No More Learning

In one
place, alarmed at the liberty which in its opening efforts always
shows itself an enemy, it will cast itself into the arms of a
convenient servitude. In another place, reduced to despair by a
pedantic tutelage, it will be driven into the savage license of the
state of nature. Usurpation will invoke the weakness of human
nature, and insurrection will invoke its dignity, till at length the
great sovereign of all human things, blind force, shall come in and
decide, like a vulgar pugilist, this pretended contest of
principles.

LETTER VIII.

Must philosophy therefore retire from this field, disappointed in
its hopes? Whilst in all other directions the dominion of forms is
extended, must this the most precious of all gifts be abandoned to a
formless chance? Must the contest of blind forces last eternally in
the political world, and is social law never to triumph over a
hating egotism?

Not in the least. It is true that reason herself will never attempt
directly a struggle with this brutal force which resists her arms,
and she will be as far as the son of Saturn in the 'Iliad' from
descending into the dismal field of battle, to fight them in person.
But she chooses the most deserving among the combatants, clothes him
with divine arms as Jupiter gave them to his son-in-law, and by her
triumphing force she finally decides the victory.

Reason has done all that she could in finding the law and
promulgating it; it is for the energy of the will and the ardour of
feeling to carry it out. To issue victoriously from her contest with
force, truth herself must first become a force, and turn one of the
instincts of man into her champion in the empire of phenomena. For
instincts are the only motive forces in the material world. If
hitherto truth has so little manifested her victorious power, this
has not depended on the understanding, which could not have unveiled
it, but on the heart which remained closed to it, and on instinct
which did not act with it.

Whence, in fact, proceeds this general sway of prejudices, this
might of the understanding in the midst of the light disseminated by
philosophy and experience? The age is enlightened, that is to say,
that knowledge, obtained and vulgarised, suffices to set right at
least our practical principles. The spirit of free inquiry has
dissipated the erroneous opinions which long barred the access to
truth, and has undermined the ground on which fanaticism and
deception had erected their throne. Reason has purified itself from
the il lusions of the senses and from a mendacious sophistry, and
philosophy herself raises her voice and exhorts us to return to the
bosom of nature, to which she had first made us unfaithful. Whence
then is it that we remain still barbarians?

There must be something in the spirit of man--as it is not in the
objects themselves--which prevents us from receiving the truth,
notwithstanding the brilliant light she diffuses, and from accepting
her, whatever may be her strength for producing conviction. This
something was perceived and expressed by an ancient sage in this
very significant maxim: sapere aude [Footnote: Dare to be wise].

Dare to be wise! A spirited courage is required to triumph over the
impediments that the indolence of nature as well as the cowardice of
the heart oppose to our in struction. It was not without reason that
the ancient Mythos made Minerva issue fully armed from the head of
Jupiter, for it is with warfare that this instruction com mences.
From its very outset it has to sustain a hard fight against the
senses, which do not like to be roused from their easy slumber. The
greater part of men are much too exhausted and enervated by their
struggle with want to be able to engage in a new and severe contest
with error. Satisfied if they themselves can escape from the hard
labour of thought, they willingly abandon to others the guardianship
of their thoughts. And if it happens that nobler necessities agitate
their soul, they cling with a greedy faith to the formulas that the
state and the church hold in reserve for such cases. If these
unhappy men deserve our compassion, those others deserve our just
contempt, who, though set free from those necessities by more
fortunate circumstances, yet willingly bend to their yoke. These
latter persons prefer this twilight of obscure ideas; where the
feelings have more intensity, and the imagination can at will create
convenient chimeras, to the rays of truth which put to flight the
pleasant illusions of their dreams. They have founded the whole
structure of their happiness on these very illusions, which ought to
be combated and dissipated by the light of knowledge, and they would
think they were paying too dearly for a truth which begins by
robbing them of all that has value in their sight. It would be
necessary that they should be already sages to love wisdom: a truth
that was felt at once by him to whom philosophy owes its name.
[Footnote: The Greek word means, as is known, love of wisdom. ]

It is therefore not going far enough to say that the light of the
understanding only deserves respect when it reacts on the character;
to a certain extent it is from the character that this light
proceeds; for the road that terminates in the head must pass through
the heart. Accordingly, the most pressing need of the present time
is to educate the sensibility, because it is the means, not only to
render efficacious in practice the improvement of ideas, but to call
this improvement into existence.

