i. e., of aesthetic 
 objects. Approaches to this, the fundamental 
 problem of the period of the Artists and of the 
 Letters on the Esthetic Education of the 
 
68 The Philosophy or Schhxee 
 
 Human Race, are found not only in the meta- 
 physical essays of the Academy, but the prob- 
 lem is definitely faced and exphcitly, though 
 somewhat one-sidedly, discussed in the drama- 
 turgical essays of the first period. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 AWAKENING 
 
 The PhUosophical Letters and Related Poems 
 
 The value of the Philosophical Letters has 
 been variously estimated. Nevinson ®* sees in 
 them only " empty speculations " and " vapid, 
 unprofitable musings," while Hoffmeister ^* 
 can speak of them only in words of the most 
 extravagant praise, finding in them a depth 
 and truth of ideas, a sanity of judgment, a 
 purity of feehng, and a beauty of expression 
 imsurpassed in German literature. As is al- 
 most always the case, the truth will be found 
 somewhere between the extreme opinions. 
 While the Letters do not represent the cautious 
 and painstaking thought of a mature and sys- 
 tematic mind, they do reveal a mind of un- 
 usual intelligence and restless striving, and a 
 temperament of the deepest seriousness. But 
 whatever the intrinsic value of the Letters as 
 philosophic hterature may be, their value to 
 the student of the growth of Schiller's reflect- 
 ive life is imquestioned, and it is for their bio- 
 graphical value that they must be somewhat 
 
 69 
 
70 The Philosophy or S chiller 
 
 closely examined. For it is here, and notably 
 in the two poems published about the same 
 time, though perhaps already written during 
 the second Mannheim period,^° the Freigeisterei 
 der Leidenschaft and Resignation, that the tra- 
 ditional views so enthusiastically espoused in 
 the writings already discussed begin to relax 
 their hold upon Schiller, and the old landmarks 
 are permanently removed from their places. 
 While the two poems represent a decided 
 change of front in his moral Weltanschauv/ng, 
 the Philosophical Letters show us the dissolu- 
 tion of his metaphysics. The right of every 
 man to a just share of happiness had always 
 been unquestioned by Schiller, and the bound- 
 less optimism of his first writings never con- 
 ceived of a state in which the rewards of happi- 
 ness were not along the path of virtue.^* The 
 right to happiness is still unqualifiedly asserted 
 in the lyrics mentioned, but the opposition of 
 virtue and pleasure, of duty and inclination, 
 rises into sharp prominence. Which side 
 Schiller takes in the conflict he does not leave 
 us in doubt: 
 
 " No, I this conflict will no longer wage 
 The conflict duty claims — the giant task — 
 Thy spells, O Virtue, never can assuage 
 The heart's wild fire — this oflFering do not ask! 
 
 " True, I have sworn — a solemn vow have sworn 
 That I myself will curb the self within; 
 Yet take thy wreath, no more it shall be worn — 
 Take back thy wreath and leave me free to sin." " 
 
Awakening 71 
 
 The close of the poem, in which Schiller 
 roundly denounces a God who takes pleasure 
 in our tears and bloody renunciation, who has 
 led the path to heaven across the depths of hell, 
 has, notwithstanding the explanation which 
 Schiller himself appended to the poem, been 
 severely criticized. It would hardly be fair, 
 after what Schiller has said, to take the poem 
 as a " philosophical system " or a calm confes- 
 sion of faith once for all delivered. But after 
 all is said, it remains that the poet was at the 
 time of the writing keenly alive to the profound"! 
 breach between virtue, conventional or other, 
 and inclination, between " the law of the flesh 
 and the law of the spirit." 
 
 The same breach between virtue and welfare 
 meets us again in the lyric. Resignation, be- 
 ginning with the well-known lines : 
 
 " I, too, was born In fair Arcadia's land. 
 To me did nature too 
 Swear at my cradle joys on every hand; 
 I, too, was bom in fair Arcadia's land. 
 But clouds of tears eclipsed the springtide's blue." 
 
 Just what the meaning of this perplexing 
 poem is has been often discussed, without any 
 particularly enlightening result. One thing, 
 however, is pretty certain, that virtue and hap^l 
 piness, in the early essays always thought of 
 as inseparable from each other, are here rather ; 
 sharply opposed, if not conceived as absolutely 
 
72 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 incompatible elements in the moral life; and 
 this is significant for Schiller's development 
 from the purely eudsemonistic standpoint of his 
 earlier writings to the more rigoristic concep- 
 tion of the Kantian period. The theistic atti- 
 tude has given way to a decidedly skeptical 
 view, and the implicit trust in the harmony 
 , and rationality of the universe, so characteris- 
 I tic of the earliest period of the poet's reflection, 
 \js decidedly shaken. Nor is the hope of a 
 future existence in which the present imperfect 
 order is to be rectified left to him: 
 
 " Giv'st thou sure joy for hope that disappears 
 Into corrupted mold? 
 
 Death has been silent for six thousand years ; 
 Nor from the grave one corpse to living ears 
 Of the Requiter told." 
 
 Nature is divided against herself; life is full 
 of problems and conflicts without solution or 
 issue, and " hope disappears into corrupted 
 mold." 
 
 The Philosophical Letters interest us not 
 only because we have in them the restatement 
 of the early metaphysical views of Schiller, and 
 his comment upon them from the point of view 
 of the present transition period, but also some 
 important information regarding the influences 
 which destroyed " the dreams," as he somewhere 
 calls them, " of his imagination." The letters 
 purport to be the correspondence between 
 
AwAjaTNENG 73 
 
 Schiller and Korner, and some of them were 
 actually passed between the two m€n during 
 the time of their most intimate intercourse, 
 between September, 1785, and April, 1786. 
 
 The general events of Schiller's life between 
 the time of the school-days and the present 
 period, and the incidents which led to the re- 
 markable friendship between Schiller and 
 Korner, are fairly well known, but may be 
 briefly recalled here in view of the influence 
 which the external circumstances of his Hfe 
 had upon the susceptible mind of SchiUer, and 
 in view, particularly, of the far-reaching influ- 
 ence of Korner upon his development at this 
 time. For with his inner development the 
 varied fortimes and personal relations of 
 Schiller's early life had, doubtless, not a little 
 to do, as has often been pointed out by his 
 biographers. We have already seen in the dis- 
 cussion of the dramaturgical essays the sober- 
 ing eff'ect which contact with the world had 
 upon him. In them we find him occupying 
 himself with the problems confronting him in 
 his professional career to the almost total neg- 
 lect of the favorite metaphysical views of only 
 a few years before, though he felt no necessity 
 or had no occasion to express any change of 
 attitude regarding what he had considered the 
 fundamental verities of life. But the forttmes 
 of his life continued to be such as to make a 
 
74 The Philosophy of Schillek 
 
 gradual and even development of his inner life 
 extremely improbable. His life continued one 
 of sharp and steady conflict, a conflict between 
 aspiration and fact, between his vocation and 
 his lot, between the desire for independent ac- 
 tivity and the barriers of irrational necessity, 
 between his genius, in short, and the limitations 
 of his life. 
 
 Schiller's engagement as theatre-poet at 
 Mannheim was only for one year, and termi- 
 nated August, 1784, setting him adrift again. 
 Fiesko and Kabale und Liebe had been pro- 
 duced in the winter and spring of that year, 
 the former a failure which, however, the suc- 
 cess of the latter somewhat retrieved. What- 
 ever reputation Schiller enjoyed with certain 
 classes of the people, it is evident that their 
 enthusiasm was little shared by those upon 
 whose purses and influence 'the successes and 
 failures of the literary world so largely depend. 
 Involved in financial embarrassment, and some 
 dangerous " friendships," so common at the 
 time, with sundry female admirers, with no 
 definite prospects or plans for the future and 
 no friends whose services extended beyond sym- 
 pathy and good wishes, he resolved to avail 
 himself of an offer which had come to him 
 some months before, and which was destined to 
 mark a turning-point in his career. A letter 
 had been received by him, June, 1784, from a 
 
Awakening 75 
 
 circle of friends and admirers in Leipzig, chief 
 of whom was Christian Gottfried Komer, 
 father of the illustrious poet of the War of 
 Liberation, in which they expressed the highest 
 admiration for Schiller's genius, at the same 
 time enclosing crayon portraits of his admir- 
 ers. Though Schiller did not reply to the letter 
 vmtil December, a steady correspondence was 
 then begun which finally resulted in Schiller's 
 leaving Maimheim to join his friends in Leip- 
 zig, where he arrived April 17th, 1785. 
 
 The relation that existed between SchiUer 
 and Korner has been well characterized by 
 Professor Royce: "His (Komer's) place in 
 Schiller's early development was one of quiet 
 and kindly opposition. When Schiller is in 
 despair, Korner encourages him. When 
 Schiller jumps at conclusions, Korner invites 
 him to study philosophy, and trust more to his 
 understanding. When Schiller plunges into 
 hard study, Korner reminds him of his voca- 
 tion as a poet. And so throughout — with a 
 curious mingling of affection, criticism, rever- 
 ence, advice — Korner gives his great friend 
 just the stay the perplexed soul needed." ** 
 It was Korner, himself an ardent Kantian from 
 the beginning, by whom Schiller was first, in- 
 troduced to the Kantian philosophy, and it is 
 in these Letters that the influence of Kantian 
 ideas first makes itself clearly felt. 
 
76 The Philosophy of ScHUiLEU 
 
 It is a matter of some importance for our 
 present purpose to determine as accurately as 
 possible the authorship, and, particularly, the 
 dates of composition of the different parts of 
 the letters, a question which is involved in some 
 obscurity, and on which, although it has been 
 exhaustively studied, there has existed consid- 
 erable diversity of opinion. That the bulk of 
 the five letters were written in the winter of 
 1785-6, during the time of the first acquaint- 
 ance between Schiller and Korner, and that 
 they are the realization of a plan for a phil- 
 osophical romance in the form of letters con- 
 ceived several years before, is certain. That 
 Korner had a part in writing the Raphael let- 
 ters is also beyond question, especially in the 
 case of the last letter of April 4th, 1788, to 
 which Korner's initial is affixed, and to which 
 Schiller replied in his own name in a letter else- 
 where published.^* It is the date of the fourth 
 letter, which contains the so-called Theosophy 
 of Julius, that has been the source of consider- 
 able difficulty to literary critics. According to 
 Tomaschek, the Theosophy of Julius was writ- 
 ten during the Stuttgart period, or in 1781 at 
 the latest, when the Philosophical Romance in 
 Letters between Julius and Raphael was pro- 
 jected, while Schiller's comments upon it, about 
 four pages in all, preceding and following it, 
 were written at this time, that is,^in the winter 
 
Awakening 77 
 
 or spring, perhaps, of 1786. HofFmeister, 
 Minor and others are also of the opinion that 
 the principal part, at least, of the Theosophy 
 is an interpolation, and was written toward the 
 end of the academic period. This opinion, 
 however, is not shared by Kuno Fischer, who 
 has argued his case with a brilliancy and 
 breadth of view that makes his conclusion very 
 attractive, if not well-nigh inevitable. He 
 points out ®* close correspondences between cer- 
 tain paragraphs of the Theosophy and later 
 poems, between the paragraphs Love and Sac- 
 rifice, particularly, and the poem Resignation, 
 just noticed, and the characterization of the 
 Marquis Posa in 'Don Carlos, both of which 
 productions belong, of course, to the present 
 period. It is easy, however, to conclude too 
 much from these resemblances, which are not 
 so close and fundamental but that they might 
 have occurred between writings considerably 
 separated from each other in time and spirit. 
 At any rate, the similarities between the The- 
 osophy and Resignation and Don Carlos are 
 no greater than the similarities between the 
 Theosophy and the writings of the Stuttgart 
 period, the Master's Dissertation, the poem 
 Die Freitndschaft and other poems of the An- 
 thology, quotations from which actually ap- 
 pear in this part of the Philosophical Letters. 
 Schiller's own testimony, of course, is well 
 
78 The Philosophy of Schiixee 
 
 known and has often been quoted. " I have 
 been looking over my papers this morning," he 
 says in the opening lines of the fourth letter, 
 " and I find a lost essay, sketched in those 
 happy hours of my proud enthusiasm. But 
 how different everything seems to me now," etc. 
 The view, therefore, which on the whole com- 
 mends itself as the right one is that the Theoso- 
 phy of Julius was written at a considerably 
 earlier time than the remainder of the Philo- 
 sophical Letters, and that it belongs chrono- 
 logically to the group of writings already 
 dealt with under the title. Early Views. This 
 does not, of course, exclude the possibility that 
 portions of the manuscript were subjected to 
 revision before it was incorporated in the body 
 of the Philosophical Letters, to which it was 
 supposed to be a complete contrast.®-' 
 
 It will not be necessary here to give a re- 
 sume of the contents of the Theosophy of 
 Julius, the leading ideas of which, when disen- 
 tangled from their elaborate rhetorical dress, 
 are in the main those that we found in the 
 Master's Dissertation. It is the comments 
 which Schiller makes upon these ideas in the 
 remaining parts of the Letters that interest 
 us, and it is upon these that our attention must 
 be mainly directed. It is significant to notice, 
 at the outset, that Julius speaks of his former 
 views as views to which he was led by his heart 
 
Awakening 79 
 
 and his imagination, and that he contrasts them 
 with the rational or reflective attitude to which 
 he was led by his friend, Raphael. " I felt and 
 was happy. Raphael has taught me to think, 
 and I am on the way to regret that I was ever 
 created." " You have robbed me of the faith 
 that gave me peace. You have taught me to 
 despise where I prayed before. A thousand 
 things were venerable in my sight, till your dis- 
 mal wisdom stripped off the veil from them." 
 The world is a divine work of art, he had said, 
 in the contemplation and imitation of which 
 man finds his highest vocation and perfection, 
 and the view had afforded satisfaction and 
 stimulus to his artist's imagination. But 
 Raphael heartlessly suggests that the world is 
 a rather large object for the human mind to 
 aim at and completely interpret, but that such 
 bold attempts are natural enough at certain 
 stages in the development of the individual or 
 racial mind. " It was most natural that your 
 philosophical career began as with the human 
 race in general. The object on which man's 
 spirit of inquiry first attempted its strength 
 was, at all times, the universe. Hypotheses re- 
 garding the origin of the world and the con- 
 nection of its parts had occupied the greatest 
 thinkers for ages, when Socrates called down 
 the philosophy of his time from heaven to 
 earth." 
 
T 
 
 80 The Philosophy of Schhxjer 
 
 Of all the propositions of Julius he can least 
 agree with the one which assumes that the high- 
 est destiny of man is to detect the spirit of the 
 divine Artist in the work of creation, and he 
 points out an important distinction between the 
 universe and the work of a human artist. The 
 work of a human artist is the pure expression 
 of an ideal. He governs despotically the inan- 
 imate matter which he uses to body forth his 
 ideas. " But in the divine work of art the in- 
 dividuality and worth of each one of its parts 
 is respected, and the respect with which the 
 divine Architect honors every germ of energy, 
 even in the lowliest creature, glorifies him just 
 as much as the harmony of the immeasurable 
 whole. Life and freedom in every part char- 
 acterize the divine creation, and it is nowhere 
 more sublime than where it seems to have de- 
 parted most widely from its ideal." ®^ 
 
 The dynamic and animistic view of nature 
 of Leibniz and Herder could hardly have found 
 a clearer expression than in this sentence. The 
 belief in the purposiveness of creation, so 
 firmly adhered to in the earlier writings, also 
 fails to stand the test of cold reflection. Means 
 and ends, the Prince declares in the Geister- 
 seher, which was written later but still belongs 
 to this period, are merely human conceptions, 
 and cannot be applied beyond the sphere of our 
 activity. If a crystal were endowed with con- 
 
Awakening ( 81 ) — 
 
 sciousness, it would doubtless see in crystalli- 
 zation the end and realization of the world 
 plan. In other words, teleology is not an ob- 
 jective principle of explanation, like physical 
 causality, but only a subjective principle 
 of reflection, and applicable, therefore, 
 only within the limited sphere of human ac- 
 tivity. 
 
 The one idea, indeed, that runs throughout 
 the whole of the Philosophical Letters, and for ^ 
 that matter through all the writings of this 
 period, is the idea of t.hp rplativity qpd limit a- 
 ti on of human desire and k nowledge. " All 
 things in heaven and earth have no value, no 
 estimation, except that which my reason grants 
 them," exclaims Julius in the first intoxication 
 of his new view. " But unhappy contradiction 
 of nature," he immediately adds, " this free and 
 soaring spirit is joined to the rigid, mechanical 
 clockwork of a mortal body, bound up with its 
 little necessities, yoked to its miserable fate — 
 this God is banished into a world of worms." "* 
 Man cannot think of two ideas at one time. 
 For one enjoyment he must resign aU others; 
 two unlimited desires are too great for his little 
 heart. " Human nature has its proper bounds," C^ 
 he says in the closing remarks of the fourth 
 letter, " and so also has the individual." The 
 human mind surveys the supersensible by means 
 of the sensible, and mathematics applies its 
 
82 The Philosophy of Schillek 
 
 conclusions to the mystery of the superhuman. 
 But this knowledge of the supersensible world 
 is forever beyond the possibility of verification : 
 " No traveler has returned from that land to 
 relate his discovery." ** 
 
 The reader acquainted with the philosophical 
 writings of Kant cannot but have noticed the 
 striking similarity between the ideas here sei 
 forth and the leading principles of the Crit- 
 ical Philosophy. And when Schiller says that 
 
 J " our purest ideas are by no means images of 
 things, but only their signs or symbols," that 
 " truth is no property of the symbols, but of 
 the conclusion; it is not the likeness of the 
 sign with the thing signified, of the conception 
 with the object, but the agreement of this con- 
 ception with the laws of thought ; " when he 
 refers to the self-deception which men practise 
 when they " dissect a conception into the sepa- 
 rate elements out of which it was first com- 
 pounded by an act of caprice," and imagine 
 they have discovered new truths, or when he 
 speaks of the " endemic forms " of our thought, 
 we can have little doubt from what quarters the 
 influence came that destroyed the dreams of his 
 imagination, and called down his philosophy 
 
 f" from heaven to earth. For it was one of the 
 
 (principal problems of the Kantian philosophy, 
 and its lasting merit, to have set the proper 
 limits to speculative inquiry, limits beyond 
 
Awakening 83 
 
 1 which reason could not go without landing in 
 
 ', self-contradiction. 
 
