further on, sights and sounds furnish one distinct department of the æsthetic domain.1

We may then properly characterize that condition as mere animalism, in which these aesthetic senses are wholly denied the exercise of their higher function, and are bound down to a low servitude, to animal appetites and passions; and the proper animal senses receive a higher respect and devotion.

Now the sensualism of the present day is not animalism. The brothel, the tippling house, are not the types of the morality prevailing with us. The concubinism and polygamy of oriental nations, the pederasty of the Greeks, the enervating baths with their unguents and shampooings, and the table epicureanism of the Romans, are not the characteristics of our times. These animal vices do appear, indeed, to a most lamentable degree; but not on an organized scale, not as determining the forms of society, not as institutions and customs. Our sensualism is of a less gross, of a somewhat more elevated type. What society will not endure in the form of this gross animal gratification, it allows or rather experiences, in the form of images addressed to the eye and the ear. A literature that will supply the imagination with pictures of sensual indulgence, that will excite it to creations of its own, of a similar character, in which the sensualized soul may revel in all its vacant hours, habitually and not occasionally, as in gross animalism, such a literature is the product, the delight, the characteristic of the present day. Philosophies, so called, of sense, works of imagination in which the entire material is of sense, physiologies and romances, furnish the supply to this debased sensual propensity, which the temples of Aphrodite in Greece, and the Orgies of the Bacchanalia in Rome, furnished to the brutalized Pagan. If the modern may boast the refinement of his sensualism, the ancient may congratulate himself that his could only be occasional in its indulgences, and was not so habitually corrupting in retired and private hours. We shall not stop to weigh the question, which of these forms of sensualism is the more corrupting and debasing; whether it is worse for man to yield occasionally, as outward

Since the text was written, the following passage, in Schiller's Letters, "on the Esthetic Culture of Man," for the first time came under our eye.

It is nature herself which elevates man from the reality to the form, since she has furnished him with two senses, which alone conduct him through the form to the knowledge of the real. To the eye and the ear the impressing matter is aloof from the sense, and the object is at a distance from us, which, in the animal senses, we immediately touch. That which we see through the eye, is different from that which we feel; for the understanding leaps out over the light to the object. The object of the touch is a force which we feel; the object of the eye and the ear is a form which we create. So long as man remains uncivilized, he enjoys only with the senses of feeling, to which the senses of the form are only subservient. He either does not raise himself at all to vision, or he does not satisfy himself with that. So soon as he begins to enjoy with the eye, and seeing acquires for him an independent value, he is aesthetically free, and the aesthetic impulse (spieltrieb) has developed itself. Letter 26th, pp. 117, 118, Cotta's ed. 10

THIRD SERIES, VOL. III.

NO. 3.

temptations may assail the animal sense, with little check or restraint from the moral tone in society, or, with as little check from prevailing manners, to gloat over foul obscenities and animal excesses, painted to the eye and ear in language or in art, or spawned from a diseased and filthy imagination; to plunge for the moment, recklessly and without thought of evil to character or reputation, into the worst excesses of brutal vice, or wallow habitually in the rottenness and filth ejected from a thoroughly sensualized mind and fancy; whether, if vice must be worshipped, it be worse to dedicate to her worship a temple abroad in the street, or to consecrate to her an altar on the hearth and by the fireside. We wish here only to mark this characteristic of the age, as indicative of the need of aesthetic cultivation. The sensualism and corruption which we have now to combat, comes in this seeming æsthetic form. It has taken this sphere of the sight and the hearing, the properly æsthetic senses. And it must be met on its own ground, and vanquished by its own weapons.

Another prominent characteristic of society at the present day, which discovers a like necessity for æsthetic culture, is its commercial spirit. Whether, in the strong commercial tendencies of the times, we regard the object and aim towards which they are directed; the accumulation of wealth, or the means by which the object is attained-the active intercourse and intermingling of nations, communities, and castes, the outward motion and bustle, and the mental collision and impulse, we see liabilities to evil of a most formidable character, which urgently demand control and guidance, and which can be effectually controlled and directed, and overruled to good, only through the aid of our æsthetic

nature.

