ABSTRACT
After Giambattista Vico, the next European mind of real speculative genius is Immanuel Kant, who now comes before us in his turn. According to Kant, art is not pure beauty wholly detached from the concept, it is adherent beauty, which presupposes and attaches itself to a concept. This is the work of genius, the faculty of representing aesthetic ideas. An aesthetic idea is "a representation of the imagination which accompanies a given concept: a representation conjoined with such truthful representation of particulars as to be unable to find for it any expression that may mark a determinate concept, thereby endowing the given concept with something of the ineffable; a feeling which stimulates the cognitive faculties and reinforcing the tongue, which is simply the letter, with the spirit". Kant began by tending towards sensationalism in aesthetic problems, then became the adversary of sensationalists and intellectualists alike.