LETTER IX.

But perhaps there is a vicious circle in our previous reasoning?
Theoretical culture must it seems bring along with it practical
culture, and yet the latter must be the condition of the former. All
improvement in the political sphere must proceed from the ennobling
of the character. But, subject to the influence of a social
constitution still barbarous, how can character become ennobled? It
would then be necessary to seek for this end an instrument that the
state does not furnish, and to open sources that would have
preserved themselves pure in the midst of political corruption.

I have now reached the point to which all the considerations tended
that have engaged me up to the present time. This instrument is the
art of the beautiful; these sources are open to us in its immortal
models.

Art, like science, is emancipated from all that is positive, and all
that is humanly conventional; both are completely independent of the
arbitrary will of men. The political legislator may place their
empire under an interdict, but he cannot reign there. He can
proscribe the friend of truth, but truth subsists; he can degrade
the artist, but he cannot change art. No doubt, nothing is more
common than to see science and art bend before the spirit of the
age, and creative taste receive its law from critical taste. When
the character becomes stiff and hardens itself, we see science
severely keeping her limits, and art subject to the harsh restraint
of rules; when the character is relaxed and softened, science
endeavours to please and art to rejoice. For whole ages philosophers
as well as artists show themselves occupied in letting down truth
and beauty to the depths of vulgar humanity. They themselves are
swallowed up in it; but, thanks to their essential vigour and
indestructible life, the true and the beautiful make a victorious
fight, and issue triumphant from the abyss.

No doubt the artist is the child of his time, but unhappy for him if
he is its disciple or even its favourite. Let a beneficent deity
carry off in good time the suckling from the breast of its mother,
let it nourish him on the milk of a better age, and suffer him to
grow up and arrive at virility under the distant sky of Greece. When
he has attained manhood, let him come back, presenting a face
strange to his own age; let him come, not to delight it with his
apparition, but rather to purify it, terrible as the son of
Agamemnon. He will, indeed, receive his matter from the present
time, but he will borrow the form from a nobler time and even beyond
all time, from the essential, absolute, immutable unity. There,
issuing from the pure ether of its heavenly nature, flows the source
of all beauty, which was never tainted by the corruption of
generations or of ages, which roll along far beneath it in dark
eddies. Its matter may be dishonoured as well as ennobled by fancy,
but the ever chaste form escapes from the caprices of imagination.
The Roman had already bent his knee for long years to the divinity
of the emperors, and yet the statues of the gods stood erect; the
temples retained their sanctity for the eye long after the gods had
become a theme for mockery, and the noble architecture of the
palaces that shielded the infamies of Nero and of Commodus were a
protest against them. Humanity has lost its dignity, but art has
saved it, and preserves it in marbles full of meaning; truth
continues to live in illusion, and the copy will serve to re-
establish the model. If the nobility of art has survived the
nobility of nature, it also goes before it like an inspiring genius,
forming and awakening minds. Before truth causes her triumphant
light to penetrate into the depth of the heart, poetry intercepts
her rays, and the summits of humanity shine in a bright light, while
a dark and humid night still hangs over the valleys.

But how will the artist avoid the corruption of his time which
encloses him on all hands? Let him raise his eyes to his own
dignity, and to law; let him not lower them to necessity and
fortune. Equally exempt from a vain activity which would imprint its
trace on the fugitive moment, and from the dreams of an impatient
enthusiasm which applies the measure of the absolute to the paltry
productions of time, let the artist abandon the real to the
understanding, for that is its proper field. But let the artist
endeavour to give birth to the ideal by the union of the possible
and of the necessary. Let him stamp illusion and truth with the
effigy of this ideal; let him apply it to the play of his
imagination and his most serious actions, in short, to all sensuous
and spiritual forms; then let him quietly launch his work into
infinite time.