 ''■~ That Schiller had not read the Critique of 
 Pure Reason at this time is shown conclusively 
 by a letter to Komer, written at Weimar, 
 April 15th, 1788. In view of the close con- 
 nection it has with the Philosophical Letters, 
 and in view of the valuable remarks it contains 
 on Schiller's philosophical reading, it wiU be 
 interesting to quote from it at some length. 
 " Your letter to Juhus (the last of the Philo- 
 sophical Letters) was a complete surprise. I 
 did not suspect that you were busy, and busy 
 for me! It contains some bright ideas as to 
 how even an active and independent mind can 
 bear the yoke of the opinion of others, and how 
 it is that such a mind, if delivered from this 
 yoke, wiU take just this course. . . . That my 
 Julius made his first attempt on the universe, 
 is perhaps due to my peculiar position ; it is 
 owing to my having studied almost no other 
 philosophy, and to my not having become ac- 
 quainted with any other by chance. From the 
 few philosophical works I have read, I always 
 appropriated that which appealed to my poetic 
 temperament and lent itself to poetic treatment. 
 It was thus that this subject which opened so 
 rich a field for the imagination, became my 
 favorite study. Your remarks on the juggling 
 tricks of reason whereby to escape the truth in 
 
84 The Philosophy of Schilleii 
 
 order to save a system I find very excoUont; 
 tliey have thrown light on my own problems. I 
 am very much mistiiken if your innocent re- 
 marks on the dry investigations on human cog- 
 nition and the humiliating limits of human rea- 
 son are not a distant threat with — tlie study 
 of Kant. I'll wager you will bring him up 
 again. I know the wolf by his howl. Well, I 
 believe that you are entirely right; but it still 
 goes against the grain with me to enter upon 
 this subject." •"> 
 
 Just at what time Schiller took up tlie study 
 of Kant, with what motives, and to what extent 
 he read the writings of the C^ritical Philoso- 
 phy, arc questions which we reserve for a sepa- 
 rate chapter. That he would read them is only 
 what we should have expected of an active and 
 earnest mind, which must almost inevitably have 
 been plunged into a period of skepticism, but 
 which nevertheless could not permanently rest 
 in it. Hoffmeister has called the Philosophical 
 Letters a history of philosophy reproduced in 
 the individual, and tlie comparison which Kor- 
 ner suggests between the course of Schiller's 
 early development and the history of early 
 Greek philosophy will be found not inapt by 
 one acquainted with this period of human 
 thought. Dogmatism, skepticism, criticism, — 
 these are the stages through whicli reflective 
 thought has more than once passed. The earli- 
 
Awakening 85 
 
 est period of Greek philosophy was character- 
 ized by its interest in the physical universe ; 
 philosophy was cosmo-centric and dogmatic. 
 This period was followed by one of skepticism, 
 inaugurated by the Sophists, in which by a 
 subtle, subjective dialectic all that had been 
 objectively established in the way of custom, 
 religious belief and law was undermined. Al- 
 most immediately succeeding this skeptical and 
 rclativistic period begins that splendid era of 
 Greek philosophy with which the names of 
 Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are so intimately 
 associated, — an era of criticism and many- 
 sided scientific activity, with which the great 
 period of European thought in the nineteenth 
 century may be broadly compared. 
 
 The influence that any one reformer exer- 
 cises on his time, it is safe to say, is almost 
 always overestimated, owing to the fact that too 
 exclusive attention is paid by the historian to 
 the particular man or system with whose cause 
 or doctrine he has identified his interests. But 
 it will be conceded by all that when one comes 
 to estimate the relative influence of different 
 individuals in shaping the philosophy, and the 
 thought in general, of the nineteenth century, 
 the work of Kant in defining the conditions and 
 limits of knowledge must be pronounced a 
 lasting achievement, and accorded an honorable 
 place, and that even his contributions to the 
 
86 The Philosophy of Schillee 
 
 sciences of ethics and aesthetics, whatever one 
 may think of their present value, must be 
 granted a large historical significance. Schil- 
 ler was destined to be one of the first to be 
 caught up by the wave of enthusiasm for the 
 Kantian philosophy which swept the land, and 
 the part he played in the development of those 
 very sciences to which Kant gave a strong im- 
 petus, but which his natural limitations, and 
 what seems to us an unreasonable adherence to 
 certain metaphysical principles, kept him from 
 developing to their fullest extent, — the part 
 which Schiller played in the broadening and 
 advancing of the sciences of ethics and esthet- 
 ics, has perhaps not been sufiiciently recog- 
 nized: and this not because of the slight sig- 
 nificance of his scientific writings, but because 
 these are overshadowed, in the popular con- 
 sciousness, by that incomparable line of dra- 
 matic writings the names of which have become 
 household words wherever the influence of Ger- 
 man letters has extended. SchiUer is known 
 not as the author of Anmut tmd Wiirde and 
 the Esthetic Letters, but as the author of Tell 
 and Wallenstein. Precisely what was the part 
 he played in the broadening, as we have called 
 it, and the advance upon the Kantian principles, 
 we must inquire presently. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE STUDY OF KANT 
 
 That Schiller had some acquamtance with 
 the Kantian philosophy perhaps as early as 
 1786, that is, during his Dresden period, has 
 been seen from the decidedly Kantian coloring 
 of some of the passages in the Philosophical 
 Letters; but that his acquaintance with it was 
 not very intimate or extensive is also seen, not 
 only from the vagueness and looseness with 
 which Kantian principles are employed, but 
 from the direct statements of Schiller himself, 
 one of which has already been quoted at some 
 length. What knowledge of the Kantian wri- 
 tings he possessed he had perhaps gleaned 
 mostly from the long and earnest conversations 
 with Korner, which he is reported to have had, 
 and from the regular correspondence with his 
 friend, whose letters and other writings show 
 him to have been a man of philosophical tem- 
 perament and varied interests, though the va- 
 riety of his interests and the somewhat desul- 
 tory character of his literary efforts kept him 
 from going far beyond the stage of dilettant- 
 ism in any line. The first writings of Kant 
 87 
 
88 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 which Schiller actually read, and the only ones 
 before 1791, so far as there is any record, were 
 the two small treatises Idee zu einer allge- 
 meinen Geschichte in weltburgerlicher Absicht 
 and Muthmas slicker Anfang der Menschenge- 
 schichte, both published in the Berlin Monats- 
 schrift. " Reinhold's lectures," he writes to 
 Korner August 29th, 1787, after a visit to 
 Jena, " commence in October ; they include 
 Kant's Philosophy and the Fine Arts. In com- 
 parison to Reinhold, you are an enemy of 
 Kant's : he maintains that a hundred years 
 hence Kant's reputation will be unbounded. 
 But I must avow that he spoke of him with 
 great judgment, and has already induced me 
 to commence reading Kant's small treatises in 
 the Berlin Monthly Review, amongst which his 
 idea of a universal history gave me great sat- 
 isfaction. That I shall read Kant, and perhaps 
 study his works, is, I see, more than probable. 
 Reinhold told me that Kant was about to pub- 
 lish a treatise on Practical Reason, or on the 
 Will; and afterwards a Treatise on Taste. 
 Rejoice, then, beforehand." ^^ 
 
 When Schiller went to Jena, May, 1789, to 
 assume his duties as professor " extraordinary " 
 of history, to which he had been appointed 
 mainly through Goethe's influence, he found 
 himself in a very nest of Kantians, and heard 
 the Kantian principles extolled until, as he says. 
 
The Study of Kant 89 
 
 he was nearly surfeited with them (zimk Satt- 
 werden preisen). Jena was known at this time 
 as the second home of the Kantian philosophy, 
 and its fame was attracting students from aU 
 parts of Germany and the northern countries, 
 many of whom were either already enthusiastic 
 adherents of the Kantian philosophy, or were 
 filled with curiosity to know more about the 
 destructive and novel theories which, as • they 
 were told, must produce a revolution in philoso- 
 phy. That Schiller was on very intimate terms 
 with the teaching force of the University does 
 not appear from his correspondence ; indeed, 
 the enthusiasm which the students displayed on 
 SchiUer's arrival was by no means shared by 
 his colleagues, some of whom were only glad 
 enough of an opportunity to humiliate him. 
 
 Schiller's impression of Reinhold, the apostle, 
 as he was called, of the new philosophical gos- 
 pel, was never very favorable, and the interest- 
 ing description SchiUer gives of his character 
 and personality shows the deep temperamental 
 differences existing between the two men. 
 " You must not, however, conclude from this 
 description," he writes to Komer, " that Rein- 
 hold and I are friends, or will become so. Rein- 
 hold can never become my friend, nor I his, 
 although he fancies so. His reason is cold, 
 deep and clear-sighted — mine is not, nor can 
 I appreciate him; but his imagination is poor 
 
90 The Philosophy of Schillee 
 
 and circumscribed, and his mind is narrower 
 than mine. . . . His sentiinents are scraped 
 together and fall heavily. . . . His ideas of 
 moral virtues are more timid than mine, and 
 his effeminacy at times approaches cowardice. 
 He never could be capable of great virtues, or 
 great crimes, either in imagination or in real- 
 ity, and that is bad. I can.be the friend of no 
 man who is not capable of one or the other, or 
 both." " 
 
 It is not probable that a man so unattractive 
 to Schiller could exert a great influence over 
 the poet, who was busy fourteen hours a day 
 preparing lectures for students on a subject 
 about which, as he frankly confesses, " many 
 of them would probably know more than the 
 professor." But it was inevitable that a mind 
 so sensitive to everything that went on about 
 him, and so eager to appropriate anything 
 which might set him to rights on problems in 
 which he felt a perennial interest, would have 
 been infected with the Kantian enthusiasm 
 everjrwhere manifested.^® For it would be an 
 error to conclude from some of his statements 
 that he was in any way antagonistic to the new 
 philosophy. The apparent indifference with 
 which he repeatedly speaks of it would be ex- 
 plained by the conjecture that he was less in- 
 terested in the problems of epistemology of the 
 first Critique, than in the treatises on Taste 
 
The Study of Kant 91 
 
 and Morals which had been promised, and which 
 Schiller hailed with joy, — a conjecture which 
 is made probable by the general tenor of his 
 interests, as we have known them, and which 
 is confirmed by the fact that he actually read 
 only the Critique of Judgment and the utter- 
 ances of Kant on the subjects of Morality. 
 The intense ethical fervor of Schiller's nature 
 attached itself only too readily to a system 
 whose ruggedness and noble sweep came as a 
 genuine relief to minds weary of the prolix 
 pedantry of the reigning philosophy and the 
 shallow eudjEmonism so prevalent at the end of 
 the eighteenth century. The boudoir philoso- 
 phy and the insipid moralizings of the Enlight- 
 enment must have appeared in strange con- 
 trast, to all healthy minds, to the impressive 
 utterances of Kant, the very difficulties and the 
 cumbrous terminology of whose writings exer- 
 cised a strange fascination over the younger 
 generation of that period. Schiller himself, as 
 Nevinson says, " though not a philosopher, had 
 a natural inclination to things abstract, intan- 
 gible and remote ; nor did he require that stim- 
 ulus of the rewards that even an unphilosophic 
 mind may gain from the study of Kant — de- 
 light in the sense of the power and solidity of 
 a supreme intellect, in the passages of stern 
 eloquence where the very strength of thought 
 endues the rugged expression with grandeur. 
 
92 The Philosophy or Schillek 
 
 and in the fervor of a living purpose which in- 
 spires and kindles the whole." ®^ 
 
 Schiller accordingly needed only an oppor- 
 tunity to devote himself in earnest to the study 
 of the Kantian philosophy. This opportunity 
 came to him in March, 1791, when his literary 
 labors had been interrupted by the first attack 
 of a serious illness, the effects of which he never 
 outgrew, and which eventually brought on his 
 premature death. Through the influence of 
 the Danish poet, Jens Baggesen, Frederick 
 Christian, the Prince of Schleswig-Holstein 
 Augustenburg, and Count Schimmelmann, pre- 
 sented Schiller with the handsome gift of a 
 thousand thalers annually for three years, to 
 free him from want and to make possible his 
 recovery. The joy Schiller experienced may 
 be best conveyed by quoting his letter to Kor- 
 ner: ". . . What I have longed for so in- 
 tensely during my whole life, is now to be ful- 
 filled. I have got rid of every care and every 
 anxiety for a long period, perhaps forever. I 
 have at last attained the long coveted independ- 
 ence of spirit. I have the immediate prospect 
 of arranging my affairs, and paying off all my 
 debts, and, freed from any solicitude about the 
 means of existence, I can now live entirely in 
 accordance with the impulses of my mind. I 
 have at last leisure to concentrate my thoughts, 
 and to toil for eternity." 
 
The Stitdy of Kant 93 
 
 The first book of Kant's to which he devoted 
 himself was the Critique of Judgment, which 
 had just been published, in the spring of 1790. 
 " You cannot guess," he wrote to Komer, 
 March 5th, 1791, " what I am reading and 
 studying-. Nothing worse than Kant. His 
 Critique of Judgment, which I have bought for 
 myself, is carrying me away by its pregnant 
 and illuminating contents, and has inspired me 
 with the greatest desire to work myself more 
 and more into his philosophy. ... I do not 
 imagine that Kant will be such an insurmount- 
 able obstacle, and I shall doubtless study him 
 still more carefuUy." 
 
 He had intended to continue his lectures on 
 aesthetics during the winter of the same year, 
 and intended to master the Kantian aesthetics 
 preparatory to them. The lectures, however, 
 were postponed until the winter of 1792-3, and 
 he had ample opportunity, in the meantime, to 
 busy himself with his favorite pursuit. " I am 
 now hard at work at Kant's philosophy," he 
 writes to Komer, January 1st, 1792, " and I 
 wish I could have a discussion with you every 
 evening on the subject. I am fully determined 
 not to lay it down until I have thoroughly 
 mastered it, even if it should take me three 
 years to do so." 
 
 Nor was his interest confined to the Kantian 
 philosophy. He would like, he adds, to study 
 
L 
 
 94 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 Locke, Hume and Leibniz at the same time, and 
 inquires about a good translation of Locke. 
 He would undertake one himself, if he were suf- 
 ficiently master of the English language. 
 Again in May he writes that he is busy with 
 the Thirty Years' War, and in studying Kant's 
 Critique of Judgment preparatory to the Ms- 
 thetic Letters, which, it appears, he had 
 planned as early as this. He intends also to 
 read Baumgarten first, he says, and hopes 
 Komer will " see if anything can be done with 
 Sulzer." 
 
 In this same letter occurs a passage which 
 has been quoted more than once to show the 
 baneful effect which the study of philosophy is 
 supposed to have had upon the mind of Schiller, 
 who fell " only too easily," we are told, " into 
 all the tricks of the metaphysical trade." " I 
 feel," says Schiller, " that ever since I have 
 acted according to laid-down rules, I have lost 
 that boldness and living fire I formerly pos- 
 sessed. I now see what I create and form. I 
 watch the progress of the fruits of inspiration ; 
 ^and my imagination is less free, since it is aware 
 that it is watched." Schiller was an artistic 
 mind and had splendid natural endowments, 
 everyone will grant ; but he was too much of 
 an artist, and he had too much natural en- 
 dowment, to imagine for a moment that the 
 knowledge of the principles one employs in ar- 
 
The Study of Kant 95 
 
 tistic creation, provided it goes far enough, 
 will detract from the value of the artistic 
 product, or that insight is incompatible with 
 inspiration. " For practice' sake," says Schil- 
 ler, " I like a philosophical discussion on theo- 
 ries, and criticism must now remedy what it has 
 spoiled, — for it has spoiled me. . . . When 
 I have succeeded in making the laws laid down 
 by art second nature, in like manner as educa- 
 tion makes the polished man, imagination will 
 then reassert its former freedom, and will pre- 
 scribe its own hmits." ^° It wiU be cheerfully 
 granted by all Hterary critics that some of the 
 " boldness and living fire " which Schiller for- 
 merly possessed and which he lost could very 
 well have been dispensed with, and some of the 
 productions of the pre-critical period been none 
 the worse for it. Carlyle puts the case admi- 
 rably : " Excellence," he says, " not ease of 
 composition, is the thing to he desired; and in 
 a mind like Schiller's, so fuU of energy, of im- 
 ages and thoughts and creative power, the more 
 sedulous practice of selection was little likely 
 to be detrimental." ^^ 
 
 It is of course idle to speculate on what 
 might or might not have been if the conditions 
 had been different from what they were, and it 
 may be that Schiller's work might have excelled 
 in artistic finish and extent anything that he 
 actually did, if he had never given serious study 
 
96 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 to the principles, philosophic or what not, ac- 
 cording to which artistic production proceeds. 
 It remains that the permanent work of Schil- 
 ler's life was accomplished after, and not before, 
 his study of philosophy, and the splendid 
 achievements of the years immediately succeed- 
 ing the Kantian period furnish a prima facie 
 justification of all the means of development 
 and self -improvement which he so assiduously 
 employed: the study of history, of Greek liter- 
 ature, and of philosophy. Nothing could be 
 more misleading than the suggestion that 
 Schiller's philosophy and his poetry were two 
 things apart. From the Odes to Laura through 
 the various productions of his Ideendichtung 
 and the dramas of his last period, the poetic 
 and reflective elements are most intimately in- 
 terwoven ; indeed, it is inconceivable how a poet 
 so profoundly ethical as Schiller could keep his 
 art and his philosophy permanently separate. 
 In the Ideendichtung philosophical problems 
 are consciously made the objects of poetic 
 treatment, and some of the poems present a 
 perfection of form hardly paralleled in the 
 language. Of course it is easy to say that 
 such poetry is not poetry in the true sense of 
 the term ; but that is only the worse for poetry 
 " in the true sense of the term." To treat in- 
 tellectual or moral problems in such a way as 
 to give the most exquisite pleasure to cultivated 
 
The Stxjdy of Kant 97 
 
 minds is not to overstep the limits of art, but 
 to extend them. 
 
 In thus defending Schiller's study of philoso- 
 phy it is not meant to justify the pedantry and 
 artificiality with which philosophy in general 
 and Kant in particular have so often been 
 charged. That there is useless machinery in 
 Kant's system is a fact too notorious to be in- 
 sisted on : it would have been an extraordinary 
 thing if philosophy alone had escaped the 
 vagueness which enveloped and the pedantry 
 which weighed down all the rest of the sciences. 
 
 Schiller returned again and again to his phil- 
 osophical studies. On October 15th he speaks 
 of studying the Critique of Judgment again, 
 and expresses his determination not to rest until 
 he has " mastered it, and made something of 
 it." By December he had reached some positive 
 results. His study of aesthetics has thrown 
 much light upon the nature of the beautiful, 
 he writes, and he believes that he has discovered 
 " the objective idea of the beautiful which is 
 qualified, eo ipso, to be the objective principle 
 upon which taste is founded, and about which 
 Kant tormented his brain without success." '^^ 
 The quotation is significant: for it is this~\ 
 point, that is, the establishment of the objective \ 
 character of the beautiful, about which much / 
 of the interest of his {esthetic writings turns, / 
 and which marks the departure from, and the ( 
 
98 The Philosophy of Schillek 
 
 advance upon, the Kantian theory of esthetics. 
 To the discussion of the aesthetic theory proper 
 we shall give some incidental attention in con- 
 nection with a group of writings mainly ethical 
 in interest, which appear among the first results 
 of the Kantian studies, — the essays tJber den 
 Grvmd des Vergnugens an tragischen Gegen- 
 stdnden, tJber die tragische Kunst, and, as 
 representing a more independent attitude 
 toward the Kantian morality, the essay Anmut 
 und Wiirde and the group of minor writings 
 related to it in content and general aim. 
 
