Schiller ascribed high educational value to art thus conceived as at once sensible and rational, material and formal. Not that it teaches moral precepts or excites to good actions; if it acted thus, or when it acted thus, it would at once cease, as we have seen, to be art. Determination in whatsoever direction, to the good or the bad, to pleasure or to duty, destroys the character of the æsthetic sphere, which is rather indeterminism. By means of art man frees himself from the yoke of the senses; but before putting himself spontaneously under that of reason and duty, he takes as it were a little breathing-space by staying in a region of indifference and serene contemplation. "While having no claim to promote exclusively any special human faculty, the æsthetic condition is favourable to each and all without favouritism; and the reason why it favours none in particular is that it is the foundation of the possibility of all alike. Every other exercise gives some inclination to the soul, and therefore presupposes a special limit; æsthetic activity alone is unlimited." This indifference, which if not yet pure form is not pure matter, confers its educational value on art; it opens a way to morality, not by preaching and persuading, that is to say, determining, but by making determination possible. Such is the fundamental concept of his celebrated _Letters on the Æsthetic Education of Man_ (1795), in which Schiller took his cue from the conditions of his times and from the necessity of finding a middle way between supine acquiescence in tyranny and savage rebellion as exemplified by the revolution then raging in France.
[Sidenote: _Vagueness and lack of precision in Schiller's Æsthetic._]
The defects of Schiller's æsthetic doctrine are its lack of precision and its generality. Who has given a better description of certain aspects of art, the catharsis produced by artistic activity, the serenity and calm resulting from the domination over natural impressions? Equally just is his remark that art, although wholly independent of morality, is in some way connected with it. But what precisely this connexion may be, or what the exact nature of æsthetic activity, Schiller does not succeed in explaining. Conceiving the moral and intellectual as the only formal activities (_Formtrieb)_ and denying as a convinced anti-sensationalist in opposition to Burke and philosophers of his type that art can belong to the passionate and sensuous nature (_Stofftrieb_), he cut himself off from the means of recognizing the general category to which artistic activity belongs. His own concept of the formal is too narrow: too narrow, also, his concept of the cognitive activity, in which he is able to see the logical or intellectual form, but not that of the imagination. What for him was this art he describes as an activity neither formal nor material, neither cognitive nor moral? Was it for him, as for Kant, an activity of feeling, a play of several faculties at once? It would seem so, since Schiller distinguishes four points of view or relations of man with things: the physical, in which these affect our senses: the logical, in which they excite knowledge: the moral, in which they appear to us as an object of rational volition: and the æsthetic "in which they refer to our powers in entirety without becoming the determinate object of any one faculty." For example, a man is pleased æsthetically when his feeling depends in no way on the pleasure of the senses and when he is not conscious of thinking about any law or end.[8] We look in vain for any more conclusive reply.