This will be the last post in which I'll be working from Leon Chai's book on the connections between Europe's romantics and America's Renaissance figures, because I am near finished with said book. For one of my earlier invocations of Chai , go here. That scholar's summary of Schiller's philosophy is as follows: "For Schiller, there is a pathetic, moving eloquence [in the relation of consciousness and object]: never can the object attain the nature of the idea, in which reposes the infinitude of the purely ideational. Consciousness here embodies, implicitly, a state of striving or aspiration: having informed or identified itself with an object, it then attempts in relating that object to an idea to pass from finite to infinite, the transcend the material element of its own content through realization of the purely ideational." What the heck does that mean? I don't know. To those of us who aren't ever going to be tested on our grasp of ...