 That Schiller read the Critique of Practical 
 Reason perhaps as early as 1791 is asserted by 
 several authorities,''^ and is made probable by 
 the influence the leading ideas of this work ex- 
 ercised upon the writings immediately follow- 
 ing this time, though I have not been able to 
 find conclusive evidence regarding the matter 
 among Schiller's own utterances. Whether or 
 not Schiller ever read the Critique of Pure 
 Reason appears doubtful, but there is no con- 
 clusive evidence one way or the other. That 
 Schiller intended making a study of the work 
 is shown by the fact that he actually ordered 
 it, as his letter to the book-dealer Crusius of 
 December 16th, 1791, shows; and the fact that 
 he expresses a desire to study Locke, Hume and 
 Leibniz in the letter of January 1st, 1792, 
 noticed above, shows that he did not intend to 
 
The Study of Kant 99 
 
 confine himself to those parts of Kant's philoso- 
 phy which were of most immediate interest to 
 him in his practical work in writing and lec- 
 turing, but was determined to acquaint himself 
 with the whole theoretical groundwork of the 
 Critical Philosophy. The circumstance, how- 
 ever, that he never refers to his study of the 
 first Critique and the philosophy out of which 
 it grew, though he was always very communi- 
 cative about his work, makes it pretty safe to 
 say that the press of work and his absorbing 
 interest in the theory of aesthetics never allowed 
 him to make much headway in the study of the 
 more theoretical parts of the Critical writings. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 FIRST FRUITS 
 
 The Essays on the Tragic 
 
 To call the two essays on the tragic, to be 
 discussed under this head, the first results or 
 first fruits of the study of Kant, as has been 
 done, perhaps requires some explanation. The 
 large amount of material in them which is ap- 
 parently uninfluenced by the Kantian aesthetics 
 may perhaps puzzle those who had expected a 
 close adhesion to, or an almost verbal repetition 
 of, the Kantian ideas, such as one is more than 
 likely to expect from the description given of 
 the essays by most of the writers who have 
 made allusion to them. The somewhat hetero- 
 geneous character and the wavering tone ac- 
 tually found in the writings in question is com- 
 pletely explained by the circumstances of their 
 composition. Most of the material contained 
 in them was already brought together for the 
 lectures on assthetics given by Schiller during 
 the summer of 1790. Whatever knowledge he 
 may have possessed of the literature on aesthet- 
 100 
 
FiEST Feuits 101 
 
 ics at that time, we have his word for it that he 
 did not depend upon it in the elaboration of 
 his lectures, and there is no reason to believe 
 that he was to any appreciable extent influenced 
 by the Critique of Judgment, although this had 
 already appeared in the spring of the same 
 year. He is giving a publicum on the tragic, 
 he writes to Komer, May 16th, 1790 ; " but do 
 not imagine," he adds, " that I am consulting 
 a single authority. I am making this esthetic 
 myself, and it is none the worse for that either, 
 according to my opinion." ''* " My theory of 
 tragedy," he says again June 18th, " to which 
 I devote one day each week, is a great source 
 of pleasure to me. Of course I get along 
 slowly, as I do not use a single book, but rely 
 entirely upon my past experience and examples 
 from tragic compositions." It is Schiller's own 
 theory of tragedy, therefore, precipitated from 
 a rather intimate and varied acquaintance with 
 tragic literature, and from an unusually suc- 
 cessful experience of ten years as a dramatic 
 composer, which he propounded to his hearers 
 at Jena in 1790. 
 
 It is not this theory in its original form, 
 however, that we have in the essays under con- 
 sideration, which were not written out until the 
 winter of 1791-2, Uber den Grund des Vergnii- 
 gens an tragischen Gegenstanden in Decem- 
 ber,''' and ijher die tragische Kunst almost im- 
 
102 The Philosophy of Schillek 
 
 mediately afterwards, or after Schiller had de- 
 voted some study to the Critique of Judgment 
 and Kant's moral treatises. The suggestion 
 that the essays were already written, in part at 
 least, during the year 1790, and merely worked 
 over for publication at this time, has no weight, 
 as Schiller had discontinued writing out his lec- 
 tures before the summer semester of 1790. 
 " My lectures do not give me much trouble 
 now," he writes, February 1st, 1790; "I have 
 given up working them out in full beforehand, 
 and speak extempore. Thus I save several 
 hours every day that I used to devote to wri- 
 ting them down, and the material is much better 
 impressed upon my memory when I rely more 
 upon it."'^^ 
 
 Indeed, one is led to suspect, on reading these 
 essays, that Schiller's mind was stiU better 
 stocked with his own ideas than with the prin- 
 ciples of the Kantian aesthetic. It is safe to 
 say that he was at this time more impressed 
 with the Kantian philosophy than he was en- 
 lightened by it. But that he had the firmest 
 faith in its conclusions is put beyond doubt by 
 the way in which he attempts to fit his own 
 ideas to fundamental Kantian principles, both 
 aesthetic and ethical. It was Kant's view of the 
 nature of morality, in particular, that lent it- 
 self to Schiller's theory of the tragic, and it 
 is this portion of Kant's philosophy that gained 
 
First Fruits 103 
 
 his almost complete adhesion at this time, as 
 will be seen presently. 
 
 One of the first things that must strike the 
 reader of these essays is the change of front 
 on the subject of the function and purpose of 
 art since he had last written on that subject, 
 nearly a decade before. The function of art, 
 he had said at that time, is twofold: the imme- 
 diate one of relaxation and aesthetic enjoyment, 
 and the ulterior and higher one of intellectual 
 and moral improvement. The aim of nature, 
 anyone must say who admits that nature has an 
 aim at all, is the happiness of man, although — 
 and here Schiller the Kantian speaks — al- 
 though he ought to take no notice of this aim 
 in his moral conduct. What the understanding 
 yields only after labor and application, what 
 the senses yield only at the risk of sacrifice or 
 at the cost of privation, art procures for us in 
 play and lavishes upon us as a pure gift. And 
 as if speaking in direct criticism of his former 
 essay, he says: "The praiseworthy object of 
 pursuing everywhere moral good as the supreme 
 aim, which has already brought forth in art so 
 much mediocrity, has caused also in theory a 
 similar prejudice. To assign to the fine arts 
 a really elevated position, to win for them the 
 favor of the state, the veneration of all men, 
 they are pushed beyond their true domain, and 
 a vocation is imposed upon them contrary to 
 
104 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 their nature. It is supposed that a great serv- 
 ice is done them by substituting for a frivolous 
 aim, that of charming, a moral aim; and their 
 influence upon morality, which is so apparent, 
 necessarily mihtates in favor of this pretension. 
 It is found illogical that the art which con- 
 tributes in so great a measure to the develop- 
 ment of all that is most elevated in man should 
 produce this effect only incidentally, and make 
 its chief object an aim so vulgar as we imagine 
 pleasure to be." 
 
 Schiller's view regarding the moral signifi- 
 cance of art is perhaps nowhere put more 
 clearly. Its value as an instrument of culture 
 and of moral elevation is of the highest kind, 
 but in order to be attained most fully, in order 
 to have art at all, in fact, who^e very essence 
 is freedom, these must not be directly aimed at. 
 The end of art is first and last to please, to 
 excite sesthetic gratification, and all the other 
 ends which this may bring in its train are de- 
 feated if this is lost sight of, just as the seeker 
 after health or pleasure defeats his aim if he 
 keeps his mind continually fixed upon the ob- 
 ject of his search, instead of engaging in the 
 living interests and activities of daily life, 
 which are the indispensable means to the har- 
 monious functioning of all one's powers in 
 which health of body and mind consists. 
 \ The moral content of art, tragic art in par- 
 
First Feuits 105 
 
 ticular, is explained by the fact that man is so 
 thoroughly moral in his make-up, and that 
 morality thus becomes the greatest source of 
 aesthetic delight. Art, that is, cannot create the"" 
 sources of pleasure, but must employ those that 
 are already furnished and at hand. And it is 
 in the exercise of the moral powers in the pres- 
 ence of moral situations furnished by art, 
 Schiller holds, that these powers are strength- 
 ened and perfected. " The pleasure we find in 
 the beautiful, pathetic and sublime strengthens 
 our moral sentiments, as the pleasure we find 
 in kindness, in love, etc., strengthens these in- 
 clinations." Besides, it seems to have been his 
 belief that happiness as such was an important 
 condition for the completest moral life. The 
 coincidence of virtue, perfection and happiness 
 was the optimistic creed of his earliest writings, 
 and we found him working out rather elabo- 
 rately the salutary influence upon man's phys- 
 ical nature of a happy condition of mind. The 
 influence of virtue and happiness he thought of 
 as reciprocal: just as contentment of mind I 
 must be the sure reward of the good man, so,/ 
 on the other hand, moral excellence naturally 
 flows from happiness and contentment of hearLl 
 This fundamental conviction may be traced in 
 many of Schiller's first utterances ; the unrest, 
 the moral storm and stress evidenced in the dis- 
 sonant poems Freigeisterei and Resignation, 
 
106 The Philosophy of Schhxer 
 
 and other writings of the Dresden period, were 
 due to the fact that it was for a time shaken, 
 and it was this conviction that furnished the 
 point of departure, in his final development, 
 from the rigoristic and ascetic morality of the 
 Kantian philosophy. 
 
 It is not within the intention of this chapter 
 to follow Schiller through the details of aesthetic 
 theory as developed in these essays, except in 
 so far as these have a bearing upon his theory 
 of morality, which, through the influence of 
 Kant, is soon to take more definite form, and 
 with which we shall now for some time be almost 
 exclusively occupied. The Eesthetic theory de- 
 veloped here is still vague and not at all repre- 
 sentative of Schiller's later position, and can 
 therefore not be advantageously treated except 
 in its connection with the later and more purely 
 esthetic writings. 
 
 The definition and characterization of the 
 tragic, however, as given here, are so firmly 
 based upon, and illustrative of, Schiller's atti- 
 tude on moral questions at this time, that some 
 of his distinctions must be clearly brought out 
 and fully grasped. The general source of 
 aesthetic pleasure is Zweckmdssigkeit, fitness or 
 conformity to an end. Now this fitness is of 
 two kinds : physical or natural fitness, and 
 moral fitness. The pleasure produced by nat- 
 ural fitness must be distinguished again from 
 
First Fruits 107 
 
 merely sensuous pleasure, which is the result 
 of a sensation awakened immediately by a phys- 
 ical cause, and which, as immediate and there- 
 fore necessitated, is excluded from the domain 
 of art. Pleasure, to be esthetic pleasure, must 
 be " free," unrestrained, that is, by the law of 
 natural necessity, and must bring into play the 
 spiritual faculties of understanding, reason and 
 imagination. Mere sense impression may be 
 agreeable, but it cannot rise to the dignity of 
 aesthetic pleasure so long as it remains merely 
 sensuous ; it is only in so far as sense impres- 
 sions are given a formal or relational value, so 
 as to be apprehended by representation, that 
 they can afford aesthetic gratification. 
 
 In the valuation of natural and moral fitness 
 as means to aesthetic ends the latter occupies the 
 higher place. The reason Schiller gives for 
 this is thoroughly Kantian. " Natural fitness 
 could well be a problem, and a problem forever 
 unsolvable. But moral fitness is already demon- 
 strated. It alone is founded upon our reason- 
 able nature and upon internal necessity. It is 
 our nearest and most important interest, and 
 at the same time the most easily recognized 
 because it is not determined by any external 
 element, but by an internal principle of our 
 reason : it is the palladium of our liberty." 
 While the true and the perfect are apprehended \ 
 by the understanding, and the beautiful by the \ 
 
108 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 understanding and the imagination, the good 
 is apprehended by reason, and the pathetic and 
 sublime, *. e., the good in conflict, by reason and 
 the imagination. Indeed, a classification of the 
 arts might be made upon the basis of the facul- 
 ties which are employed in their apprehension, 
 or upon the basis of the predominance, in any 
 object of aesthetic contemplation, of natural or 
 moral fitness. We should thus have the arts of 
 the understanding, having for their principal 
 object the true, the beautiful and the perfect, 
 and the arts of reason or the heart, which have 
 for their chief object the good, the sublime and 
 the pathetic. 
 — The Kantian influence is clearly seen in the 
 emphasis placed upon the representation of fit- 
 ness or purposiveness as the basis of assthetic 
 enjoyment, and in the entire exclusion from the 
 \ sphere of the aesthetic of the purely sensuous 
 L element. The divisions of the faculties and the 
 tendency to classification are, of course, thor- 
 oughly Kantian, and the definitions of the sub- 
 lime and the pathetic are entirely in the spirit 
 of the master. Indeed, the whole theory of"^| 
 tragedy, as here presented, rests upon, and the i 
 various kinds of tragedy may be tabulated on 
 the basis of, the Kantian dualism between nat- 
 ural and moral forces, and the Kantian idea of 
 fitness. For it is just in the sacrifice of a phys- 
 ical to a moral fitness, or in the sacrifice of one 
 
FiKST Feuits 109 
 
 species of moral fitness to a higher one, in the i 
 subordination, in short, of the sensuous to ideal 
 interests, that the tragic consists. Theron and 
 Amanda are tied to the stake as martyrs ; they 
 are free to choose either life or death by the 
 frightful ordeal of fire, but they choose the 
 latter. The disregard of the natural interests 
 awakens in us the feeling of unfitness, and ought 
 to fill us with distress. But what are the dis- 
 cords in nature compared with the harmony in 
 the world of moral freedom ! The keen pleasure 
 we feel in the contemplation of this scene is due 
 to the fact that we see the triumph of moral 
 fitness and of the moral law, an experience so 
 subhme that we may even hail the calamity 
 which elicits it. It is in such situations as this, 
 in the struggle between the non-moral forces 
 of nature, such as feelings, instincts, passions, 
 physical necessity and destiny, with the moral 
 law, that the latter is seen in its fuU power, and 
 moral consciousness rises to the highest degree 
 of clearness. " The more redoubtable the ad- 
 versary, the more glorious the victory," and the 
 more keen the pleasure we experience. 
 
 Schiller is disposed, we see here, to insist 
 upon and carry through without qualification 
 Kant's fundamental doctrine of the incompati" 
 bility of natural inclination and moral worth 
 And though he perhaps emphasizes more than 
 did Kant the pleasure which accompanies virtu- 
 
110 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 ous action, yet this pleasure, however exalted 
 it may be, is not the motive of the act, which 
 must be different from natural incHnation of 
 any kind if the act is to have moral worth. So 
 far he and Kant perfectly agree. Indeed, it 
 "^eems almost as if Schiller were quoting Kant 
 when he says that the moral merit of an act 
 decreases just to the degree that it is deter- 
 mined by inclination or pleasure, or when he 
 says in another place that it requires a clear 
 understanding and a reason emancipated from 
 the powers of nature to determine the relation 
 of moral duties to the highest principle of 
 morality. 
 
 That Schiller found the characterization of 
 the tragic, as attempted in these essays, too 
 narrow for his later thought, and that the en- 
 tire exclusion, from the moral realm, of the 
 desiderative side of man's nature proved suf- 
 ficiently unsatisfactory to the poet to call forth 
 some qualification, is, of course, familiar in a 
 general way to any one at all acquainted with 
 his later writings. But the elements of truth 
 expressed here, however one-sided and incom- 
 plete they may have appeared to him at times 
 in his later development, always made a strong 
 appeal to the poet, both in his theoretical activ- 
 ity and in his work as artist. He was not so 
 bad a moralist as to be willing to surrender the 
 will to the solicitation of every passing desire 
 
FiEST Fruits 111 
 
 of the agent, however unregulated or erratic 
 that desire may be, nor was his sense of moral 
 values so obscured as not to recognize the moral 
 worth of an action, however fierce the conflict 
 of the passions from which it emerged. It is 
 in the conflicts of the moral life, in fact, that 
 Schiller found the material for those dramatic 
 situations which ehcited his greatest powers, 
 and on which the reader lingers with greatest 
 pleasure. It is not the Piccolomini ^^ who 
 could " exercise in sport his duties, indulge all 
 lovely instincts, act forever with undivided 
 heart," that elicits our greatest sympathy and 
 admiration. It is when " like enemies the roads 
 start from each other, duties strive with duties," 
 when he must choose his party in the war which 
 is kindling between his friend and his emperor, 
 when the beautiful, that is, rises to the sublime, 
 that we feel the height of assthetic enjoyment 
 and the keenest interest. In the Maid of Or- 
 leans, too, and in Mary Stuart, the most pow- 
 erful artistic effects are produced in those pas- 
 sages where, in the fierce conflict between the 
 opposing forces of inclination and duty, or of 
 the free spirit and blind fate, beauty rises into 
 sublimity of action. Conflict, that is, and 
 catastrophe form the very essence of a tragic 
 situation, a conflict, of course, which, if it is 
 to produce the highest aesthetic effect, must 
 issue in the triumph of those interests which 
 
112 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 are regarded as of most significance or value. 
 The subjective effect upon the observer will 
 consist, as Schiller found, of a complex of pain- 
 ful and pleasurable emotions, painful through 
 sympathy with the person or persons whose 
 particular interests are sacrificed, and pleasur- 
 able through sympathy with the more universal 
 and hence significant interests, moral or other, 
 which are seen to triumph. 
 