That, through the constitution of man, and the determination of his relations to the natural world, the power of accumulating wealth was given him by his Maker, for wise and beneficent purposes, none will doubt. If, on the one hand, through perversion and excess, the love of money is a root of all evil; if there is no evil of which it may not be a spring and source, still, on the other hand, there is no good of which it may not be made an efficient instrument and helper. The proper function of wealth, in the beneficent economy of Providence, is not limited to the sphere of merely animal wants. It has a higher office than merely to sustain corporeal existence in comfort and health; to provide for necessary physical wants in the possessor himself, or in others to whom he may, through it, become an almoner. If this were the whole province of wealth, as designated and intended by the Creator, to be the prudent or beneficent minister to the necessities of our animal life, why should man, in his instincts and his capabilities, have been differently constituted from the ant or the beaver? Why should he ever feel the promptings to labor and

toil, in order to amass beyond what is needful for this purpose? Why do not reason and conscience and revelation speak out, and condemn accumulations beyond this as excessive, as worse than needless?

If we seek to learn the uses of wealth, either as shown in its own nature, or as indicated by Providence, in determining the manner of its employment, and as set forth in history, we shall be led to believe it to be one of its leading functions, to minister to the æsthetic nature of man, and through that, instrumentally to redeem and elevate him. In all ages of the world, wealth (and we use the term as one of degree, and as denoting what is above a mere competence for comfortable subsistence), wealth has found its natural outflow in this direction. Grant that vanity and pride and ambition have had much to do with this determination of wealth; still the fact is not sufficiently accounted for by the supposed operations of these corrupt motives. For, why should pride seek this mode of gratification? Surely there must be something intrinsically good in this appropriation of wealth, or pride could find no gratification in it.

No man condemns the accumulation of wealth to any degree, if it be effected by honest industry, and without encroachment on other spheres of duty. The greater the accumulation, if accompanied by no accidental evils or liabilities, the more truly enviable is the lot universally regarded. The allowable degrees in this accumulation far exceed any demands of personal necessity or beneficence. The appropriation to æsthetic uses, to objects which are fitted to refine and elevate the heart through the taste, has ever been approved, where there was no room for imputation of corrupt motives. Esthetic wants can be supplied only through accumulations of wealth beyond the demands of the mere necessities of life. If not diverted to the supply of these wants, it will unavoidably be perverted to a ruinous ministry, to sloth or sensuality or sordid avarice. The tendency to this perversion is a feature of the age, indicating the necessity of opening some other channel for the appropriations of wealth, in which it shall flow out for the refinement and elevation of society.

So, too, the healthful motion in society, prompted and directed by the commercial spirit in the pursuit of its aim, the intercourse and intermingling of its particular elements, will, even to a superficial observation, furnish like evidence of the need of an æsthetic influence to regulate and purify it. There is danger that this intercourse will assume a merely sordid character; that men will meet men only in strife for the better part of the bargain, in the spirit of counting-house calculation; and will measure one another only by their credit and tact on 'change or in the market ;that all the agitation and activity, which commerce has aroused, will only sharpen the appetite for gain, and bind down society in a

bondage to avarice hardly better than that of gross animalism. In counteracting this tendency to commercial sordidness, and in overruling it to the true elevation of society, virtuous principle, while it ever must instil the spirit of benevolence, and inculcate the second of the two great laws of human duty, must, to be fully successful, avail itself of the æsthetic elements of our nature, and through them, work upon the manners, the specific aims, the spirit of commercial intercourse. What a check on the indulgence of sordid propensities would the urbanity, the courtesy, the refinement which true taste dictates, create and maintain? How elevat ing would be the influence on commercial pursuits, if an aim ulterior to mere accumulation of wealth, were generally recognised in the travel and traffic of commercial men; if an æsthetic sentiment were to pervade commercial enterprise; if all the motion to and fro, which it prompts, were accompanied by a decidedly æsthetic spirit; if upon all the varied forms of beauty which successively reveal themselves on the track of travel, an eye of taste could look out, and images of spiritual peace and beauty be conveyed to a mind prepared to receive and profit by them.

