ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that Socrates, in the Hippias maior, mentions the doctrine of beauty as "that which pleases hearing and sight": and he adds, it seems impossible to deny that we take pleasure in looking at handsome men and fine ornaments, pictures and statues with the eyes, and hearing beautiful songs or beautiful voices, music, speeches and conversations with the ears. Schleiermacher's radical denial of the existence of a natural beauty external to and independent of human mind marked a victory over a serious error, and appears to us imperfect and one-sided only so far as it seems to exclude those aesthetic facts of imagination which are attached to objects given in nature. In his criticism of his own Asthetik, Vischer completes the passage from metaphysical construction of beauty in nature to psychological interpretation of it, and recognizes the necessity of suppressing the section devoted to Natural Beauty in his first aesthetic system, and incorporating it with doctrine of imagination.