 The tragic, we must conclude from passages 
 in these essays, and from the thoroughly Kant- 
 ian attitude in morality which he maintains 
 here, Schiller regarded as the highest expres- 
 sion of dramatic art, at this period of his de- 
 velopment. But the antagonisms and the op- 
 positions which so deeply divide man against 
 himself, we must imagine him to say at a later 
 period of his artistic development, are not to 
 be regarded as so permanent and absolute but 
 that they may be softened down more and more 
 ■ as culture proceeds. The self and the not-self, 
 the world of freedom and the world of neces- 
 sity, are not so fundamentally different from 
 each other but that, by a gradual process of 
 transformation, the latter terms may be more 
 and more embraced by the former. The art of 
 the tragic, therefore, like the ethics of rigorism, 
 will maintain its supremacy only at one stage 
 in the development of humanity, a temporary 
 period in a process which leads forward towards, 
 
First Fruits 113 
 
 though it may never completely attain to, that I 
 ideal condition in which there will be no " par- j 
 ticularity of desire " to sacrifice, and hence no 
 duty to triumph or conflict to harmonize. And — ' 
 as the cultivated man of to-day finds but Httle 
 pleasure in the contemplation of the conflict of 
 fierce passions as depicted in the poetry of 
 primitive peoples, so the man of the future will 
 find less and less pleasure in the contemplation 
 of those moral conflicts which are the source of 
 such deep satisfaction to man at the present 
 stage of his moral development. \i The difl'erence 
 in tragic interest between the earlier works just 
 mentioned and WiUiam Tell, which impresses 
 the reader more by the placidity and lyric 
 beauty of many of its parts than by its tragic 
 situations, would suggest that Schiller became 1 
 more enamored of that ideal of the conciliated I 
 self, which he proposed as the goal of jesthetic | 
 culture, as he approached the zenith of his ar- j 
 tistic development, under the influence of / 
 Goethe. " -^ 
 
 The attempt of Schiller to free himself from 
 the rigorous interpretation of morality as 
 found in the essays just noticed, an interpreta- 
 tion we should not have expected from the read- 
 ing of his early writings, and into which he 
 was led, we must believe, in the first enthusiasm 
 over the Critical Philosophy and by his great 
 reverence for its founder, we must follow some- 
 
114 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 what carefully in the next chapter. The main 
 writings which will come under consideration 
 are Anmut wnd Wiirde (1793), and, as supple- 
 mentary to this, a group of poems of which 
 the most notable are Der Genius, Der Tanz, and 
 Wiirde der Frcmen. References will also be 
 made to tfber den moralischen Nutzen cesthe- 
 tischer Sitten and tjber die Gefahr cesthetischer 
 Sitten. The satirical epigrams Gewissensscru- 
 pel (Xenien 388) and Decisum (Xenien 389) 
 may also be read in this connection. Then for 
 Schiller's theory of education must be consid- 
 ered portions of Brief e iiher die cesthetische 
 Erziehung des Menschen (1795), in connection 
 with which may be read the poems Die Kimstler, 
 Die Ideale, and Das Ideal timd das Leben; also 
 Tdyula votiva, 6-8, 47, and 57-60. As these 
 are among the most widely known of the poet's 
 works, and are included in almost every collec- 
 tion of his poems, it is not deemed necessary 
 to offer any extended resume of their contents. 
 Our purpose, at any rate, will be best attained 
 by leaving to one side the details, often pedan- 
 tic and tiresome, of purely aesthetic theory, and 
 by centering attention upon those passages 
 which have an obvious bearing upon Schiller's 
 view of morality in the final period of his de- 
 velopment: for it is to ascertain this as defi- 
 nitely as possible that we must mainly devote 
 ourselves from this time on. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 INDEPENDENT DEVELOPMENT 
 
 Attention has been called more than once 
 to the fact that certain leading features of 
 Schiller's later thought appear more or less 
 clearly in the writings of the school period and 
 in the other works which may be broadly desig- 
 nated as pre-Kantian: the stream of his 
 thought, I have said, " was clarified and deep- 
 ened, rather than directed into other channels, 
 by contact with the Critical Philosophy." The 
 one problem which seems to have been upper- 
 most in his mind in the academic dissertations, 
 particularly, but also in some of the minor 
 writings both of his school period and after- 
 wards, was to conciliate, as it were, the differ- 
 ent factions or interests in human nature, and 
 to offer some sort of mediating term by which 
 the chasm which was supposed to exist between 
 the natural and the spiritual, the physical and 
 the moral, might be spanned. This middle 
 term he had found in his metaphysical writings 
 to be a substance which partook in si way of 
 the character of both the physical and the spir- 
 115 
 
116 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 itual, — Mittelkraft he called it, — at once 
 penetrable and impenetrable, and thus at once 
 susceptible of being acted upon by the material 
 world and of acting upon spirit. He came 
 early to inquire into the comparative impor- 
 tance of the mind and the body, and between 
 the extreme idealists who regarded the body as 
 only a prison-house of the spirit, checking its 
 flight toward perfection, and the extreme ma- 
 terialists who treated knowledge and virtue as 
 only a means to happiness, and who held that 
 the whole perfection of man consists in " the 
 amelioration and perfection of the body," 
 Schiller was concerned to maintain an inter- 
 mediate position ; and, while holding spirit to 
 be the higher term, he undertook to champion 
 the rights of that part of our nature which, as 
 he thought, had been underrated, and to show, 
 by appealing to the actual development both of 
 the individual and of the race as a whole, " the 
 remarkable contribution of the body to the ac- 
 tivity of the soul, and the great and real influ- 
 ence of the system of animal sensations upon 
 the spiritual life." This great importance he 
 found to consist not only in the function of the 
 preservation of the organism which was en- 
 trusted to them, but in the fact that it was 
 through the influence of these same animal feel- 
 ings and impulses that man's spiritual nature 
 is developed from its lowest and most primitive 
 
Independent Development 117 
 
 to its highest forms. Without these animal 
 feelings, indeed, man's cognitive and, particu- 
 larly, man's practical life would become an im- 
 possibility. Without feeling, no desire, and 
 without desire no vohtion and no active hfe. 
 Body, in short, is the indispensable companion 
 of spirit in this present world : " Man has to 
 be an animal before he can, like Newton, at- 
 tempt the flight through the universe." Al- - 
 most at the same time that we found Schiller 
 trying to mediate between the natural and the 
 spiritual by the metaphysical intermediate 
 agent we had occasion to notice another at- 
 tempt at this mediation by the forms of beauty. 
 The problem here is the refinement and educa- 
 tion of the primitive and merely natural in- 
 stincts of the savage until they become instru- 
 ments for the production of the noblest quali- 
 ties of the human spirit. " Music softens the 
 savage breast, beauty ennobles morals and 
 taste, and art leads man to science and to vir- 
 tue." In the essay on the moral influence of 
 the stage, some four years later, the aesthetic! 
 condition is characterized as one of repose, a 
 gentle harmony into which the tension due to 
 the one-sided activity of our sensuous or our ^ 
 spiritual nature is resolved and the integrity ( 
 of the true self is restored, and we found the 1 
 author insisting in a rather one-sided way on 
 the pedagogical value of art, recommending it 
 
118 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 in the highest terms as an instrument of intel- 
 lectual and moral education. It is in the con- 
 templation of art that there is induced that 
 happy condition in which the spiritual is 
 merged, as it were, with the natural, the former 
 being humanized and softened, the latter re- 
 fined and spiritualized in the process. 
 
 Having thus traced this rather persistent 
 attempt of Schiller's to maintain an interme- 
 diate position between extreme sensualism and 
 extreme rationalism in morality, we are pre- 
 pared to anticipate the attitude which he will 
 finally assume toward the extreme rigorism of 
 the ethical system of Kant. That his attitude 
 is that of independent criticism, and that it 
 marks an advance upon the Kantian position, 
 that this advance, finally, consists in a fuUer 
 recognition of the desiderative side of man's 
 nature, all this must be the broad result of an 
 unbiased reading of the writings of Schiller. 
 The broad result: for when we come to deter- 
 mine the particular aspects of Schiller's moral 
 doctrine, or attempt a definite formulation of 
 his relation to Kant, the problem is by no means 
 simple, and the reading of the different writings 
 of the post -Kantian period yields no single or 
 unambiguous result. Nor will a careful read- 
 ing of the extensive literature which has been 
 written on the SchiUer-Kant problem help us 
 materially. Writers of equal ability have ar-' 
 
Independent Development 119 
 
 rived at the most diverse conclusions, from those 
 who maintain that there is no essential differ- 
 ence between Kant and Schiller at any point of 
 the latter's development, to those who find a 
 radical and fundamental divergence between the 
 two men's views from the outset, — a diver- 
 gence which results in the complete repudiation, 
 on the part of Schiller, of the moral point of 
 view, in the sense of Kant, and in the substi- 
 tution for this of a purely aesthetic ideal. The 
 present writer's own attitude has already been 
 indicated in the introductory chapter, and it 
 must be his task in the present chapter to jus- 
 tify this position by a careful comparison of 
 the different passages concerned. 
 
 The question is, to get the problem once 
 more clearly before us, does Schiller conceive 
 the progress of human development as passing 
 from the natural through the aesthetic to the 
 moral stage, that is, does he conceive the ees- 
 thetic condition as one in which man is freed 
 from the bonds of physical necessity, and thus 
 made capable of realizing his moral ideals, or 
 is the progress rather from the natural through 
 the moral stage to that final condition in which 
 man is not merely natural or merely moral, but 
 in which every part of his nature will have its 
 due.'' If we find that the question cannot be 
 answered one way or the other way without 
 qualification, the clear formulation of it will 
 
120 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 at least aid us in the reading of the passages 
 and in arriving at some sort of result. 
 
 The attitude of Schiller in Anmut und 
 Wurde is fairly clear and consistent, and will 
 furnish a starting-point for the investigation 
 of some of the later writings. One point of 
 importance, however, must be clearly grasped 
 at the outset, not only for the understanding 
 of Anmut und Wurde but for the correct inter- 
 pretation of passages in some of the other 
 writings with which we shall have to deal, and 
 that is that two distinct kinds of valuation of 
 human conduct must be recognized in Schiller, 
 one from the standpoint of morality and the 
 -other from the purely aesthetic standpoint. The 
 \ double demand which Schiller always makes of 
 I an act or a character is grounded upon the two 
 |fundamental traits, the artistic and the ethical, 
 ■running through his entire nature, to which I 
 have already adverted more than once. The 
 full recognition of this dualism in point of view 
 will help to clear up those passages in which 
 Schiller seems prepared to accept without qual- 
 ification the Kantian position that the only 
 proper motive for a moral act is respect for 
 the moral law, but in which he is no less intent 
 on demanding recognition for those inclinations 
 without which, as he somewhere says, the char- 
 acter can perform isolated moral acts, but can 
 never attain to complete moral perfection. 
 
I'ndependent Development 121 
 
 Man, tHat is, has other than merely moral in- 
 terests, and while for purposes of logical analy- 
 sis or theoretical discussion we may separate 
 man's moral interests from his esthetic or what 
 not, and pass judgment on an action or a char- 
 acter first from one point of view and then 
 from another, such a separation is never ac- 
 tually made in practice, and man has as much '^ 
 right to demand that an act shall satisfy his ; 
 aesthetic sense as that it shall measure up to the ; 
 ideals of morality. And his aesthetic sense is \ 
 never satisfied if the moral act is accomplished 
 only after a severe conflict and at the sacrifice 
 of a part of our entire nature. If such a strug- 
 gle is inevitable, the artist, at least, has a right 
 to demand that its ugly features and uncouth 
 traces shall be hidden from his view. This two- 
 fold attitude which the spectator may assume 
 toward human conduct is clearly illustrated by 
 the whole tenor of Schiller's writings, and is 
 explicitly recognized in more than one place. 
 So in Anmut und WUrde, after describing the 
 expression reason requires of the human fea- 
 tures as belonging to a moral being, he goes 
 on to say : " But man as phenomenon is at the 
 same time an object of sense, and when the 
 moral feeling is satisfied, the aesthetic sense will 
 not consent to a sacrifice of its own interests : 
 the agreement with an idea must not lessen the 
 beauty of the phenomenon. Thus, as much as 
 
122 The Philosophy of Schuxer 
 
 reason demands an expression of morality, just 
 as persistently does the eye demand beauty. 
 Inasmuch, then, as both these requirements, 
 though made by two distinct judgments, ad- 
 dress themselves to the same object, both must 
 be granted satisfaction by one and the same 
 -cause. The disposition of man which fits him 
 \best for fulfilling his mission as a moral being 
 must also permit an expression that will be most 
 advantageous to his beauty as a phenomenon. 
 (In other words, the aptitude of his moral ac- 
 ij;ivity ought to reveal itself by grace." ''^ 
 
 Another precaution may not be out of place 
 here, and may save us from much unnecessary 
 confusion. I have just alluded to the fact that 
 under conditions the moral struggle will be in- 
 evitable, and referred to the demands which the 
 spectator may, even then, make of the agent in 
 such a time of moral stress. Now a careful 
 discrimination must always be made between 
 those passages in which Schiller speaks of an 
 ideal which is suited to our present state and 
 which the conditions, as they exist here and 
 now, permit us to realize, and an ideal, on the 
 other hand, which man may approximate more 
 and more, but which, owing to the limitations 
 of human nature, is forever beyond the possi- 
 bility of complete attainment. The distinction 
 will be supported later by references to pas- 
 sages in point. It has been thought necessary 
 
l!NDEPENDENT DEVELOPMENT 123 
 
 to call attention to it explicitly at the outset, 
 for it is only by a clear apprehension of it that 
 we can hope to introduce some order and con- 
 sistency into what may seem at first sight a, 
 hopeless confusion and a fundamental contra- 
 diction in Schiller's writings. Simply to ig- 
 nore the difficulties, or to dismiss them by say- 
 ing that Schiller espoused and rejected the 
 Kantian doctrine in turn, at one time advoca- 
 ting a moral ideal and at another abandoning 
 it for the esthetic, is a quick and easy method, 
 but indolent and essentially false. For while 
 Schiller was not as systematic in his philo- 
 sophical writings as he might have been, he was 
 by no means a tyro in the discussion of the 
 problems which interested him ; and if he seems 
 to contradict his own conclusions in places, it 
 must be that he changes his point of view or 
 speaks in different senses ; and it becomes the 
 duty of the student to determine by a careful 
 study of the context what is the particular point 
 of view adopted, and to point out definitely 
 the sense in which the writer is speaking. 
 
 The complete blending of moral and aesthetic \ 
 interests, to which attention has just been 1 
 called, is nowhere seen more clearly than in 
 Anmut und Wiirde, to the examination of which 
 we must now address ourselves. Schiller was 
 just fresh from his investigation into the nature 
 of the beautiful, and had at length fixed upon 
 
124 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 the " objective principle upon which alljtaste 
 is founded," and "which Kant had racked his 
 "brain about without success." Beauty, he an- 
 ^nounces to Komer, December, 1792, is nothing 
 else than freedom-in-the-appearance {Freiheit 
 in der Erscheinung). And in succeeding letters 
 he attempts to apply his new discovery to an 
 exposition of the relation between the objects 
 of beauty in nature and art, and the aesthetic 
 -observer. In order to be beautiful the object 
 must not appear to suffer any determination 
 I from without, but must convey, by its form, a 
 i suggestion of freedom. A law indeed there 
 is, but it is the law of the object's own nature, 
 and each beautiful object thus represents, as it 
 were, a kingdom of freedom. A vase is beau- 
 tiful when it seems to suffer no restraint, but 
 in its gracefulness gives the appearance of a 
 free play of its own nature. A birch is beau- 
 tiful when it is slender and graceful, an oak 
 when it is rugged and bent: the sight of a 
 slender oak or a distorted birch could not but 
 offend the eye, because such shapes would be 
 contrary to the nature of the objects: they 
 would seem to be determined from without. 
 
 This theory he attempts to apply also to his 
 favorite subject of morality. The concept of 
 beauty is too general, however, when applied 
 to the human being, with his dual nature. We 
 must here distinguish between fixed beauty 
 
rNDEPENDENT DEVELOPMENT 125 
 
 which man has in common with other natural \ 
 objects, and mobile beauty, i. e., beauty of vol- > 
 untary movements " which express some senti- 
 ment of the moral order." Merely natural — i 
 movements like the undulations of the ringlets 
 of hair on a beautiful head cannot pretend to 
 it, nor even voluntary or instinctive movements, 
 so long as they are expressions of our merely 
 sensuous nature. It is this beauty of move- ' 
 ment, this graciousness of behavior, the out- | 
 ward expression of an inner harmony, that 1 
 Schiller calls Anmut. It is a personal quality, _^ 
 may be acquired or forfeited, and if sympa- 
 thetic, i. e., not directly aimed at, may become 
 the truest test of character and moral worth. 
 " Architectonic beauty does honor to the author i 
 of nature ; grace does honor to him who pos- 
 sesses it. The former is a gift, the latter a 
 personal merit." 
 
 So far Schiller has spoken of grace as a 
 quality of movement, and has contrasted it with 
 fixed or architectonic beauty, which is a prod- 
 uct of necessity. But he goes on to modify 
 his position somewhat, and grants that features 
 fixed and in repose may also possess grace. 
 This he explains, however, as due to the fre- 
 quent repetition of graceful movements, as the 
 durable traces or the crystallized form of habit- 
 ual beauty of conduct; arid since it thus repre- 
 sents the aptitvde of the soul for beautiful feel- 
 
126 The Philosophy or Schiller 
 
 ing, even esteems it, of all the species of grace, 
 the most precious.^® Schiller, we see here, is 
 approaching a favorite subject of his earliest 
 metaphysical speculations, and what he says 
 here about the beautifying or distorting effect 
 of the feelings and passions upon the physical 
 features affords an interesting parallel to the 
 remarks he made on the same subjects nearly 
 a decade before. 
 
 We are now fairly in possession of the crit- 
 ical apparatus with which Schiller met the 
 Kantian morality; and when he goes further 
 
 "^nd states explicitly that in order to have grace 
 or beauty of conduct no sort of restraint must 
 be exerted either by the will or by passion, by 
 spirit or by nature, one feels that the decisive 
 word has been spoken, and that it needs only 
 
 _ the moral to complete the tale. The action 
 which is prompted solely by respect for the 
 
 j moral law is good as far as it goes ; and there 
 
 ! are times when such action is demanded. But 
 it does not fulfil the conditions which Kant him- 
 
 / self demanded of moral activity, namely, that 
 it shall be self-determined. One kind of slavery 
 is just as humiliating as another, and perfect 
 freedom is found only when the act proceeds 
 from the character of man in its entirety: 
 from a character in which reason and sense, 
 inclination and law, are in perfect harmony. 
 The ideal moral organization is that in which 
 
Independent Development 127 
 
 nature is so thoroughly disciplined that it exe- 
 cutes with ease and precision those actions 
 which, if it were not so disciplined, reason 
 would, in its capacity as intelligence, be obliged 
 to demand. Inclination to duty, — that is the"| 
 heart of Schiller's ethics, and the gist of his ' 
 criticism of Kantian rigorism. _^' 
 
 SchiUer is never tired of trying to enforce 
 his favorite thought, and he repeats it in a 
 variety of ways and enforces it by a number of 
 telling illustrations. We can conceive of a 
 threefold relation, he says, in which the sensu- 
 ous part of man's nature can stand to his rea- 
 son. Man may either repress the demands of 
 sense in order to live conformably to his reason, 
 or he may subordinate the reasonable portion 
 of his being to the sensuous, and allow himself 
 to be swept away, like other merely natural 
 obj ects, by the force of physical necessity ; or, 
 finally, the inclinations may place themselves in 
 harmony with law, and man is one with him- 
 self.®" The beauty of conduct of which we are 
 in search is not found in the first case, for 
 where the sensuous nature offers an obstinate 
 and vigorous resistance it must be met by a 
 similar resistance on the part of spirit; but 
 under this stem discipline sensuousness will ap- 
 pear repressed, and the inner conflict will re- 
 veal itself outwardly by constraint. A condi- 
 tion of pure morality, then, cannot be favor- 
 
128 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 able to beauty of action, which nature cannot 
 produce except in so far as it is perfectly free ; 
 and we can never have grace of action so long 
 as there are visible the traces of the conflict 
 between moral freedom and the material con- 
 ditions. Still less do we find beauty of action 
 in the second case. Whereas under the rule of 
 reason the freedom of form was only restrained, 
 here it is completely crushed by the brutal 
 force of matter. Here the inner autonomy has 
 vanished, and every external trace of this au- 
 tonomy is entirely effaced. The grim realism 
 with which Schiller describes the wretched wit- 
 nesses of this physical and moral degradation, 
 — the dull, protruding eye, the relaxed lips and 
 stupid mouth, the gasping voice and irregular 
 breath, — reveals at once the medical student 
 and the sensitive observer to whom the human 
 form was the emblem and expression of all that 
 was most precious in life. " Man in this con- 
 dition not only revolts the moral sense . . . but 
 the (Esthetic sense also, which is not content 
 with mere matter, but seeks true pleasure in 
 form, will turn away from such a spectacle with 
 disgust." 
 
