His polemic against Kant in the Metacritique, 1799 (against the Critique of Pure Reason), and the dialogue Calligone, 1800 (against the Critique of Judgment), is less pleasing.  These are neither dignified in tone nor essentially of much importance.  In the former the distinction between sensibility and reason is censured, and in the latter the separation of the beautiful from the true and the good, but Kant’s theory of aesthetics is for the most part grossly misunderstood.  The “disinterested” satisfaction Herder makes a cold satisfaction; the harmonious activity of the cognitive powers, a tedious, apish sport; the satisfaction “without a concept,” judgment without ground or cause.  The positive elements in his own views are more valuable.  Pleasure in mere form, without a concept, and without the idea of an end, is impossible.  All beauty must mean or express something, must be a symbol of inner life; its ground is perfection or adaptation.  Beauty is that symmetrical union of the parts of a being, in virtue of which it feels well itself and gives pleasure to the observer, who sympathetically shares in this well-being.  The charm and value of the Calligone lie more in the warmth and clearness with which the expressive beauty of single natural phenomena is described than in the abstract discussion.

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819) gave the most detailed statement of the position of the philosophy of feeling, and the most careful proof of it.  He was born in Duesseldorf, the son of a manufacturer; until 1794 he lived in his native place and at his country residence in Pempelfort; later he resided in Holstein, and, from 1805, in Munich, where, in 1807-13, he was president of the Academy of Sciences.  Of his works, collected in five volumes, 1812-25, we are here chiefly concerned with the letters On the Doctrine of Spinoza, 1785; David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism, 1787; and the treatise On Divine Things, 1811, which called out Schelling’s merciless response, Memorial of Jacobi.  Besides Hume and Spinoza, the sensationalism of Bonnet and the criticism of Kant had made the most lasting impression on Jacobi.  His relation to Kant is neither that of an opponent nor of a supporter and popularizer.  He declares himself in accord with Kant’s critique of the understanding (the understanding is merely a formal function, one which forms and combines concepts only, but does not guarantee reality, one to which the material of thought must be given from elsewhere and for which the suprasensible remains unattainable); in regard to the critique of reason he raises the objection that it; makes the Ideas mere postulates, which possess no guarantee for their reality.  The critique of sensibility appears to him still more unsatisfactory, as it does not explain the origin of sensations.  Without the concept of the “thing-in-itself” one cannot enter the Kantian philosophy, and with it