But the minds set on fire by this ideal have not all received an
equal share of calm from the creative genius--that great and patient
temper which is required to impress the ideal on the dumb marble, or
to spread it over a page of cold, sober letters, and then entrust it
to the faithful hands of time. This divine instinct, and creative
force, much too ardent to follow this peaceful walk, often throws
itself immediately on the present, on active life, and strives to
transform the shapeless matter of the moral world. The misfortune of
his brothers, of the whole species, appeals loudly to the heart of
the man of feeling; their abasement appeals still louder; enthusiasm
is inflamed, and in souls endowed with energy the burning desire
aspires impatiently to action and facts. But has this innovator
examined himself to see if these disorders of the moral world wound
his reason, or if they do not rather wound his self-love? If he does
not determine this point at once, he will find it from the
impulsiveness with which he pursues a prompt and definite end. A
pure, moral motive has for its end the absolute; time does not exist
for it, and the future becomes the present to it directly, by a
necessary development, it has to issue from the present. To a reason
having no limits the direction towards an end becomes confounded
with the accomplishment of this end, and to enter on a course is to
have finished it.

If, then, a young friend of the true and of the beautiful were to
ask me how, notwithstanding the resistance of the times, he can
satisfy the noble longing of his heart, I should reply: Direct the
world on which you act towards that which is good, and the measured
and peaceful course of time will bring about the results. You have
given it this direction if by your teaching you raise its thoughts
towards the necessary and the eternal; if, by your acts or your
creations, you make the necessary and the eternal the object of your
leanings. The structure of error and of all that is arbitrary, must
fall, and it has already fallen, as soon as you are sure that it is
tottering. But it is important that it should not only totter in the
external but also in the internal man. Cherish triumphant truth in
the modest sanctuary of your heart; give it an incarnate form
through beauty, that it may not only be the understanding that does
homage to it, but that feeling may lovingly grasp its appearance.
And that you may not by any chance take from external reality the
model which you yourself ought to furnish, do not venture into its
dangerous society before you are assured in your own heart that you
have a good escort furnished by ideal nature. Live with your age,
but be not its creation; labour for your contemporaries, but do for
them what they need, and not what they praise. Without having shared
their faults, share their punishment with a noble resignation, and
bend under the yoke which they find is as painful to dispense with
as to bear. By the constancy with which you will despise their good
fortune, you will prove to them that it is not through cowardice
that you submit to their sufferings. See them in thought such as
they ought to be when you must act upon them; but see them as they
are when you are tempted to act for them. Seek to owe their suffrage
to their dignity; but to make them happy keep an account of their
unworthiness; thus, on the one hand, the nobleness of your heart
will kindle theirs, and, on the other, your end will not be reduced
to nothingness by their unworthiness. The gravity of your principles
will keep them off from you, but in play they will still endure
them. Their taste is purer than their heart, and it is by their
taste you must lay hold of this suspicious fugitive. In vain will
you combat their maxims, in vain will you condemn their actions; but
you can try your moulding hand on their leisure. Drive away caprice,
frivolity, and coarseness, from their pleasures, and you will banish
them imperceptibly from their acts, and at length from their
feelings. Everywhere that you meet them, surround them with great,
noble, and ingenious forms; multiply around them the symbols of
perfection, till appearance triumphs over reality, and art over
nature.

LETTER X.

Convinced by my preceding letters, you agree with me on this point,
that man can depart from his destination by two opposite roads, that
our epoch is actually moving on these two false roads, and that it
has become the prey, in one case, of coarseness, and elsewhere of
exhaustion and de pravity. It is the beautiful that must bring it
back from this twofold departure. But how can the cultivation of the
fine arts remedy, at the same time, these opposite defects, and
unite in itself two contradictory qualities? Can it bind nature in
the savage, and set it free in the barbarian? Can it at once tighten
a spring and loose it, and if it cannot produce this double effect,
how will it be reasonable to expect from it so important a result as
the education of man?