 " Of these two relations between the moral 
 nature of man and his physical nature, the 
 first makes one think of a monarchy where the 
 strict surveillance of the ruler restrains every 
 spontaneous movement ; the second resembles 
 
Independent Development 129 
 
 an ochlocracy in which the citizen, in refusing 
 obedience to his legitimate sovereign, finds he 
 has liberty quite as little as the human features 
 have beauty when the moral autonomy is sup- 
 pressed. . . . Now just as liberty is found; 
 between the extremes of legal oppression and 
 anarchy, so also we shall find beauty between 
 dignity, which bears witness to the domination 
 exercised by mind, and voluptuousness, which 
 reveals the domination of instinct." ^^ "^ 
 
 This comparison between the relation of the 
 parts of man's nature and the relation of the 
 governing and the governed in the state calls 
 to mind the almost identical comparison drawn" 
 by Plato. It may be interesting to call atten- 
 tion in this connection to the very close re- 
 semblance between Schiller's Anmut and Plato's 
 Justice, which is precisely that equable ar- 
 rangement or right relation of its single parts 
 or powers in which the completed perfection of 
 the soul consists. This anticipation by the 
 reason of the wants of nature, and by nature 
 of the laws of reason may be further illustrated 
 by the relation Leibniz maintains to exist be- 
 tween the governing monad and the governed, 
 soul and body, as we call them, in organic na- 
 ture. When we speak of a ruling or a govern- 
 ing monad, Leibniz warns us, the expression is 
 merely figurative, for by virtue of the auton- 
 omy of each monad, of whatever degree of de- 
 
130 The Philosophy of Schhxer 
 
 velopment, this dominating influence of the 
 ruling monad is purely ideal. We cannot speak 
 of rule or domination in the literal sense if the 
 obedience of the governed monads is, as indeed 
 it is, entirely spontaneous. " They do not 
 subordinate themselves to the ruling monad 
 because this forces them to do so, but because 
 their own nature compels them to do it." The 
 illustration by reference to Leibniz may not be 
 inapt, since we know that the Leibnizian meta- 
 physics exerted a strong influence over Schiller 
 especially during the earlier periods of his phil- 
 osophical activity, and we find distinct traces 
 of the Leibnizian view of nature as late as the 
 time of the Philosophioal Letters, in which 
 Raphael points out to Julius that the difference 
 between the human and the divine artist is that, 
 while the former governs despotically over his 
 material, the latter respects the individuality 
 and worth of every part of his handiwork, and 
 that " the respect with which he honors every 
 germ of energy even in the lowliest creature, 
 glorifies him just as much as the harmony of 
 the immeasurable whole." And when Raphael 
 adds that life and freedom characterize every 
 part of the divine creation, we feel that he could 
 hardly have expressed more clearly the central 
 motive of Schiller's ethical philosophy. It is 
 not until reason is so completely humanized 
 that it will render due respect to nature, and 
 
Independent Detelopment 131 
 
 nature is so completely rationalized that it will 
 execute spontaneously the behests of reason, 
 not till subjection, in short, gives place to per- 
 fect freedom, and man is at peace with himself, 
 that the ideal of humanity has been fully real- 
 ized. The conduct flowing from such a har-' 
 monious activity of all man's powers Schiller 
 calls beautiful conduct (die schone Sittlich- 
 keit), and the soul thus at one with itself the 
 
 beautiful soul {die schone Seele). i 
 
 The criticism of the Kantian morality with 
 which Schiller follows up the delineation of his 
 own ideal of " beautiful morality " is character- 
 istic, and shows in every line the great rever- 
 ence which he has for the master, a reverence 
 which doubtless kept him, at this time, from 
 going the full extent of his convictions in his 
 opposition to the Kantian rigorism. " In the 
 moral philosophy of Kant," he says, " the idea 
 of duty is expounded with a harshness which is 
 enough to frighten away the Graces, and could 
 easily tempt a feeble mind to seek for moral 
 perfection in the somber paths of an ascetic 
 and monkish life. However much the great 
 philosopher may have endeavored to guard 
 against this false interpretation, which must be 
 repugnant more than all else to so cheerful and 
 independent a mind, he has nevertheless given 
 occasion for it, as it seems to me, by placing 
 in such strict and harsh opposition the two 
 
132 The Philosophy of Schh^ee 
 
 principles which act upon the human will." 
 The meaning of Kant, Schiller thinks, is per- 
 fectly justifiable, and the conclusions which 
 Kant reached were reached on " purely objec- 
 tive grounds : " it was only when he came to the 
 exposition of the truths he had gained that he 
 appears to have been " guided by more sub- 
 jective maxims," which, Schiller believes, can 
 be easily explained by the circumstances of the 
 time. The shallow morality of the period, man- 
 ifesting itself under the forms of coarse ma- 
 terialism, perfectionism and sensualism, needed 
 some heroic remedy, and Kant applied it. It 
 was not ignorance that he had to deal with, but 
 perversion. " The cure required violent meas- 
 ures, not persuasion or flattery; and the more 
 violent the contrast between the truth and the 
 dominant maxims, the more he could hope to 
 provoke reflection. He was the Draco of his 
 time because his time seemed to him as yet un- 
 worthy and unprepared for a Solon. From 
 the sanctuary of pure reason he drew forth the 
 strange and yet so familiar moral law, and 
 troubled himself little to know whether there 
 were eyes too enfeebled to bear the bright- 
 ness." *^ 
 
 But what have the children of the house done, 
 he adds, that Kant should make provision only 
 for the valets? It is true, as Kant holds, that 
 inclination is often an uncertain guide, and may 
 
Independent Development 133 
 
 prompt to the evil as well as to the good. But 
 must we on that account reject it altogether? 
 " Because impure inclinations usurp the name 
 of virtue, is that a reason why the disinter- 
 ested feelings in the noblest heart should also 
 be placed under suspicion? Because the moral 
 weakling would make the law lax enough to 
 suit all his whims and caprices, there is no rea- 
 son to give it a rigidity which would turn the 
 most spontaneous expression of moral freedom 
 into slavery. Under this imperative of the law 
 the pure will is under no less restraint than the 
 depraved: man is accused and humbled, and 
 the law which ought to be the most sublime wit- 
 ness of our grandeur becomes the most crushing 
 argument for our frailty. The law which man 
 has imposed upon himself comes, by this im- 
 perative form, to have the aspect of a positive 
 law imposed from without, an appearance which 
 is not entirely unjustified by the alleged radical 
 tendency in human nature to act in opposition 
 to it." 
 
 The reference here is to Kant's doctrine of 
 radical evil, developed in a paper with that 
 caption published in the Berliner Monatsschrift, 
 April, 1792, and afterwards embodied in his 
 Religion irmerTialh der Grenzen der hlossen 
 Verwimft, published at Easter, 1793. Schiller, 
 it appears, read advance sheets of it as early 
 as February 28th, 1793. The work, he writes 
 
134 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 to Korner on that date, " has carried me away, 
 and I can scarcely await the remaining sheets. 
 One of the first principles laid down, however, 
 is revolting to my feelings, and will probably 
 be so to yours. He maintains an inborn pro- 
 pensity of the human heart to evil, which he 
 calls radical evil, and which is by no means to 
 be confounded with the solicitations of sense. 
 He places it above sense in the personality of 
 man, the seat of freedom. But you will read 
 it for yourself. It is impossible to refute his 
 arguments, however much one might desire to 
 do so." »3 
 
 The question whether reason as such can 
 supply a motive to action, — a question which 
 has come in for so large a share of attention 
 in modem ethical literature, and a consideration 
 of which would seem to be of first importance 
 in any discussion of the Kantian morality, — 
 was not overlooked by Schiller, though he does 
 not seem to have been sufficiently impressed with 
 its importance to discuss it at length. The will, 
 he remarks, stands in a more immediate rela- 
 tion to feeling than it does to cognition, and 
 it would be in a bad plight if it had to appeal 
 to pure reason in every case for guidance. At 
 any rate, he is almost ready to suspect the man 
 who can trust his instinct so little that he must 
 bring It before the bar of the moral law on 
 every occasion. The man whom we esteem most / 
 
Independent Development 135 
 
 highly is the man who can surrender himself 
 / to his impulse, and who need not be in constant 
 / fear of being led astray by it. " That he can 
 '-^o this is evidence that the two principles of his 
 nature have already attained that condition of 
 harmony which is the seal of completed human- 
 ity, and constitutes the beautiful soul." - 
 
 It would seem from the doubt which Schiller 
 casts upon the efficiency of reason when com- 
 pared with feeling to supply a motive for ef- 
 fective action, especially in times of moral 
 emergency, that he proposed his ideal of dispo- 
 sition and character in the interests of morality \ 
 as well as in the interests of aesthetics. Just as 
 that state is never secure which is based upon 
 force rather than upon liberal principles, so 
 morality is not secure so long as the triumph 
 of one faction of man's nature depends upon 
 the suppression of another. " It is only," he 
 says in a rather striking passage, " when man's 
 moral attitude results from the united action 
 of the two principles and thus becomes the ex- 
 pression of his entire humanity, — when it he- 
 comes his second nature, — that it is secure ; 
 for as long as the spirit employs violence, so 
 long must instinct use force to resist it. The 
 enemy who is only overpowered and cast down 
 can rise again, but the enemy who is reconciled 
 is truly vanquished." ** 
 
 As much, however, as Schiller is disposed to 
 
136 The Philosophy of Schillee 
 
 claim for the moral instinct and for beautiful 
 conduct on behalf of objective morality and in 
 the name of taste, he is never wilHng to allow 
 that any moral worth attaches to them. On 
 this point he and Kant are in complete agree- 
 ment. The phenomenal value of an act, its 
 value, that is, from the standpoint of the 
 aesthetic observer (and from the standpoint, 
 perhaps, of objective morality), may therefore 
 be in an inverse ratio to its moral value in the 
 sense of Kant. It is important to notice this, 
 for to misunderstand Schiller here would be not 
 only to do injustice to his position, but to mis- 
 understand his relation to the attitude of Kant. 
 And if a few passages occur which appear to 
 lend countenance to a contrary position, these 
 must be neglected, as being opposed to the plain 
 letter of many passages throughout the wri- 
 tings with which we are dealing.*^ Schiller 
 maintains, as was said at the outset, the Kant- 
 ian distinction between legal and moral, the only 
 difiPerence being that, for reasons already ad- 
 verted to, Schiller is inclined to rate legal con- 
 duct much more highly than Kant, from his 
 more restricted point of view, was enabled to do. 
 In thus waiving any claim to the value or 
 merit (^Verdienst) of an act when it appears 
 as the result of natural inclination or a good 
 disposition, and is judged independently of its 
 material consequences, Schiller is no doubt jus- 
 
Independent Development 137 
 
 tified by common usage. Just as we do not 
 say that a man has merited or earned external 
 possessions or personal talents which have come 
 to him through inheritance or as a gift of na- 
 ture, without any expenditure of energy on his 
 part, so we do not attribute merit, or, to use a 
 term with perhaps a still stricter signification, 
 and corresponding more nearly with the German 
 Verdienst, we do not attribute desert to an 
 action for the performance of which is required 
 no expenditure of energy or sacrifice on the 
 part of the agent. The double judgment which 
 we pass on conduct, first from the point of 
 view of the sacrifice involved or the energy ex- 
 pended in its production, second from the 
 point of view of its material consequences (a 
 judgment which, as has been shown, may be 
 still further complicated by sesthetic consider- 
 ations), finds an interesting parallel in econom- 
 ics where an object is valuated on the basis 
 (1) of the cost of production, or the effort or 
 sacrifice made for it, and (2) of its utiKty. It 
 is just on account of this constant association 
 between sacrifice and meritorious action that by 
 a common confusion of thought what is a neces- 
 sary means or a concomitant of the means often 
 comes to be regarded In the light of an end 
 worthy of pursuit for its own sake, and that 
 any action, If only It Involves sacrifice or ef- 
 fort. Is assumed to have moral value. Thus 
 
138 The Philosophy of S chiller 
 
 fasting, as Simmel points out,^® though orig- 
 inally adopted merely as a means to spiritual 
 ends, came as early as the time of Tertullian 
 to possess an independent religious value, and 
 self-denial and ascetic practices of all hinds, 
 because recurring as the constant element in 
 virtuous actions of the most various kinds, 
 have often been regarded as highly meritorious. 
 And when one reads Schiller's Wiirde der 
 Frauen, in which he contrasts the unconscious 
 grace, the beautiful harmony, of the character 
 of woman with the unruly and tempestuous 
 temper of the sterner sex, one is reminded that 
 the term virtuous, etymologically considered, 
 is perhaps more significant than might at first 
 thought be supposed. The conduct, at any 
 \rate, which is deemed virtuous in the sense of 
 jmeritorious by the moral judgment of to-day, 
 /though not distinctly associated with man, is 
 nevertheless that conduct which emerges, not 
 from the harmonious disposition, but from that 
 /conflict of opposing forces in which the manly 
 ; or heroic traits of humanity find their com- 
 pletest manifestation. 
 
 " After making the Kantian distinction be- 
 tween legal and strictly moral acts, and placing 
 himself in complete agreement, as he says, with 
 the rigorists in morality by denying feeling any 
 voice " in the sphere of pure reason," it seems 
 almost like taking back his own statement when 
 
Independent Development 139 
 
 he goes on to declare that the very feeling 
 which " can prove nothing regarding the moral- 
 ity of the act " is indispensable to the moral 
 perfection of man. " For man," he adds, " is 
 not intended to accomplish isolated moral acts, 
 but to be a moral being. It is not virtues that 
 are prescribed to him, but virtue, and virtue is 
 nothing else than inclination to duty." 
 
 The suggestion that a constitution of char- 
 acter which keeps man from performing moral 
 acts is yet indispensable for his complete moral- 
 ity, paradoxical as it may seem, is perhaps also 
 justified by common usage. Just as we do not 
 attribute desert to the performance of physical 
 feats by an athlete whose physical powers and 
 training enable him to accomplish them without 
 strain or a painful expenditure of energy, while 
 yet willing to assign a high degree of merit, 
 perhaps, to the athlete for having undertaken 
 the long series of tedious exercises which we 
 assume to have been necessary for arriving at 
 his present condition of physical excellence, so 
 likewise we do not commonly attribute a high 
 moral quality to those acts, during the time of 
 their performance, which we feel have been 
 " natural," and have involved little or no indi- 
 vidual cost, while at the time we value highly, 
 even aside from his material worth to society 
 or his assthetic significance, the person himself, 
 who embodies, as it were, and represents the 
 
140 The Philosophy of Schillee 
 
 long series of more or less heroic and disciplin- 
 ary acts which have made possible that ease and 
 grace of action which flows from a highly cul- 
 tivated moral disposition. It is this tendency 
 to value " virtues," i. e., isolated moral acts, 
 rather than " virtue " and personality, that 
 justifies in a way the complaint often heard by 
 the " beautiful " child or the good citizen, that 
 he is not appreciated as much as his meaner 
 brother or neighbor, whose virtues, like the 
 single stars, shine only the more brightly for 
 their isolation. It was the son, in the parable, 
 who had wasted his substance in riotous living 
 that received the ring and the robe and shoes 
 and ate of the fatted calf, while the son who 
 had served many years and had not at any time 
 transgressed had to content himself with those 
 slight tokens of affection which, though per- 
 haps more than making up for their slightness 
 by the frequency of their occurrence, were less 
 appreciated, no doubt, on account of their very 
 commonness. And when we are assured by the 
 sacred text that there shall be more joy in 
 heaven over one sinner that repents than over 
 ninety and nine just persons who need no re- 
 pentance, we understand that the rejoicing is 
 over the single act of repentance, and the future 
 conduct for which it is the guarantee, rather 
 than over the personality of the sinner, who 
 certainly cannot on any standard of valuation 
 
Independent Development 141 
 
 be esteemed more highly than ninety and nine 
 just persons who need no repentance. We 
 surely do not consider that in the long run we 
 raise ourselves in the esteem of others by plun- 
 ging into dissipation, though the disapproval 
 from which we suffer is to a certain extent re- 
 moved, and our loss of moral esteem to a de- 
 gree compensated for, by the rejoicing on the 
 occasion of our return to the moral fold. 
 
 However much verbal agreement there may 
 be between Schiller and Kant on the matter of 
 morality and legality, it is after all the differ- 
 ence between the two men that strikes the 
 reader as important, and this difference, broadly 
 stated, consists in the circumstance, as I con- 
 ceive the matter, that Kant was interested al- 
 most exclusively in " morality," while Schiller's 
 interest lay primarily in " legality." Kant 
 had regard for the subjective motive, the letter 
 and the form ; Schiller, for the material effect, 
 the spirit and the life. While Kant had un- 
 bounded confidence in the power of reason, and 
 was jealous of its prerogatives, regarding feel- 
 ing as an incompetent and dangerous guide to 
 the will, Schiller was rather inclined to doubt 
 the capacity of reason, considered in independ- 
 ence of the emotional nature, to furnish a suf- 
 ficient motive for conduct, and had unlimited 
 confidence, on the other hand, in the possibility 
 of the education of feeling to the point where \ 
 
142 The Philosophy of Schillee 
 
 the will might surrender itself completely to its 
 guidance, and have no occasion to fear for the 
 consequences. It was the " children of the 
 irouse " whom Kant had neglected for the valets, 
 those exquisite souls that have been purged of 
 fierce passions and conflicting interests, whose 
 quick and sensitive instincts shrink from the 
 coarse and unbeautiful in conduct, and furnish 
 guidance through those complex moral situa- 
 tions whose finer points reason is unable to dis- 
 cern, and law too cumbrous to decide ; for 
 whom, in short, duty has become a grateful 
 task: 
 
 "Glad hearts! without reproach or blot; 
 Who do thy work, and know it not:" 
 
 it was these who, after all, came in for the 
 largest share of Schiller's interest. 
 
 It is the beautiful soul that the poet cele- 
 brates in a number of poems whose dash and 
 finish bear witness to the enthusiasm with which 
 he contemplated this ideal of his poetic nature. 
 In the choice between reason and uncorrupted 
 feeling it was always the latter that received 
 Schiller's favor and support. " Know'st thou," 
 he warns the youth who is about to distrust his 
 heart and seek guidance of reason, 
 
 " Know'st thou what bars thy way? how dear the bar- 
 gain thou dost make 
 
 When but to buy uncertain good, sure good thou dost 
 forsake? 
 
Independent Development 143 
 
 Feel'st thou sufBcient strength to brave the deadliest 
 
 human fray — 
 When Heart from Reason — Sense from Thought, shall 
 
 rend themselves away? 
 
