  These claims are grandiose and abstract. In a crucial footnote to the Thirteenth Letter, however, Schiller comes down to earth, and reveals that what he expects from aesthetic education is something quite specific, although for that reason all the more plausible.  What he worried about is “the pernicious effect, upon both thought and action, of an undue surrender to our sensual nature” on the one hand and “the nefarious influence exerted upon our knowledge and upon our conduct by a preponderance of rationality” on the other. In the realm of scientific inquiry, what we need to learn and what we can learn from aesthetic experience is not to “thrust ourselves out upon [nature], with all the impatient anticipations of our reason,” without having collected adequate data to support our theorizing. In the realm of conduct, thus of the moral generally and not just the realm of politics, what we need to learn is to be specifically attentive to the particular circumstances, needs, and feelings of others, and not just to impose our own views upon them.  Schiller’s argument comes down to the claim that through the cultivation of our aesthetic sensibility we can learn to be attentive to detail and particularity as well as to principle and generality, and that being so attentive is a necessary condition for both theoretical and practical success. And it seems plausible to suppose that this claim is true, and therefore that aesthetic education may play a valuable rôle in the theoretical and practical development of human beings, in modern society as much as in any other. But this is a far cry from any claim that aesthetic education is sufficient for either theoretical or moral development, or even that it is necessary for such development, as the only way to cultivate the necessary combination of sensitivities. In the case of the natural sciences, surely both their general principles and their particular techniques of observation must be taught directly, and presumably a well-managed scientific education could also teach the student not to project the principles unchecked by the data. In the case of morals and politics, surely the general principles must be clearly fixed in the mind of those being initiated into the relevant community, as well as a proper empathy for the actual circumstances of others; but while perhaps the latter could be cultivated by aesthetic education, presumably it could also be cultivated directly by suitably edifying moral discourses, and certainly the general principles of morality will still have to be directly taught or elicited.