It may be urged that it is almost a proverbial adage that the
feeling developed by the beautiful refines manners, and any new
proof offered on the subject would appear superfluous. Men base this
maxim on daily experience, which shows us almost always clearness of
intellect, deli cacy of feeling, liberality and even dignity of
conduct, associated with a cultivated taste, while an uncultivated
taste is almost always accompanied by the opposite qualities. With
considerable assurance, the most civilised nation of antiquity is
cited as an evidence of this, the Greeks, among whom the perception
of the beautiful attained its highest development, and, as a
contrast, it is usual to point to nations in a partial savage state,
and partly barbarous, who expiate their insensibility to the
beautiful by a coarse or, at all events, a hard austere character.
Nevertheless, some thinkers are tempted occasionally to deny either
the fact itself or to dispute the legitimacy of the consequences
that are derived from it. They do not entertain so unfavourable an
opinion of that savage coarseness which is made a reproach in the
case of certain nations; nor do they form so advantageous an opinion
of the refinement so highly lauded in the case of cultivated
nations. Even as far back as in antiquity there were men who by no
means regarded the culture of the liberal arts as a benefit, and who
were consequently led to forbid the entrance of their republic to
imagination.

I do not speak of those who calumniate art, because they have never
been favoured by it. These persons only appreciate a possession by
the trouble it takes to acquire it, and by the profit it brings; and
how could they properly appreciate the silent labour of taste in the
exterior and in terior man? How evident it is that the accidental
disadvantages attending liberal culture would make them lose sight
of its essential advantages! The man deficient in form despises the
grace of diction as a means of corruption, courtesy in the social
relations as dissimulation, delicacy and generosity in conduct as an
affected exaggeration. He cannot forgive the favourite of the Graces
for having enlivened all assemblies as a man of the world, of having
directed all men to his views like a statesman, and of giving his
impress to the whole century as a writer; while he, the victim of
labour, can only obtain, with all his learning, the least attention
or overcome the least difficulty. As he cannot learn from his
fortunate rival the secret of pleasing, the only course open to him
is to deplore the corruption of human nature, which adores rather
the appearance than the reality.

But there are also opinions deserving respect, that pronounce
themselves adverse to the effects of the beautiful, and find
formidable arms in experience, with which to wage war against it.
"We are free to admit"--such is their language--"that the charms of
the beautiful can further honourable ends in pure hands; but it is
not repugnant to its nature to produce, in impure hands, a directly
contrary effect, and to employ in the service of injustice and error
the power that throws the soul of man into chains. It is exactly
because taste only attends to the form and never to the substance;
it ends by placing the soul on the dangerous incline, leading it to
neglect all reality and to sacrifice truth and morality to an
attractive envelope. All the real difference of things vanishes, and
it is only the appearance that determines their value! How many men
of talent"--thus these arguers proceed--"have been turned aside from
all effort by the seductive power of the beautiful, or have been led
away from all serious exercise of their activity, or have been
induced to use it very feebly? How many weak minds have been
impelled to quarrel with the organisation of society, simply because
it has pleased the imagination of poets to present the image of a
world constituted differently, where no propriety chains down
opinion and no artifice helds nature in thraldom? What a dangerous
logic of the passions they have learned since the poets have painted
them in their pictures in the most brilliant colours and since, in
the contest with law and duty, they have commonly re mained masters
of the battlefield. What has society gained by the relations of
society, formerly under the sway of truth, being now subject to the
laws of the beautiful, or by the external impression deciding the
estimation in which merit is to be held? We admit that all virtues
whose appearance produces an agreeable effect are now seen to
flourish, and those which, in society, give a value to the man who
possesses them. But, as a compensation, all kinds of excesses are
seen to prevail, and all vices are in vogue that can be reconciled
with a graceful exterior. " It is certainly a matter entitled to
reflection that, at almost all the periods of history when art
flourished and taste held sway, humanity is found in a state of
decline; nor can a single instance be cited of the union of a large
diffusion of aesthetic culture with political liberty and social
virtue, of fine manners associated with good morals, and of
politeness fraternising with truth and loyalty of character and
life.