 Fly, if thou canst not trust thy heart to guide thee on 
 the way — 
 
 Oh! fly the charmed margin, ere the abyss engulf its 
 prey. 
 
 Round many a step that seeks the light the shades of 
 midnight close; 
 
 But in the glimmering twilight, see — how safely child- 
 hood goes ! " " 
 
 The complete blending of freedom and law 
 is symbolized in the well-known poem Der Tanz, 
 whose noble ease and smoothly flowing rhythm 
 is itself the best illustration of the ideal it 
 glorifies. The buoyant movement of the dance, 
 " like the skiff that softly rocks when silver 
 waves are fair," represents primarily the entire 
 domain of the fine arts, in which submission to 
 rule and glad freedom of expression are united 
 as in the playful movements of the dance forms. 
 And as in art we obey the law of nature with 
 gladness, so also should it be in conduct, which, 
 from one point of view, may be considered as 
 one of the fine arts, and not the least noble. 
 Perhaps the most significant of these poems, 
 from a philosophical standpoint, though less 
 perfect in workmanship than the piece just 
 mentioned, is Der Genius, at first perhaps more 
 appropriately called Natur und Schule. Can 
 knowledge only and the wooden systems, the 
 
144 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 question runs, lead to true peace? Must I mis- 
 trust impulse, the law which nature herself has 
 written in my bosom, unless it squares with the 
 rule, 
 
 " Till the school's signet stamp the eternal scroll. 
 Till in one mold some dogma hath confined 
 The ebb and flow, the light waves, of the mind? 
 Say thou, familiar to these depths of gloom, 
 
 Say — if life's comfort with yon mummies dwells ! 
 Say — and I grope — with saddened steps indeed — 
 But on, through darkness, if to Truth it lead ! " 
 
 Friend, the answer runs, you remember the 
 golden time 
 
 " When heavenlier shapes with man walked side by side. 
 And the chaste feeling was itself a guide 
 
 Then sense unerring — because unreproved — 
 True as the finger on the dial moved, 
 Half guide, half playmate, of earth's age of youth. 
 The sportive instinct of eternal truth." 
 
 But this golden time is gone, and desecrated 
 feeling is no more the voice of the gods. Na- 
 ture now yields her truth only to the inquirer 
 who seeks it with a pure heart. But, the genius 
 adds, if thou hast not lost thy guardian angel 
 from thy side, if thy heart's guileless childhood 
 can yet rejoice in sweet instinct with its warn- 
 ing voice, then go hence in thy innocence: 
 
 "Science can teach thee naught — she learns from thee! 
 
 From thine own self thy rule of action draw; 
 
 That which thou dost — what charms thee — is thy law.'' 
 
Independent Development 145 
 
 These thoughts are repeated in endless variety, 
 and may be found in many places, both in the 
 shorter poems and in the dramas. One or two 
 of the Votive Tablets may be reproduced in 
 conclusion. 
 
 For the following I have not found an ade- 
 quate translation, and therefore reproduce it 
 in the original: 
 
 " ijber das Herz zu siegen ist gross, ich verehre den Tap- 
 fern; 
 Aber wer durch sein Herz sieget, er gilt mir doch mehr.'' 
 
 From the last poem Schiller wrote, Die Huldi- 
 gung der Kimste: 
 
 " Doch Schon'res find' ich nichts, wie lang ich wahle, 
 Als in der schonen Form — die schone Seele." 
 
 But this ideal of completed humanity, we ; 
 learn from several very explicit statements, is 
 only a task, which is forever beyond the reach | 
 of perfect fulfilment. " It has indeed been pre- 
 scribed to man," he says at the beginning of 
 the second part of Avmut und Wilrde, — " to 
 bring about a complete union of his two na- 
 tures, and to form a harmonious whole, so as 
 to be able to act with his entire humanity. But 
 this beauty of character, the last fruit of his 
 humanity, is but an idea, to conform to which 
 he can strive with constant vigilance, but to 
 which he can with all his efforts never com- 
 pletely attain." 
 
146 The Philosophy of Schtt.t.kb 
 
 The reason for this lies in the natural limi- 
 tations of humanity incident to the dependence 
 of its existence upon natural conditions. Na- 
 ture, unwilling to entrust so momentous a mat- 
 ter as the preservation of the individual and 
 the race to man's doubtful intelligence, has 
 provided him with instinct which impels him, 
 by an almost inevitable necessity, to avert those 
 situations which threaten his existence, and to 
 seek those which make for his preservation and 
 well-being. And though it is the prerogative 
 and the glory of man to be able to rise superior 
 to his momentary desires, yet in its own sphere 
 feeling must always continue to hold powerful 
 sway, and to demand the recognition and re- 
 spect even of reason. The possibility, there- 
 fore, of a conflict between the law of spirit and 
 the law of nature is never entirely excluded. 
 When this conflict, however, occurs, when nature 
 takes the will by surprise, as it were, and tries 
 to force it to yield allegiance to her, the moral 
 character must manifest itself by its resistance, 
 and " in order to keep from being restrained 
 
 Tby instinct, must restrain the instinct itself." In 
 these cases beauty of action, which is impossible 
 when inclination and law are thus at war, rises 
 into grandeur or sublimity, and " dignity " is 
 
 I its expression in appearance. It is in these 
 times of stress that the diff^erence between 
 merely temperamental conduct and beautiful 
 
Independent Development 147 
 
 conduct clearly reveals itself. In the merely 
 temperamental character, in whom inclination 
 is on the side of duty simply because duty is 
 accidentally on the side of inclination, the will 
 will yield to the force brought to bear upon it 
 by sense, and if any sacrifice is to be made it 
 will itself be obliged to make it. The beautiful! 
 soul, on the other hand, which has merely en- 
 trusted sense, as it were, with the guidance of \ 
 conduct, will take back this trust the moment 
 nature seems inclined to abuse it ; sense, as the ! 
 lower term, must subordinate itself to reason, , 
 and beautiful action will rise to the sublime.** 
 Schiller speaks in places as if the union of 
 Antnut and Wiirde in the same person were the 
 mark of human perfection, and as if he pro- 
 posed this as the ideal of completed humanity. 
 So in Anmut imd Wiirde: "When grace and 
 dignity . . . are united in the same person 
 the expression of humanity would be completed 
 in him: such a person would stand justified in 
 the intelligible world and acquitted in the nat- 
 ural." *® So also in Uber das Erhdbene '" he 
 speaks as if the development of the ability to 
 act sublimely must be a part of aesthetic educa- 
 tion, as well as the development of the ability 
 to act in accordance with the demands of taste. 
 But the meaning we must attach to these pas- 
 sages, in the light of Schiller's other and ap- 
 parently contradictory utterances, is that along 
 
148 The Philosophy of Schillek 
 
 with the education of the natural instincts 
 there must go such an education of the moral 
 feelings that if nature should at any time fail 
 us, as it almost inevitably will in human expe- 
 rience, we may still have recourse to the impera- 
 tive of the moral law. It cannot be the task 
 of aesthetic education " to bring about a com- 
 plete union of man's dual nature " so that he 
 can act with his entire humanity, and, at the 
 same time, to develop " grace " and " dignity " 
 side by side ; and if Schiller speaks of the com- 
 plete fusion of man's natural and moral powers 
 and their due coordination, it may be, as the 
 mark of human perfection, he must speak of 
 human perfection in different senses. And this 
 indeed he does, as has been pointed out. The 
 difference is that between an absolute ideal, a 
 poet's dream, forever beyond the reach of real- 
 ization in consequence of the conditions of ex- 
 istence and the limitations of our humanity, 
 and an ideal, on the other hand, which lies 
 within man's possibilities, and the attainment 
 of which constitutes his highest trust. The 
 difference between the ideal and the actual de- 
 mand made upon humanity is clearly brought 
 out by placing side by side the passage in the 
 Esthetic Letters in which the author says that 
 " man must learn to desire more nobly in order 
 that he may have no need to act sublimely," 
 arid the passage in Votixie Tablets to the effect 
 
Independent Development 149 
 
 that if man cannot desire in accordance with the 
 demands of beauty he will nevertheless have it 
 within his power to act in accordance with 
 reason, and so do in his capacity as spirit what 
 lies beyond the power of his humanity. 
 
 The poetic expression of this human ideal, 
 as we may call it, is found in the poem Die 
 Fiihrer des Lehens, which on account of its 
 brevity may be reproduced in full: 
 
 " Two genii are there, from thy birth through weary life 
 to guide thee; 
 
 Ah, happy when, united both, they stand to aid, beside 
 thee! 
 
 With gleesome play, to cheer the path, the one comes 
 blithe with beauty — 
 
 And lighter, leaning on his arm, the destiny and duty. 
 
 With jest and sweet discourse, he goes unto the rock sub- 
 lime. 
 
 Where halts above the eternal sea, the shuddering child 
 of Time. 
 
 The other here, resolv'd and mute, and solemn claspeth 
 thee. 
 
 And bears thee in his giant arms across the fearful sea. 
 
 Never admit the one alone ! — Give not the former guide 
 
 Thy honor — nor unto the last thy happiness confide ! " 
 
 It remains to speak briefly of Schiller's 
 rather famous theory of aesthetic education by 
 means of which, according to Schiller's sanguine 
 view, man's complete culture was to be achieved. 
 The education of man through the instrumen- 
 tality of art was a favorite subject of reflec- 
 tion, as has been seen, from his earliest writings 
 to the last. It was touched upon in the school 
 essays, discussed rather elaborately in the es- 
 
150 The Philosophy of Schillee 
 
 says on the influence of the stage, and given 
 poetic expression in Die JCiimstler, which has 
 been justly ranked among Schiller's noblest 
 poems. The subject is taken up again in a 
 more extended way in the Letters on Msthet'ic 
 Education, pubhshed in 1795. It would be im- 
 possible in the short space at our disposal to 
 give an adequate idea of the wealth of this,' 
 perhaps the most original and interesting of all 
 Schiller's prose writings, and we shall have to 
 content ourselves with a brief examination of 
 the subject Schiller proposes to discuss, leaving 
 aside the many pregnant observations on poht- 
 ical and purely esthetic subjects as being be- 
 yond our immediate interest. The truth is that 
 while the Letters cover over a hundred pages, 
 Schiller never fairly faces his problem, and he 
 discusses it even more scantily than it deserves. 
 The purely sensuous condition, we are told, 
 is one of restraint, and it becomes the first care 
 of the moral pedagogue to break the power of 
 sense, so that man may be enabled to fulfil his 
 vocation as a moral being. The instrument or 
 agency by which this is accomplished is art. 
 " It is one of the most important objects of 
 culture to subject man in his purely physical 
 existence to the influence of form ... to make 
 him esthetic, because it is only from the aes- 
 thetic condition, not from the physical, that 
 man can pass into a state of morality." ®^ Not 
 
Independent Development 151 
 
 that the aesthetic condition is of any positive 
 and direct significance either for knowledge or 
 for the will : it is perfectly indifferent and fruit- 
 less ; it discovers not a single idea and helps to 
 fulfil not a single duty. All it does is to give 
 man back to himself, as it were, to restore his 
 freedom so that he can make of himself what 
 he will. In the aesthetic condition, as Schiller 1 
 likes to express it, man is zero, but he is thus 
 prepared to become all things ; and small as 
 the gift may seem that art bestows on man, it' 
 is really infinite. In this condition man ita void 
 of interest {i/nteresselos), in the language of 
 Kant ; both the sensuous and the moral needs 
 are cancelled, for the time being, and the tran- 
 sition from the physical to the moral state thus 
 becomes a possibility. Kant,'^ too, regarded 
 the new birth, the transition, that is, from na- 
 ture to morality, as an inexpHcable act of the 
 intelligible character. But the aid which Kant i 
 sought in religion Schiller sought to supple- j 
 ment by invoking the agency of art; it will be! 
 remembered that in the essays on the moral in- 
 fluence of the stage Schiller placed art, relig- 
 ion and law side by side, and found in art, even 
 then, an instrument superior to the other two 
 in accomplishing the work of regenerating man. 
 It may be doubted, if we emphasize too much 
 the passages in which Schiller dwells upon the 
 merely negative character of the aesthetic con- 
 
152 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 dition, whether he could claim for art a place 
 equal or even superior to religion as an instru- 
 ment of moral education. The claims of relig- 
 ion and the claims Schiller makes for art are 
 indeed very similar. Religion,®^ too, claims to 
 reduce the merely " natural " inclinations of 
 man to a minimum, so that his " spiritual " 
 nature may have an opportunity, as it were, 
 to assert itself. But it claims more than this 
 merely negative merit: whatever may be 
 thought of the religious sanctions as perma- 
 nent and indispensable adjuncts to the machin- 
 ery of moral education, there is no question 
 that they have furnished important positive 
 motives for morality in the past, and will doubt- 
 less continue to do so among certain large 
 classes of religious persons for some time to 
 come. At any rate, whether the dynamic is to 
 come from religion or what not, it is certain 
 that man's morality will not be secured by re- 
 ducing his desiderative activity to a minimum 
 so that the moral law may have an opportunity 
 to exert its power. This is, to say the least, 
 an unfortunate way of putting the matter. 
 SchiUer is never at his best in the more theo- 
 retical formulation of his principles, and we 
 may feel free, we take it, since Schiller has him- 
 self put the matter in different ways, not to 
 insist unduly upon the passages in the Esthetic 
 Letters just adverted to. It is not the intention 
 
Independent Development 153 
 
 of the poet, we must say in the light of all his 
 previous philosophical endeavors, to subtract 
 from human nature, but rather to transform 
 and utilize what is furnished and at hand. And 
 this is what aesthetic education, according to the 
 whole tenor of Schiller's philosophy, tends to 
 do. The_fu nction of art as an instrument of 
 education at first appears as in no wise different 
 from that of religion: its appeal, as Schiller~ 
 put the matter in the essays on the moral in- 
 fluence of the stage, is largely to man's hopes 
 and fears: and it accomplishes its purpose thg.. 
 more perfectly because it employs not dogmas 
 whose truth is questionable, or sanctions which 
 are too far removed in the future to have any 
 large degree of moral influence, but because it 
 brings before men's very eyes, in the living 
 images of sense, the charm of virtue and the 
 hideousness of vice, and presents in concrete 
 form the natural rewards and punishments 
 which these entail. This crass and rather un- 
 characteristic way of stating the case is no- 
 where found, so far as I have seen, in Schiller's 
 later writings, where he tends rather to speak 
 of the refining influence of aesthetic objects 
 upon man's nature, so that the unbeautiful, or, 
 what always means the same thing for Schiller, 
 the immoral, will lose its attraction for him, 
 and the beautiful or moral will have more pow- 
 erful sway. Bildung, that is, is simply Um- 
 
154 The Philosophy of Schillee 
 
 bUdung, education is transformation, or a re- 
 organization, we might say, of man's motives. 
 This is certainly the least that Schiller would 
 say. So far from limiting man's desiderative 
 and rational life and reducing him to a condi- 
 tion of pure passivity, it is rather the function 
 of art to develop every part of man's nature 
 to its utmost extent, so that he may live not 
 less but more: his sensuous nature, as the poet 
 rather strikingly puts it in one place, that he 
 may apprehend {ergreifen) more, and his ra- 
 tional that he may comprehend (begreifen) 
 more. 
 
 Precisely how this refinement and develop- 
 ment of man's nature is accomplished by art 
 Schiller thought it unnecessary, or, what seems 
 more likely from his own confession about the 
 difficulty of writing those portions of the Let- 
 ters in which he approaches the problem, found 
 it difficult to state. He has thrown out sugges- 
 tions in other parts of his writings which may 
 aid us in forming some sort of idea how the 
 matter presented itself to his mind, and which 
 may accordingly be brought together in this 
 place. We have found him emphasizing ( 1 ) the 
 importance of the relaxation of man's powers, 
 especially after having been one-sidedly em- 
 ployed; and this relaxation, he conceived, was 
 afforded in its purest form in aesthetic contem- 
 plation, where all the parts of man's nature 
 
Independent Development 155 
 
 receive their due, as in play. (2) Art, espe-~ 
 cially in tragic situations, affords an oppor- ) 
 tunity for the exercise of man's moral powers, ' 
 particularly, which may thus be trained and I 
 strengthened. (3) It was Schiller's view thatJ 
 a condition of happiness or contentment is in 
 general conducive to that physical and spiritual 
 well-being which is an indispensable requisite 
 for the fullest moral life, and this condition of 
 physical well-being and spiritual exaltation, we 
 may imagine him to say, it is at least one of 
 the functions of art to induce. To these gen- 
 eral propositions, I suppose, no serious objec- 
 tion will be made, if only their importance is 
 not exaggerated. The influence upon conduct 
 of aesthetic habituation, as we may call it, or 
 the development of taste through the contem- 
 plation of objects of aesthetic value, will also, 
 perhaps, not be questioned. It is no doubt due 
 to the more refined esthetic sensibilities of the 
 Greeks that they never descended to those 
 depths of moral degradation into which the 
 coarser nature of the Romans permitted the 
 latter to fall. 
 
 Nor is it necessary that the moral influence 
 of taste be a merely negative or restraining 
 one: it is possible to conceive that the aesthetic 
 nature may be so thoroughly developed and 
 completely refined that " beautiful action," in 
 the sense of Schiller, those more or less typical 
 
156 The Philosophy of Schillee 
 
 moral situations which satisfy the moral de- 
 mand, may exercise a strong and positive influ- 
 ence over the agent. Just as the moral impera- 
 tive comes to exercise greater and greater in- 
 fluence over us as moral education proceeds, 
 impelling us not merely to recognize an act as 
 moral, but also to do it, so the aesthetic impera- 
 tive, as we may call it, may develop sufficient 
 dynamic, as aesthetic education proceeds, to 
 impel us not only to acknowledge conduct as 
 beautiful, but also to realize it, in some degree, 
 by our own efforts. The two imperatives doubt- 
 less combine in determining the actual conduct 
 of the average moral person at any stage of 
 his cultural development. The moral influence 
 of the products of the religious imagination, 
 we may say, in so far as they do not appeal 
 merely to the instinct of fear, is due almost 
 entirely to the aesthetic elements they contain. 
 Indeed, it is hard for one to see how it could 
 be otherwise, if one accepts the view that a 
 large part of the images and ideals of the re- 
 ligious imagination are but the crystallization 
 and ideal construction of those portions of 
 human experience which have stirred most pro- 
 foundly the emotional nature. 
 
