ABSTRACT
To Lessing must be ascribed the merit and the sole glory of having discovered that every art has its special character and inviolable limits. Lessing was induced to raise the question in the attempt to controvert the strange views of Spence concerning the close union between painting and poetry among the ancients, and of Count Caylus, who held that the excellence of a poem must be judged by the number of subjects it offers to the brush of the painter. The principle of limitations or of the specific character of individual arts, as laid down by Lessing, occupied the attention of philosophers in later days, who, without discussing the principle itself, employed it in classifying the arts and arranging them in series. Schelling differentiated the artistic identity according as it consisted in the infusion of the infinite into the finite, or of the finite into the infinite: into poetry and art proper.