As long as Athens and Sparta preserved their independence, and as
long as their institutions were based on respect for the laws, taste
did not reach its maturity, art remained in its infancy, and beauty
was far from exer cising her empire over minds. No doubt, poetry had
already taken a sublime flight, but it was on the wings of genius,
and we know that genius borders very closely on savage coarseness,
that it is a light which shines readily in the midst of darkness,
and which therefore often argues against rather than in favour of
the taste of the time. When the golden age of art appears under
Pericles and Alexander, and the sway of taste becomes more general,
strength and liberty have abandoned Greece; eloquence corrupts the
truth, wisdom offends it on the lips of Socrates, and virtue in the
life of Phocion. It is well known that the Romans had to exhaust
their energies in civil wars, and, corrupted by Oriental luxury, to
bow their heads under the yoke of a fortunate despot, before Grecian
art triumphed over the stiffness of their character. The same was
the case with the Arabs: civilisation only dawned upon them when the
vigour of their military spirit became softened under the sceptre of
the Abbassides. Art did not appear in modern Italy till the glorious
Lombard League was dissolved, Florence submitting to the Medici, and
all those brave cities gave up the spirit of independ ence for an
inglorious resignation. It is almost super fluous to call to mind
the example of modern nations, with whom refinement has increased in
direct proportion to the decline of their liberties. Wherever we
direct our eyes in past times, we see taste and freedom mutually
avoiding each other. Everywhere we see that the beautiful only
founds its sway on the ruins of heroic virtues.

And yet this strength of character, which is commonly sacrificed to
establish aesthetic culture, is the most power ful spring of all
that is great and excellent in man, and no other advantage, however
great, can make up for it. Accordingly, if we only keep to the
experiments hitherto made, as to the influence of the beautiful, we
cannot certainly be much encouraged in developing feelings so
dangerous to the real culture of man. At the risk of being hard and
coarse, it will seem preferable to dispense with this dissolving
force of the beautiful, rather than see human nature a prey to its
enervating influence, notwithstanding all its refining advantages.
However, experience is perhaps not the proper tribunal at which to
decide such a question; before giving so much weight to its
testimony, it would be well to inquire if the beauty we have been
discussing is the power that is condemned by the previous examples.
And the beauty we are discussing seems to assume an idea of the
beautiful derived from a source different from experience, for it is
this higher notion of the beautiful which has to decide if what is
called beauty by experience is entitled to the name.

This pure and rational idea of the beautiful--supposing it can be
placed in evidence--cannot be taken from any real and special case,
and must, on the contrary, direct and give sanction to our judgment
in each special case. It must therefore be sought for by a process
of abstraction, and it ought to be deduced from the simple
possibility of a nature both sensuous and rational; in short, beauty
ought to present itself as a necessary condition of humanity. It is
therefore essential that we should rise to the pure idea of
humanity, and as experience shows us nothing but individuals, in
particular cases, and never humanity at large, we must endeavour to
find in their individual and variable mode of being the absolute and
the permanent, and to grasp the necessary conditions of their
existence, suppressing all accidental limits. No doubt this
transcendental procedure will remove us for some time from the
familiar circle of phaenomena and the living presence of objects, to
keep us on the unproductive ground of abstract ideas; but we are
engaged in the search after a principle of knowledge solid enough
not to be shaken by anything, and the man who does not dare to rise
above reality will never conquer this truth.

LETTER XI.

If abstraction rises to as great an eievation as possible, it
arrives at two primary ideas, before which it is obliged to stop and
to recognise its limits. It distinguishes in man something that
continues, and something that changes in cessantly. That which
continues it names his person; that which changes his position, his
condition.

The person and the condition, I and my determinations, which
we represent as one and the same thing in the neces sary being,
are eternally distinct in the finite being. Not withstanding
all continuance in the person, the condition changes; in spite of
all change of condition, the person remains. We pass from rest to
activity, from emotion to indifference, from assent to contradiction,
but we are always we ourselves, and what immediately springs from
ourselves remains. It is only in the absolute subject that all his
determinations continue with his personality. All that Divinity is,
it is because it is so; consequently it is eternally what
it is, because it is eternal.

As the person and the condition are distinct in man, be cause he is
a finite being, the condition cannot be founded on the person, nor
the person on the condition. Admitting the second case, the person
would have to change; and in the former case, the condition would
have to continue. Thus in either supposition either the personality
or the quality of a finite being would necessarily cease. It is not
because we think, feel, and will, that we are; it is not because we
are that we think, feel, and will. We are because we are. We feel,
think, and will, because there is out of us something that is not
ourselves.