CHAPTER Vin 
 
 THE EELATION OF SCHILLEE TO POST - KANTIAN 
 IDEAXISM 
 
 The position of Schiller in the history of 
 modern ethics and aesthetics has often been ex- 
 plained by philosophical writers, and his solid 
 merits in these fields may be said to be to-day 
 generally recognized. In the philosophy of 
 art, his theory of the esthetic state as one in 
 which the various powers of man's nature come 
 into spontaneous and balanced play, his defini- 
 tion of beauty as freedom-in-the-appearance, 
 his ethical concept of the beautiful soul {die 
 schone Seele) in which the harsh opposition be- 
 tween inclination and duty is resolved, and man 
 is at peace with himself, his theory of the func- 
 tion of art in moral culture, — these and other 
 characteristic ideas have assured Schiller an 
 honorable place in the history of modem phi- 
 losophy. Nowhere is Schiller's historical im- 
 portance more dramatically displayed than in_ 
 his criticism of the Kantian ethics. His lasting 
 merit in this connection is that he reassigned 
 157 
 
-r 
 
 158 The Philosophy of ScnnxER 
 
 I to desire a central place in the moral life: de- 
 sire, not in the sense of an isolated and unbri- 
 dled impulse, seeking satisfaction in the nearest 
 way, but desire chastened and rationalized, i. e., 
 taking its place in a universe of desire, whose 
 object will be a moral object just in proportion 
 as the {esthetic and social culture of the indi- 
 vidual has been deepened and completed. A 
 man is moral, not in proportion as he has suc- 
 ceeded in defeating impulse in obedience to 
 reason, as Kant seemed to hold, but rather as 
 he has rationalized and refined impulse, which 
 thereupon has unrestricted play. Not inclina- 
 tion and duty, but inclination to duty, is the 
 ideal constitution of man. " Even in the purest 
 manifestation of the divine part of his nature," 
 Schiller says in an oft-quoted passage, " man 
 must not leave the sensuous behind. He must 
 not found the triumph of the one upon the sup- 
 pression of the other. Only when action flows 
 from his entire humanity as the result of the 
 united action of both principles, when it has 
 become second nature to him, is his morality 
 secure." ®* Thus is the autonomy of the moral 
 life established. " An enemy who is only over- 
 powered and cast down can rise again, but the 
 enemy who is reconciled is truly vanquished." 
 The relation of Schiller to the more strictly 
 metaphysical views of Kant and his successors, 
 however, is a subject to which only scant atten- 
 
Post-Kaktian Idealism 159 
 
 tion has been given by historians of philosophy, 
 and which is frequently ill understood or en- 
 tirely misapprehended.^® There are two rea- 
 sons for this. In the first place, Schiller's inter- 
 est in metaphysical questions was entirely sub- 
 ordinate to his interest in ethical and aesthetical 
 problems. Even in his early writings, where 
 the metaphysical interest is strong, the human 
 bearings of metaphysical problems are almost 
 invariably in the background of his conscious- 
 ness, and are often explicitly traced out. In the 
 later periods of his thought, his theoretical re- 
 flections centered more and more around those 
 social and hxunan problems with which as a poet 
 he was primarily concerned, — the problems of 
 the relation of the individual to society, of 
 beauty and duty, of freedom and necessity, of 
 art and moral culture. 
 
 In the second pla,ce, Schiller's metaphysical 
 views, in so far as he can be said to have held 
 metaphysical views in any serious way, did not 
 constitute a clear development upon those of 
 Kant, as did his ethical and assthetic theories. 
 The line of philosophical progress doubtless lay 
 in the direction of absolute idealism. One of 
 the central problems of post-Kantian metaphys- 
 ical and epistemological speculation was to in- 
 troduce unity into the Kantian system by the 
 expulsion or the assimilation of Kant's thing- 
 in-itself, which, to use the striking word of 
 
160 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 Hegel, hovered like a pale ghost about the 
 Kantian system. To this end the philosophical 
 efforts of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were ahke 
 directed. But with this main movement of 
 post-Kantian philosophy, as I shall seek to 
 show, Schiller was never in any significant way 
 identified. 
 
 Whether Schiller remained to the end a true 
 Kantian in his metaphysical views, or whether 
 he should rather be classed with the post-Kant- 
 ians, is a problem for the solution of which 
 materials in the shape of systematic philosoph- 
 ical writings from Schiller's hand are unfortu- 
 nately rather meager, the Letters on Esthetic 
 Education having been partly worked out be- 
 fore Fichte's influence upon Schiller made it- 
 self distinctly felt. The fact that Schiller had 
 been for three years almost exclusively occupied 
 with the study of Kant, and that the period of 
 his active philosophical study and productivity 
 was drawing to a close, is not without interest 
 in the present connection. 
 
 In the absence of a large amount of sys- 
 tematic material upon the basis of which to 
 estimate Fichte's influence upon Schiller, the 
 epistolary literature of the period becomes of 
 special significance. There are a number of 
 letters which are of particular interest not only 
 because they throw light upon the personal re- 
 lations between Fichte and Schiller, but also 
 
Post - Kantian Idealism 161 
 
 because they contain passages of first impor- 
 tance for the determination of Schiller's posi- 
 tion on some of the fundamental problems of 
 German ideahsm. The most important of these 
 letters, to enumerate them together, are a letter 
 from Schiller to Korner of June 12, 1794, one 
 by Humboldt to Schiller of September 22, 1794, 
 one by SchiUer to Goethe of October 28, 1794, 
 one by Schiller to Hoven of November 21, 1794, 
 and finally the correspondence between Schiller 
 and Fichte of the summer of 1795, especiisilly 
 the letter from Schiller to Fichte, of June 24. 
 Schiller had met Fichte at Tubingen in the 
 early summer of 1794, when Fichte was on his 
 way to Jena where he was to succeed to the chair 
 of philosophy at the university vacated by 
 Reinhold's removal to the University of Kiel. 
 Their acquaintance became closer through their 
 subsequent professional and personal associa- 
 tion at Jena, where Fichte became one of the 
 contributors to Schiller's newly established lit- 
 erary periodical, the Horen. That Schiller 
 read the major part of Fichte's writings at this 
 time, including his political tracts, the Kritik 
 aller Offenbarung, Uber den Begriff der Wissen- 
 schaftslehre, the Grundlage der gesammten Wis- 
 senschaftslehre, and the lectures, fiber die Be- 
 stimmung des Gelehrten, all of which were pub- 
 lished in 1793 and 1794, is put beyond ques- 
 tion by various references in Schiller's corre- 
 
162 The Philosophy of Schillee 
 
 spondence and by clear traces of the influence 
 of these works upon the political ideas, particu- 
 larly, and upon the general terminology of the 
 first two series of Schiller's ^Esthetic Letters. 
 The high respect which Fichte's genius inspired 
 in Schiller is clearly shown in Schiller's letter to 
 Korner of June 12, 1794. " Fichte is a most 
 interesting acquaintance," he writes, " more, 
 however, on account of his teachings themselves 
 than his manner. He is doubtless a man of 
 great promise for philosophy." ^® In the letter 
 to Hoven of November 21, 1794), he is still 
 more generous in Fichte's praise. " Since I 
 have been in Jena I have been studying Kant- 
 ian philosophy again, and have been very happy 
 in it. Fichte interests me also. He is the au- 
 thor of a new system of philosophy which is 
 built upon Kant's and confirms Kant, but which 
 contains much that is new and great in its form. 
 He will doubtless arouse much controversy, but 
 his superior genius will carry everything before 
 it, for he is surely after Kant the greatest 
 speculative intellect of this century.®'' 
 
 That Fichte reciprocated the high regard 
 which Schiller expressed for him is indicated 
 by a letter from Humboldt to Schiller which is 
 of the greatest interest to the student of the 
 relation between Fichte and Schiller, not so 
 much because it shows the high esteem in which 
 Fichte held Schiller during the first part of the 
 
Post - Kantian Idealism 163 
 
 Jena period, but because it indicates unmis- 
 takably the view which Fichte himself took of 
 Schiller's relation to the Kantian and post- 
 Kantian philosophy at this time. " I had an 
 interesting conversation with Fichte," writes 
 Humboldt ; '^ " among other things we talked 
 about yourself. He expects a great deal for 
 philosophy from you. The only thing which 
 your system needs, according to him, is unity, 
 a unity which doubtless exists in your feeling, 
 but which you have as yet not incorporated into 
 your system. If you could only achieve that, 
 you would inaugurate a new epoch in philoso- 
 phy." The unity, of course, which Fichte had 
 in mind could, according to Fichte's view, be 
 attained only by the abandonment of the Kant- 
 ian dualism between subject and object, a dual- 
 ism to which Schiller had unequivocally com- 
 mitted himself, and to which he continued to 
 adhere, and this separated Schiller once and for 
 all from the great movement of philosophical 
 criticism and construction known as post 
 Kantian idealism. " 
 
 If Fichte's testimony as to Schiller's philo- 
 sophical position were not decisive, Schiller's 
 own utterance on the matter in the well known 
 letter to Goethe of October 28, 1794, should 
 establish this position beyond question. After 
 referring to the Kantian spirit pervading the 
 first series of Esthetic Letters, which had just 
 
164 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 been completed, he expresses his conviction that 
 the fundamental principles of the Kantian phi- 
 losophy, tacitly recognized from the very be- 
 ginning of human thought, must ever remain 
 unassailable, which is more, he adds, than can 
 "he said of the Fichtean system, according to 
 which the ego is creative, and includes the 
 _whole of reality within itself. " The world is 
 a sort of ball, which the ego pitches into space 
 only to catch it again! This is the declaration 
 of divinity which we have been expecting." '" 
 The passage is of the greatest interest as indi- 
 cating clearly the fundamental philosophical 
 difference between the two men. The motive of 
 i Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre from its first incep- 
 I tion was the refutation of " dogmatism," the 
 ) standpoint according to which experience is 
 I explained as partly, at least, the product of the 
 \_non-ego, the thing-in-itself. But Schiller, both 
 in his earlier philosophical period, and at the 
 height of his speculative activity, never aban- 
 doned the presupposition of an extra-mental 
 object, the material of sense experience, and 
 the condition of thought and will. 
 
 As the aesthetic theories of Fichte and Schil- 
 ler are intimately bound up with their meta- 
 physical views, we are at once prepared for a 
 certain amount of divergence in their aesthetic 
 opinions. In this connection the correspond- 
 ence between Schiller and Fichte during the 
 
Post - Kantian Idealism 165 
 
 summer of 1795 is of special importance. 
 Fichte had sent Schiller, at the latter's request, 
 a paper, tjher Geist und Buchstab in der Phir 
 losophie,^''^ for publication in the Horen. 
 Schiller understood the article to be meant as a 
 caricature and a refutation of his own Esthetic 
 Letters, and returned the paper to Fichte, ac- 
 companied by a letter in which he criticized 
 both the form and the contents of the Fichte 
 production. The somewhat acrimonious corre- 
 spondence which followed is of considerable 
 historical importance, inasmuch as it reveals 
 not only certain theoretical differences between 
 the two men, but led to an estrangement be- 
 tween them, which, aggravated by a number of 
 other incidents, prevented any close intimacy in 
 after years.-'"^ 
 
 A point of fundamental difference arises in 
 connection with the analysis of human nature 
 with a view to assigning the place of the aes- 
 thetic impulse among the various powers of the 
 soul, an analysis which yields, in Fichte, a pri- 
 mary impulse of self-activity (Grundtrieb der 
 Selbstthatigkeit) of which the three impulses7| 
 the noetic, which seeks to determine the truth | 
 of presentations, the practical, which seeks to '( 
 realize presentations, and the aesthetic, which I 
 finds an interest in presentations for their own I 
 sake, are only special or subordinate manifestar_j 
 tions. Now the material for this general im- 
 
166 The Philosophy or S chiller 
 
 pulse of self-activity, Fichte contends, is not a 
 given, extra-mental, object, the condition of 
 presentations, as some philosophers erroneously 
 maintain, but is immanent in the impulse itself. 
 It is, in fact, determined by nothing except it- 
 self. Schiller's psychological analysis yields, as 
 is well known, two irreducible impulses, the ma- 
 terial and the formal (^Stofftrieb and Form- 
 trieb), both, however, implying the existence of 
 an extra-mental object, which acts as the con- 
 dition for their activity. To the material im- 
 ' pulse, SchiUer complains particularly,^"^ Fichte 
 accords no recognition. The fundamental dis- 
 agreement between the two men suggested in 
 the letters above presents itself here in another 
 connection. Fichte conceives of matter as self- 
 limitation, a limitation immanent in the impulse 
 of self-activity itself; Schiller, in thoroughly 
 Kantian style, conceives it as an external limit 
 in relation to which alone the self can find the 
 condition for its activity. 
 
 Fichte's discussion of the third of his special 
 impulses, the aesthetic, its independence of 
 noetic and practical interests and motives, and 
 its freedom from desire, presents a striking 
 resemblance to the conception of Kant and 
 Schiller, as does also the doctrine developed in 
 Fichte's Sittenlehre, concerning assthetic educa- 
 tion. These special aesthetic doctrines, interest- 
 ing as a comparative study of them would be, 
 
Post - Kantian Idealism 167 
 
 do not, however, concern us further, as they 
 throw little additional light upon the meta- 
 physical relations of Schiller to post-Kantian- 
 ism, which we are here seeking to determine. 
 
 The view of the philosophical relations of 
 Schiller to post-Kantianism developed here is 
 apparently contradicted by a remarkable pas- 
 sage in Hegel, to which Mr. Bosanquet has 
 called particular attention in his History of 
 Msthetics}^^ "It is Schiller, then," says 
 Hegel, " to whom we must give credit for the 
 great service of having broken through the 
 Kantian subjectivity and abstraction of 
 thought, and of having ventured to go quite 
 beyond it, by intellectually apprehending unity 
 and reconciliation as the truth, and by making 
 them real through the power of art. Now thS 
 unity of the universal and particular, of free- 
 dom and necessity, of the spiritual and the 
 natural, which Schiller scientifically conceived 
 as the principle and essence of art, and unwear- 
 iedly strove to call to life by art and aesthetic 
 culture, was afterwards, under the name of the 
 " Idea," made the principle of knowledge and 
 existence, and pronounced the sole truth and 
 reality. It was by this conception that science 
 attained in ScheUing its absolute standpoint." 
 Credit is due to Tomaschek,^"* however, for 
 having shown that Hegel's interpretation of 
 certain passages in Schiller was based upon an 
 
J 
 
 168 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 imperfect acquaintance with Schiller's thought, 
 an interpretation based upon a superficial read- 
 ing of the Msthetic Letters, mainly the fourth. 
 It is presumably unnecessary to treat exhaust- 
 ively what was probably a mere misconception 
 on Hegel's part, and it will perhaps suffice to 
 state that Hegel's error consists in interpret- 
 ing as a metaphysical theory of reality Schil- 
 ler's notion of the unity of the spiritual and the 
 natural, the universal and the particular, which 
 was intended by Schiller to be merely an ethical 
 precept or ideal. The organization in man of 
 the rational and the sensuous, which formed 
 such a striking part of Schiller's ethical 
 thought, is falsely taken by Hegel to be the 
 identity of the ideal and the real. These two 
 elements, however, are held in strict separation 
 by Schiller, and Hegel's criticism of Kant, that 
 the latter had not transcended the opposition 
 of subjective thought and objective reality, ap- 
 plies to Schiller as fully as it does to Kant. 
 
 That the notion of unity and reconciliation 
 was to Schiller merely one of anthropological 
 and ethical significance, an Idee der Menscliheit, 
 is further shown by the fact, already referred to 
 in the preceding chapter, that it is conceived by 
 Schiller not as an actual condition, but rather 
 as an ideal to be striven for, an ideal which art 
 might be instrumental in aiding to reaKze more 
 and more completely. The ideal of a completed 
 
Post - Kantian Idealism 169 
 
 humanity is, indeed, forever beyond the reach 
 of human fulfilment. " It is indeed demanded 
 of man," he says in Anmut und Wiirde, " to 
 bring about a complete union of his two natures, 
 and to form an harmonious whole, so as to act 
 with his entire humanity. But this beauty of 
 character, the last fruit of his humanity, is but 
 an idea, for the realization of which he may 
 strive with constant vigilance, but which with 
 all his efforts he can never completely attain." 
 And again, in the /Esthetic Letters: " This re- 
 ciprocal relation between the two impulses (the 
 material and the formal) is indeed only a task 
 of reason, which man is able to accomplish only 
 in the perfection of his being. It is in the 
 strictest signification of the term the idea of his 
 humanity, an infinite goal to which he may ap- 
 proach nearer and nearer, in the progress of 
 time, but without ever reaching it." ^'^^ 
 
 That the above is probably the correct view 
 of the real relation of Schiller to post-Kantian 
 idealism may be seen from the following pas- 
 sage taken from one of his letters to Hum- 
 boldt written in 1805, in which he expresses his 
 fidelity to the Kantian philosophy, and his lack 
 of sympathy with its subsequent developments. 
 " Speculative philosophy," he says, " if it ever 
 attracted me, has disgusted me with its empty 
 forms ; I found no living springs and nothing 
 to nourish me on its barren plain ; but the deep 
 
170 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 fundamental ideas of the idealistic philosophy 
 are an abiding treasure, and, if only on their 
 account, we must count ourselves happy to 
 have lived in this age." 
 
 It is hardly necessary, after all that has 
 been said, to dwell upon the merits and short- 
 comings of the philosophy we have endeavored 
 to outline in the various stages of its develop- 
 ment. That Schiller was not a systematic 
 thinker those who have tried most diligently to 
 follow his lines of thought have doubtless had 
 the best opportunity to find out. But it is not 
 always true that the thinker who gives himself 
 up most completely to system will have the 
 truest insight, as the philosopher whom Schiller 
 found it necessary to criticize abundantly illus- 
 trates. With a power of logical analysis and 
 a love for abstraction such as perhaps no other 
 man has ever possessed, Kant divided and sub- 
 divided to a degree such that it took a genera- 
 tion of thinkers to weld together and infuse 
 life into the reality which he had broken up 
 and left lying in fragments, only externally 
 and mechanically related to each other. Now 
 it is the main merit of Schiller (1) that he 
 saw, perhaps more clearly than anyone else in 
 his time, that human nature, at least, in which 
 he was mainly interested, was not a mere ag- 
 gregate of parts, a house divided against itself. 
 
Post - Kantian Idealism 171 
 
 but an organic whole, and that he attempted 
 to base ethics not on this or that part or power 
 of the whole, but upon human nature is its en- 
 tirety; (2) that he viewed morality not as 
 something complete or static, but as a slow 
 growth, influenced by and bound up with the 
 broader stream of natural and historical evolu- 
 tion, directed more or less consciously, of 
 course, by human education. He emphasized 
 (3) the possibility of this moral education 
 through the refinement of man's aesthetic nature 
 by means of the objects of aesthetic apprecia- 
 tion, and he himself became a distinguished 
 leader in moral and political reform by the 
 products, not often surpassed in imaginative 
 sweep and artistic finish, of his poetic activity. 
 But if Schiller still belabors the reader with a 
 cumbrous and pedantic vocabulary, and often 
 struggles helplessly in the meshes of certain 
 Kantian distinctions which do not any longer 
 engage the interests of educated men, if he still 
 goes back to the water-tight compartments of 
 the human mind, after the manner of his school, 
 or believes in idyllic states of nature in a far- 
 away past that our larger historical knowledge 
 has taught us to put by as poetic fictions, we 
 must not let his faults blind us to his virtues 
 and his real service to philosophy. They only 
 serve to show again that philosophy is itself a 
 product of slow growth, and that no man, no 
 
172 The Philosophy of Schiller 
 
 matter how distinguished his talents or how 
 great his industry, can entirely escape the im- 
 perfections and shortcomings even of the sys- 
 tems he undertakes to criticize. 
 
