Schelling has obviously studied Schiller, but he brings to the problem a mind more purely philosophical and a method more exactly scientific. He even takes Kant to task for faultiness of method. His remarks as to Plato's position are curious, if not conclusive. He says that Plato condemned the art of his time, because it was realistic and naturalistic: like all antique art, it exhibited a _finite_ character. Plato's judgment would have been quite different had he known Christian art, of which the character is _infinity_.
Schelling held firm to the fusion of art and beauty effected by Schiller, but he combated Winckelmann's theory of abstract beauty with its negative conception of the characteristic, assigning to art the limits of the individual. Art is characteristic beauty; it is not the individual, but the living conception of the individual. When the artist recognizes the eternal idea in an individual, and expresses it outwardly, he transforms the individual into a world apart, into a species, into an eternal idea. Characteristic beauty is the fulness of form which slays form: it does not silence passion, but restrains it as the banks of a river the waters that flow between them, but do not overflow.
Schelling's starting-point is the criticism of teleological judgment, as stated by Kant in his third Critique. Teleology is the union of theoretic with practical philosophy. But the system would not be complete, unless we could show the identity of the two worlds, theoretic and practical, in the subject itself. He must demonstrate the existence of an activity, which is at once unconscious as nature and conscious as spirit. This activity we find in Aesthetic, which is therefore "the general organ of philosophy, the keystone of the whole building."
Poetry and philosophy alone possess the world of the ideal, in which the real world vanishes. True art is not the impression of the moment, but the representation of infinite life: it is transcendental intuition objectified. The time will come when philosophy will return to poetry, which was its source, and on the new philosophy will arise a new mythology. Philosophy does not depict real things, but their ideas; so too, art. Those same ideas, of which real things are, as philosophy shows, the imperfect copies, reappear in art objectified as ideas, and therefore in their perfection. Art stands nearest to philosophy, which itself stands nearest to the Idea, and therefore nearest to perfection. Art differs from philosophy only by its _specialization_: in all other ways it is the ideal world in its most complete expression. The three Ideas of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty correspond to the three powers of the ideal and of the real world. Beauty is not the universal whole, which is truth, nor is it the only reality, which is action: it is the perfect mingling of the two. "Beauty exists where the real or particular is so adequate to its concept that this infinite thing enters into the finite, and is contemplated in the concrete." Philosophy unites truth, morality, and beauty, in what they possess in common, and deduces them from their unique Source, which is God. If philosophy assume the character of science and of truth, although it be superior to truth, the reason for this lies in the fact that science and truth are simply the formal determination of philosophy.