The name is absent

The Breviary of Aesthetic 31
trines, in which philosophers become the crowd, and the
crowd feels itself philosophical, because in agreement with
those crowd-philosophers. The origin of these theories is no
secret for us, because, even in the brief sketch that we have
given, it is quite clear that they have sprung from the trunk
of hedonistic, moralistic, conceptualistic, or physical concep-
tions of art: they are all doctrines which, failing to perceive
what makes art art, were obliged somehow to regain art,
which they had allowed to escape them, and to reintroduce
it in the form of an accessory or accidental element; the up-
holders of the theory of the content conceived it as an ab-
stract formal element, the formalists as the abstract element
of the content. What interests us in those æstheties is just this
dialectic, in which the theorists of the content become forma-
lists against their will, and the formalists upholders of the
theory of the content; thus each passes over to occupy the
other’s place, but to be restless there and to return to their
own, which gives rise to the same restlessness. The “beauti-
ful forms” of Herbart do not differ in any way from the “beau-
tiful contents” of the Hegelians, because both are nothing.
And we become yet more interested to observe their efforts
to get out of prison, and the blows with which they weaken
its doors or its walls, and the air-holes which some of those
thinkers succeed in opening.—Their efforts are clumsy and
sterile, like those of the theorists of the content (they are to
be seen in a repulsive form in the Philosophie des ScJwnen
of Hartmann), who, by adding stitch to stitch, composed a
net of “beautiful contents” (beautiful, sublime, comic, tragic,
Iiumouristic, pathetic, idyllic, sentimental, etc., etc.), in
which veιy coarse net they tried to enclose every form of
reality, even that which they had called “ugly.” They failed
to perceive that their aesthetic content, thus made to enclose
little by little the whole of reality, has no longer any charac-

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