Summarizing the results of such a consideration, we may say at once that though Kant holds an immensely important place in the development of German thought; though the book containing his examination of æsthetic facts is among his most influential works; and though in histories of Æsthetic written from the German point of view, which ignore practically the whole development of European thought from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Kant can pose as the man who discovered the problem of Æsthetic or solved it or brought it within sight of solution; yet in an unprejudiced and complete history whose aim is to take broad views and to consider not the popularity of a book or the historical importance of a nation but the intrinsic value of ideas, the judgement passed on Kant must be very different. Like Vico in the serious tenacity with which he reflected upon æsthetic facts, more fortunate than he in having a much larger stock of material gathered from preceding discussion and argument, Kant was at once unlike and less successful than Vico in that he was unable to attain a doctrine substantially true, and unable also to give his thoughts the necessary system and unity.
[Sidenote: _Identity of the concept of art in Kant and Baumgarten._]
In fact, what was Kant's idea of art? Strange as our reply may seem to those who recollect the explicit and insistent war waged by him against the school of Wolff, and the concept of beauty as a perfection confusedly perceived, we must assert that Kant's idea of art was fundamentally the same as that of Baumgarten and the Wolffian school.[2] In that school his mind had been trained; he always had a great respect for Baumgarten whom in the _Critique of Pure Reason_ he calls "that excellent analyst"; he chose the text of Baumgarten for two of his University lectures on Metaphysics, and that of Meier for his lecture on Logic (_Vernunftlehre_). Kant, like them, therefore considered Logic and Æsthetic (or theory of art) as conjoined sciences. They were thus described by him in his _Scheme of Lectures_ in 1765, when he proposed, while expounding the critique of reason, to "throw a glance at that of taste, that is to say, at Æsthetic, since the rules of one apply to the other and each throws light upon the other."