and may be seen, touched, and heard.  The creative artist creates like nature in realizing the ideal; hence, art must serve as the absolute model for the intuition of the world—­it is the true and eternal organ of philosophy.  Like the artistic genius, the philosopher must have the faculty for perceiving the harmony and identity in the universe; esthetic intuition is absolute knowing.  Art aims to reveal to us the profoundest meaning of the world, which is the union of form and matter, of the ideal and the real; in art alone the striving of nature for harmony and identity is realized; the beautiful is the infinite represented and made perceivable in finite form; here mind and nature interpenetrate.  In creative art the artist imitates the creative act of nature and becomes conscious of it; in esthetic intuition, or the perception of beauty, the philosophical genius discovers the secret of reality; nature herself is a poem and her secret is revealed in art.  This philosophy is a far cry from the logical-mathematical method of the Aufklaerung; it is a protest against this, a protest in which the leaders of the new German literature, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, as well as the Romanticists, willingly joined.  Goethe’s entire view of nature, art, and life rested upon the teleological or organic conception; he, too, regarded the ability to peer into the heart of things—­to see the whole in its parts, the ideal in the real, the universal in the particular, as the poet’s and thinker’s highest gift.  He called it an apercu, “a revelation springing up in the inner man that gives him a hint of his likeness to God.”  It is this gift which Faust craves and Mephisto sneers at as die hohe Intuition.

  Dass ich erkenne was die Welt
  Im innersten zusammenhaelt,
  Schau alle Wirkungskraft and Samen
  Und tu’ nicht mehr in Worten kramen.

There was much that was fantastic in the Naturphilosophie and much a priori interpretation of nature that tended to withdraw the mind from the actualities of existence; it often dealt with bold assertions, analogies, and figures of speech, rather than with facts and proofs.  But it had its merits; for it aroused an interest in nature and nature-study, it kept alive the philosophical interest in the outer world, the desire for unity, Einheitstrieb, which has remained a marked characteristic of German science from Alexander von Humboldt down to Robert Mayer, Helmholtz, Naegeli, Haeckel, Ostwald, Hertz, and Driesch.  It opposed the one-sided mechanical method of science, and emphasized conceptions (the idea of development, the notion of the dynamic character of reality, pan-psychism, and vitalism) which are still moving the minds of men today, as is evidenced by the popularity of Henri Bergson, who, with our own William James, leads the contemporary school of philosophical Romanticists.