he and Kant, are specially attractive. The theme of
this paper is the conception of grace, or the expression of a beautiful
soul and dignity, or that of a lofty mind. The idea of grace has been
developed more deeply and truly by Schiller than by Wieland or
Winckelmann, but the special value of the paper is its constantly
pointing to the ideal of a higher humanity. In it he does full justice
to the sensuous and to the moral, and commencing with the beautiful
nature of the Greeks, to whom sense was never mere sense, nor reason mere
reason, he concludes with an image of perfected humanity in which grace
and dignity are united, the former by architectonic beauty (structure),
the last supported by power.

The following year, 1795, appeared his most important contribution to
aesthetics, in his Aesthetical Letters.

In these letters he remarks that beauty is the work of free
contemplation, and we enter with it into the world of ideas, but without
leaving the world of sense. Beauty is to us an object, and yet at the
same time a state of our subjectivity, because the feeling of the
conditional is under that which we have of it. Beauty is a form because
we consider it, and life because we feel it; in a word, it is at once our
state and our art. And exactly because it is both it serves us as a
triumphant proof that suffering does not exclude activity, nor matter
form, nor limitation the infinite, for in the enjoyment of beauty both
natures are united, and by this is proved the capacity of the infinite to
be developed in the finite, and accordingly the possibility of the
sublimest humanity.

The free play of the faculty of cognition which had been determined by
Kant is also developed by Schiller. His representation of this matter is
this: Man, as a spirit, is reason and will, self-active, determining,
form-giving; this is described by Schiller as the form-instinct; man, as
a sensuous being, is determinable, receptive, termed to matter; Schiller
describes this as the material instinct, "Stofftrieb." In the midst
between these two is situated the beautiful, in which reason and the
sensuous penetrate each other, and their enjoyable product is designated
by Schiller the play instinct. This expression is not happily chosen.
Schiller means to describe by it the free play of the forces, activity
according to nature, which is at once a joy and a happiness; he reminds
us of the life of Olympus, and adds: "Man is only quite a man when he