18 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
elements of dissolution, the more copious and efficacious
by as much as the spirit of the philosopher who professed
them was energetic, and therefore nowhere are they so
copious and efficacious as in Schelling and Hegel, who thus
had so lively a consciousness of artistic production as to sug-
gest by their observations and their particular developments
a theory opposed to that maintained in their systems. Fur-
thermore, the very Conceptualistic theories are superior to
the others previously examined, not only in so far as they
recognise the theoretic character of art, but also carry with
them their contribution to the true doctrine, owing to the
claim that they make for a determination of the relations
(which, if they be of distinction, are also of unity) between
fancy and logic, between art and thought.
And here we can already see how the simplest formula,
that “art is intuition,”—which, translated into other sym-
bolical terms (for example, that “art is the work of fancy”),
is to be found in the mouths of all those who daily discuss
art, and is to be found in older terns (“imitation,” “fiction,”
“fable,” etc.) in so many old books,—pronounced now in the
text of a philosophical discourse, becomes filled with a his-
torical, critical, and polemical content, of which I can hardly
here give any example. And it will no longer cause astonish-
ment that its philosophical conquest should have cost an
especially great amount of toil, because that conquest is like
setting foot upon a little hill long fought for in battle. Its
easy ascent by the thoughtless pedestrian in time of peace
is a very different matter; it is not a simple resting-place
on a walk, but the symbol and result of the victory of an
army. The historian of æsthetie follows the steps of its diffi-
cult progress, in which (and this is another magical act of
thought) the conqueror, instead of losing strength through