A third prominent feature of society as it now exists, which shows the necessity of aesthetic culture, is the superficial philanthropy of the times. It is a happy characteristic of the age, that there is so much sympathy for the sufferings of others—so much solicitude expressed for others' welfare. But there is need that this commendable sympathy be properly grounded and rightly directed. If it proceed, as there is much reason to fear is the case, from mere distress at present, seen, momentary want and wretchedness; if it overlook the spiritual well-being, in its anxiety for the relief of outward and temporary suffering, it is, at best, but a rose-water philanthropy," which would apply perfumes, rather than the knife, to a mortifying limb, and complacently see the suf ferer die in inward anguish and alarm, if he but breathe out his spirit in outward sunshine, and bed his lifeless body in flowers. There is an alarming degree of this miserable, puling, sentimental philanthropism in modern society. It is poisoning healthful discipline in families and schools; corrupting and enervating government; and diverting the extraordinary beneficence of the age from true and real, to merely superficial and outward wants.

Without stopping now to show how a true æsthetic culture will furnish the most effectual antidote to this spreading contagion, and thus anticipating what will find a more appropriate place elsewhere, we pass to name, and merely to name, one other feature of society which evinces the existence of the same want. It is the religious formalism which has lately revived and flourished with so much vigor. Its history and its progress, as well as its destructive tendencies, are too familiar to the minds of all to require any notice here..

We discover, then, in these four aspects of society, as contemplated from a view of the direction of man's activity towards himself, external nature, his fellows, and his Maker, existing evils and threatening tendencies, which, as has been already in part, and in the sequel will be more fully shown, demand for their removal and correction the instrumentality of aesthetic culture. All these developments of society are, as will more clearly be seen hereaf ter, in the aesthetic sphere;-that is, they are all in the same sphere in which all art is comprehended. We shall endeavor to show the direct tendency of a true æsthetic culture to correct or remove them. We do, however, in this endeavor, by no means suffer the important truth to escape us, that all these evils are the product of a depraved heart, for which the only effectual cure is the gospel; and that exclusive reliance on any other means for their removal must, as God is wise and true, result in an aggravation of them all.

If

Nor, on the other hand, are we the dupes of that philosophical mysticism which would identify the true artistic spirit with the religious sentiment; which, in true pantheistic consistency, recognises in every creative genius a real incarnation of the Deity, and only there; which, first shutting out from the æsthetic sphere, its highest province, the relations of man to God as sovereign, makes the Divine perfection to consist in artistic excellence in its lower departments merely. It still remains true that religion works its great recovering and redeeming through instrumentalities. the aesthetic mysticism and pantheism of the present century be no more promising, of itself, for man than was the Illuminism of the last; still, it may be true for all this, that Christianity must work through the taste, as it must work through the intelligence. An accidental perversion and false elevation should no more lead us to reject the one than the other; the instrumentality of the taste more than that of the intelligence. Judging a priori, how can we but conclude that the love of the beautiful in man's nature, is as proper a medium through which Christianity is to reach the heart, as the love of the true; that it is not as really necessary in order to its perfect work, if not in as high a degree, as necessary in some part of the work, if not in all? If intelligence precede, necessarily, the development of the taste, still, may not the culture of the taste be indispensable to the ultimate perfect triumph of the gospel? Are we to conclude, hastily, that, because the gospel has spread without the use of this instrumentality to a very prominent extent, therefore it will be unnecessary in confirming and perfecting its power over society? Is the millennial age to be a rude, gross, barbarous age? Is its approach to be harbingered by no increase of refinement in manners, no unwonted loveliness in the shapes that a purer virtue shall assume, no higher, purer relish for the beauty and glory that invest Divinity?