Notes 
 
Notes 
 
 ^ Henry Jones, Brovmmg as a Philosophical and Re- 
 ligious Teacher, p. IS. 
 
 ' Caird, Evolution of Religion, Vol. I, p. 315. 
 
 'Reason in Religion, p. 9. 
 
 * For an excellent discussion of the relations between 
 literature and philosophy, cf. Taylor, Elements of Meta- 
 physics, p. 5 ff. 
 
 ° Browning, The Ring and the Book, I. 
 
 "Tennyson, The Ancient Sage. 
 
 ' Cf . Ralph Barton Perry, Harvard Theological Review, 
 April, 1909. 
 
 ' Windelband, Geschichte d. neueren Philosophie, Vol. 
 II, p. 248. 
 
 " For titles, see the bibliography at the end of this book. 
 
 "James Seth, Ethical Principles, p. 16. 
 
 " The Problems of Philosophy, p. 162. 
 
 ^ For further confirmation of the view of the historical 
 significance of Schiller presented see Hoifding, History 
 of Modern Philosophy, Vol. II, 122, 130 ff.; Hettner, 
 Gesch. d. d. Literatur, Drittes Buch, Erster Abschnitt, 
 Zweite Abteilung, 141 ff.; Paulsen, By stem of Ethics, 
 Introduction. 
 
 ^ K. Berger, Entwickelung v. Schiller's Aesthetik. 
 
 " The reader who desires a fuller knowledge of Leibniz 
 should consult Duncan, Leibniz, Philosophical Works; 
 Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leib- 
 niz; Merz, Leibniz; and the histories of philosophy, es- 
 pecially Falckenberg, Erdmann and Kuno Fischer. For 
 the philosophy of the entire period see also the excellent 
 recent work by Professor Hlbben, The Philosophy of the 
 Enlightment. 
 
 " For Shaftesbury, see v. Gizycki, Die Philosophie 
 Shafteshwrys; Fowler, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and 
 the histories of philosophy. 
 
 '" For an interesting discussion of the relation of egoism 
 to altruism consult Spencer, Data of Ethics, chapters XI- 
 173 
 
174 Notes 
 
 XIV; Paulsen, System of EtUcs, Book II, chapter VI ; 
 Sorley, The Ethics of Naturalism, and other treatises on 
 ethics 
 
 " Wundt, Ethics, Vol. II, p. 74. 
 
 ^' Compare Sidgwick, History of Ethics, pp. 201-204. 
 
 ^'Essays on the Passions, p. 17. Quoted by Mackin- 
 tosh, Ethical Philosophy, p. 126. 
 
 ^" For an attractive discussion of this important point 
 see Paulsen, A System of Ethics, Book II, chapter V. 
 
 ^ See on this point HoiFding, Problems of Philosophy, 
 pp. 169 and 197, and his Ethik; also Taylor, The Problem 
 of Conduct, chapter IV, especially p. 201 ff.; Bradley, 
 Appearance and Reality, p. 414 if.; and the literature on 
 egoism and altruism cited above. 
 
 ^^ James Seth, Ethical Principles, p. 18. 
 
 ^ For a similar obj ection in the theory of education 
 see Bagley, The Educative Process, p. SO ff. 
 
 ^* For a detailed and highly interesting account of 
 Schiller's studies in the Stuttgart Academy, see Minor, 
 Schiller, I, p. 192-293. 
 
 ^ Karl Godeke, Schiller's sdmmtliche Schriften, his- 
 torisch-kritische Ausgabe, Stuttgart, I, 74-94. Unless 
 otherwise specified, all references vpiU be to this standard 
 edition of Schiller's complete works. For other editions 
 and bibliography, consult the bibliography at the end of 
 the book. 
 
 ^"The essay was originally in five chapters, but only a 
 part of the first chapter has come down to us. Efforts 
 have been made to restore the lost portions from the 
 criticisms of Consbruch, SchUler's instructor in medicine, 
 which are extant. Fortunately, SchiUer has made this 
 work rather unnecessary, as the gist of the paper is 
 doubtless repeated in Schiller's second master's disserta- 
 tion, On the Connection between the Animal and the 
 Spiritual Nature in Man, to be discussed presently. 
 
 '^Schriften, I, pp. 7S-6. 
 
 == Cf. Chapter VIII. 
 
 ™ Weber, History of Philosophy , p. 320. For a 
 thorouph discussion of the various theories of the rela- 
 tion between soul and body consult Taylor, Elements of 
 Metaphysics, Book IV, chapter II, and literature cited 
 there. 
 
 '"Minor, Schiller, I, 3S7. 
 
 ^ Little progress has been made, in spite of the enor- 
 mous advance of the science of neurology, in the solution 
 
Notes 175 
 
 of this interesting problem of the conversion of physical 
 processes successively into nerve processes and thence 
 into processes of consciousness. For a modern discussion 
 of this subject, see Donaldson, The Central Nervous Sys- 
 tem, in the American Text-Book of Physiology, especi^y 
 pp. 232-33; Hering, Zur Theorie der Nerventhatigkeit; 
 Wundt, Physiological Psychology; Ebbinghaus, Psychol- 
 ogic, I, p. 144, and literature cited there. 
 
 '^ Wundt, Physiological Psychology, ii, p. 387. 
 
 ''James, Principles of Psychology, ii, pp. 561, 564. 
 
 '*Cf. Minor, op. cit., i, p. 279. 
 
 '^Schiller in seinem Verhdltnisse zur Wissenschaft. 
 Wien, 1863. 
 
 ^Schriften, i, p. 143. 
 
 " Schriften, i, p. 143. 
 
 ^ Schriften, i, p. 152. 
 
 =» Schriften, i, p. 156. 
 
 '^Schriften, i, p. 156. 
 
 "^ Schriften, i, p. 158. 
 
 '^ Schriften, i, p. 154. 
 
 ''Schriften, i, p. 159 ff. 
 
 "Schriften, i, p. 170. 
 
 '^Schriften, ii, pp. 340-48; iii, pp. 509-24. 
 
 "January, 1782. 
 
 "A distinct advance upon the principle of nature imi- 
 tation of Sulzer and Mendelssohn, which Schiller had him- 
 self recently expressed in the first preface to the JBo6- 
 hers, is noticed here. Cf. Schiller's idea with Lessing's 
 Dramaturgic, Part 3, letter 79. 
 
 ''Cf. Tomaschek, op. cit., p. 25; Uberweg, Schiller als 
 Historiker und Philosoph, p. 70; Berger, op. cit., p. 34. 
 
 •" Schriften, iii, 523. 
 
 ™ A first-hand knowledge of Shaftesbury at this period 
 is improbable, as appears from a letter to Lotte von 
 Lengefeld of November 27th, 1788, in which he "hopes 
 to enjoy Shaftesbury; perhaps he would give him pas- 
 time in the summer." See Tomaschek, op. cit., p. 15, n. 
 10. For a more detailed discussion of influences, see 
 Palleske, Schiller's heben und Werke, I, p. 76 ff., p. 
 100 ff., and II, p. 180 ff. ; also Boas, Schiller's Jugend- 
 jahre, p. 136 ff. 
 
 »Cf. Tomaschek, op. cit., p. 10 and note 31. 
 
 "^ For the influence of Leibniz's theory of presentation 
 upon subsequent sense physiology, see Sommer, Deutsche 
 Psychologic und Aesthetik, p. 51 ff., p. 368. 
 
176 Notes 
 
 ^ Life of Schiller, p. 63. 
 
 " Schiller's Leben, ii, p. 39. 
 
 °° For various opinions regarding the dates of their 
 composition, cf. Tomaschek, op. cit., p. 31, n. 11. Nevin- 
 son's date (autumn, 1785) is almost certainly a year too 
 late. 
 
 5" Cf. p. 37 f. 
 
 ^'' Freigeisterei der Leidenschaft, Schriften, iv, p. 23 ff. 
 Hempel's tr. 
 
 ^ Journal of Speculative Philosophy, xii, p. 379. 
 
 ™ The Philosophical Letters, of which there are five in 
 all, three by Julius and two by Raphael, were published 
 in the Thalia, the first four in 1786, the last not until 
 1789. This was answered by Schiller, April 15, 1788. 
 Cf. Correspondence of Schiller and Kiirner, tr. Simpson, 
 i, p. 217. 
 
 ^Schiller als Philosoph, p. 59. Cf. also Schiller's 
 Jugend- und Wanderjahre in Selbstbekenntnissen, pp. 
 245-6. 
 
 "'Whether the document is too mature to be ac- 
 counted for by this supposition, as Harnack would seem 
 to maintain, is a point which afi'ords opportunity for 
 the nicest literary discrimination, but which, it seems 
 to me, must remain largely a matter of individual 
 opinion. 
 
 '"Schriften, iv, p. 59. 
 
 <^ Schriften, iv, pp. 36-7. 
 
 ''Schriften, iv, p. 5i:\ 
 
 ^ Schriften, iv, pp. 59-60. 
 
 »' Correspondence of Schiller and Kiirner, tr. Simpson, 
 i, pp. 131-2. 
 
 «' Letter to Korner, Aug. 29th, 1787. 
 
 »* For Schiller's philosophical friends and associates 
 cf. Tomaschek, op. cit., p. 143 if. 
 
 ™ Life of Schiller, p. 88. 
 
 '"Correspondence with Korner, Ibid., ii, 172. Many 
 other quotations from Schiller, pro and con, might be 
 made. Cf. his letters to Humboldt, June 27, 1798; to 
 Korner, Dec. 10, 1804; to Goethe, Oct. 16, 1795; and to 
 Rochlitz, April 16, 1801. 
 
 "ii7« of Schiller, p. 100. 
 
 ''"Correspondence with Korner, tr. Simpson, ii, p. 204. 
 
 " Hoffmeister, Meurer, and others. 
 
 " Correspondence with Korner, ed. Veit., ii, pp. 187, 
 192. 
 
Notes 177 
 
 "Cf. Schiller's letter to Komer, Dec. 4, 1791. The 
 date given by Kuno Fischer is incorrect. 
 
 '° Correspondence with Korner, Veit. ed., il, pp. 167-8. 
 Cf. Tomaschek, p. 2S4, n. 37. 
 
 "Cf. Wallemtein, pt. iii, act ii, sc. 3. 
 
 ''^ Schriften, x, pp. 93-3. 
 
 "Cf. Schriften, x, 79, note. 
 
 ™ Cf. Schriften, x, pp. 95-6. 
 
 '^Schriften, x, 97. 
 
 '^Schriften, x, 101. 
 
 "Schiller's Briefwechsel mit Korner, Godeke ed., iii, 
 pp. 42-3. 
 
 ^Schriften, x, p. 100. 
 
 ^ Besides Anmut und Wilrde, see Uber das Pathe- 
 tische, Orund des VergmUgens an tragischen Gegenr- 
 stdnden, Tragische Kunst, and XJher den moralischen 
 Nutzen aesthetischer Sitten. 
 
 ^ Einleittmg in die Moralwissenschaft, i, p. 220. 
 
 "'An einen jungen Preund als er sich der Weltweisheit 
 widmete. The translation of this and the following 
 poems is by Sir Bulwer Lytton. 
 
 ^ Cf. Anmut und Wiirde, Schriften, x, pp. 109-110. See 
 also Jodl, loc. cit. 
 
 «> Schriften, x, p. 117. 
 
 '" Schriften, x, pp. 229-230. 
 
 '"■ Aesthetische Brief e, 33. 
 
 "^ Cf . Windelband, Geachichte der neueren Philosophie, 
 Vol. II, p. 260 ff. 
 
 " I speak here of the Christian religion, as being that 
 which has had perhaps the most general influence among 
 the civUlzed nations. 
 
 "* Anmut und Wiirde. 
 
 "'Cf. for the whole subject, Tomaschek, op. cit., Book 
 V. 
 
 ™ Jonas, Schiller's Brief e, III, p. 453. 
 
 "Jonas, op. cit., IV, p. 69. 
 
 "'Schiller's u. Sumboldfs Briefwechsel, 2 ed., p. 57. 
 
 '^Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Ooethe, I, p. 35. 
 
 ^°° Contained in Fichte's complete Werke, Volume VIII. 
 
 "^ The Fichte-Schiller correspondence has been pub- 
 lished by J. G. Fichte, Schiller's u. Pichte's Briefwechsel. 
 See especially p. 28 ff. 
 
 i« See op. cit., p. 31. 
 
 "=P. 287. 
 
178 Notes 
 
 ^"^ Schiller in seinem Verhdltnisse zur Wissenschaft, p. 
 438. 
 
 ™ Bchriften, x, p. 320. See also pp. 338-9, 413. Cf. 
 Jodl, Oeschichte der Ethik in der neueren Philosophie, p. 
 S3 ff. 
 
Bibliography 
 
Bibliography 
 
 The extensive Schiller bibliographies in Godeke, Ornnd- 
 riss zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung, and in the 
 Jahresberichte fiir neuere deutsche Literaturgeschichte 
 are very general and comprehensive, and are, on that ac- 
 count, of little use to the student of Schiller's reflective 
 thought. The more strictly philosophical literature on 
 Schiller is reported periodically in the Archiv fiir Ge- 
 schichte der Philosophie. A critical bibliography of the 
 philosophical literature of much value, especially for the 
 relation of Schiller to Kant, is the Kant bibliography by 
 Adickes, published in the Philosophical Review, III, 4. 
 Of the most recent publications tJberweg-Heinze, Orund- 
 riss der Geschichte der Philosophie, 10 ed., vol. Ill, gives 
 a very complete account. The following bibliography 
 aims to give a fairly exhaustive account of the literature 
 in books, monographs, dissertations and programs. No 
 attempt has been made to cover with any completeness 
 the periodical Literature, except in the case of the few 
 articles written in English. 
 
 The philosophical writings of Schiller wiU be found in 
 complete form and arranged in chronological order in the 
 standard edition of Schiller's complete works, Godeke, 
 Schiller's sammtliche Schriften, historisch-kritische 
 Ausgabe, Stuttgart, 1868-76. They have recently been 
 published separately in selections by Eugen Kiihnemann, 
 Schiller's philosophische Schriften und Oedichte {Aus- 
 wahl), Leipzig, 1902; 2 ed., 1910. An English transla- 
 tion of the philosophical works is published in the Bohn 
 Library, London, 1875. Schiller's correspondence has 
 been published in many editions. The most recent and 
 valuable is that of F. Jonas, Schillers Briefe, Kritische 
 Gesarawtamgahe, Stuttgart, 1892 ff. Of the Schiller 
 biographies perhaps the most important for the philo- 
 sophical student are those of Holfmeister and Griin. 
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 are, unfortunately, incomplete. The demand for a de- 
 179 
 
180 Bibliography 
 
 tailed modern life of Schiller has recently been met by 
 two excellent works, Kuhnemann's Schiller, and the work 
 of Berger. Calvin Thomas' The Life and Works of 
 Schiller also contains an interesting chapter, in a popular 
 vein, on Schiller's philosophy. 
 
 Among the best brief treatments of Schiller's philos- 
 ophy are those found in the standard histories of philos- 
 ophy and of literature. The chapters in the works of 
 Hoffding, Jodl and Windelband, cited below, are in 
 every way admirable. The treatment of the subject by 
 Hettner, Literaturgeschichte, though not written by a 
 technical student of philosophy, is one of the most il- 
 luminating short discussions of Schiller's philosophical 
 writings which we possess. Of the single works on 
 Schiller as a philosopher mentioned below the titles by 
 Tomaschek, Uberweg, Twesten, Zimmermann, Meurer, 
 Hemsen, Drobisch and Fischer are of the first impor- 
 tance. The remainder are either less significant or 
 negligible. 
 
 Baltzer, Schiller, besonders in seiner religiosen Bedeii- 
 
 tiing, Gotha, 1860. 
 Bartsch, Schiller's Olauhe an die Unsterblichkeit der 
 
 Seele, Berlin, 1860. 
 Baumeister, tjher Schiller's Lebensansioht, insbesondere 
 
 in ihrer Bedeutung zur Kant'schen, Tiibingen, 1897. 
 Benard, L'esthetique de Schiller, C. R. Acad. d. Sci. 
 
 Mor. et Pol., XXIII, 1870. 
 Berger, Die Entwickelung von Schiller's Aesthetik, 
 
 Weimar, 1894. 
 Berger, Schiller, sein Leben u. seine Werke, Miinchen, 
 
 1906-9. 
 Beste, Goethe's w. Schiller's Religion, Gotha, 1783. 
 Binder, Schiller im Verhaltniss zum Christenthum, Stutt- 
 gart, 1839. 
 Bbhme, Schillerstudien, Freiberg, 1891. 
 Borkowsky, Die Unsterblichkeitslehre Schillers, Konigs- 
 
 berg, 1898. 
 Brahm, Schiller, Berlin, 1888. 
 Carruth, The Religion of Friedrich Schiller, Publ. Mod. 
 
 Lang. Assn., XIX, 4. 
 Carus, Friedrich Schiller, Chicago, 1905. 
 Clasen, Der Wandel in Schiller's Weltanschauung, Zeit- 
 
 schrift f. Phil. u. phil. Kritik, 1905, 113-39. 
 Danzel, Th., Vber d. gegenwdrtigen Zustand d. Phil. d. 
 
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 Ges. d. Wiss. zu Leipzig. Philologisch-hist. Classe. 
 
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 Fischer, K., Schiller als Philosoph, 3 ed., Heidelberg, 
 
 1891. 
 Fischer, Schiller als Komiker, Frkft, 1861. 
 Fo^, A., L'ideale estetico di F. Schiller, Parma, 1893. 
 Franli, A., TJber Schiller's Begriff des sittlich-schdnen, 
 
 Vienna, 1886. 
 Friedrich, Der Olaube Ooethes u. Schillers, Halle, 1891. 
 Geil, G., Schillers Ethik w. ihr Verhdltniss zu der Kan- 
 tischen, Strassburg, 1888. 
 Geil, G., System v. Schillers Ethik, Strassburg, 1890. 
 Geyer, Schillers asthetisch-ethische Weltanschauung, Ber- 
 
 Un, 1898. 
 Gneisse, K., Schillers Lehre v. d. dsthetischen Wahrneh- 
 
 mung, Berlin, 1893. 
 Grosse, H., Schillers Brief e iiber d. dsthetische Erziehung 
 
 des Menschen u. d. Bedeutung ihres Grundgedanhens 
 
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 Harnack, G. R., Die klassische Asthetik der Deutschen, 
 
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 Heine, G., Das Verhdltniss d. Asthetik z. Ethik bei Schil- 
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 Hettner, H., Die romantische Schule, Braunschweig, 
 
 1850. 
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182 Bibliography 
 
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 tik, Munich, 1895. 
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