Consequently the person must have its principle of exist ence in
itself because the permanent cannot be derived from the changeable,
and thus we should be at once in possession of the idea of the
absolute being, founded on itself; that is to say, of the idea of
freedom. The condition must have a foundation, and as it is not
through the person, and is not therefore absolute, it must be a
sequence and a result; and thus, in the second place, we should have
arrived at the condition of every dependent being, of everything in
the process of becoming something else: that is, of the idea of
time. "Time is the necessary condition of all processes, of becoming
(werden);" this is an indentical proposition, for it says nothing
but this: "That something may follow, there must be a succession. "

The person which manifests itself in the eternally continuing Ego,
or I myself, and only in him, cannot become something or begin in
time, because it is much rather time that must begin with him,
because the permanent must serve as basis to the changeable. That
change may take place, something must change; this something cannot
therefore be the change itself. When we say the flower opens and
fades, we make of this flower a permanent being in the midst of this
transformation; we lend it, in some sort, a personality, in which
these two conditions are manifested. It cannot be objected that man
is born, and becomes something; for man is not only a person simply,
but he is a person finding himself in a determinate condition. Now
our determinate state of condition springs up in time, and it is
thus that man, as a phenomenon or appearance, must have a beginning,
though in him pure intelligence is eternal. Without time, that is,
without a becoming, he would not be a determinate being; his
personality would exist virtually, no doubt, but not in action. It
is not by the succession of its perceptions that the immutable Ego
or person manifests himself to himself.

Thus, therefore, the matter of activity, or reality, that the
supreme intelligence draws from its own being, must be received by
man; and he does, in fact, receive it, through the medium of
perception, as something which is outside him in space, and which
changes in him in time. This matter which changes in him is always
accompanied by the Ego, the personality, that never changes; and the
rule prescribed for man by his rational nature is to remain
immutably himself in the midst of change, to refer all perceptions
to experience, that is, to the unity of knowledge, and to make of
each of its manifestations of its modes in time the law of all time.
The matter only exists in as far as it changes; he, his personality,
only exists in as far as he does not change. Consequently,
represented in his perfection, man would be the permanent unity,
which remains always the same, among the waves of change.

Now, although an infinite being, a divinity could not become (or be
subject to time), still a tendency ought to be named divine which
has for its infinite end the most characteristic attribute of the
divinity; the absolute manifestation of power--the reality of all
the possible--and the absolute unity of the manifestation (the
necessity of all reality). It cannot be disputed that man bears
within himself, in his personality, a predisposition for divinity.
The way to divinity--if the word "way" can be applied to what never
leads to its end-is open to him in every direction.

Considered in itself and independently of all sensuous matter, his
personality is nothing but the pure virtuality of a possible
infinite manifestation, and so long as there is neither intuition
nor feeling, it is nothing more than a form, an empty power.
Considered in itself, and independently of all spontaneous activity
of the mind, sensuousness can only make a material man; without it,
it is a pure form; but it cannot in any way establish a union
between matter and it. So long as he only feels, wishes, and acts
under the influence of desire, he is nothing more than the world, if
by this word we point out only the formless contents of time.
Without doubt, it is only his sensuousness that makes his strength
pass into efficacious acts, but it is his personality alone that
makes this activity his own. Thus, that he may not only be a world,
he must give form to matter, and in order not to be a mere form, he
must give reality to the virtuality that he bears in him. He gives
matter to form by creating time, and by opposing the immutable to
change, the diversity of the world to the eternal unity of the Ego.
He gives a form to matter by again suppressing time, by maintaining
permanence in change, and by placing the diversity of the world
under the unity of the Ego.

Now from this source issue for man two opposite exigencies, the two
fundamental laws of sensuous-rational nature. The first has for its
object absolute reality; it must make a world of what is only form,
manifest all that in it is only a force. The second law has for its
object absolute formality; it must destroy in him all that is only
world, and carry out harmony in all changes. In other terms, he must
manifest all that is internal, and give form to all that is
external. Considered in its most lofty accomplishment, this twofold
labour brings us back to the idea of humanity which was my starting-
point.

LETTER XII.

This twofold labour or task, which consists in making the necessary
pass into reality in us and in making out of us reality subject to
the law of necessity, is urged upon us as a duty by two opposing
forces, which are justly styled impulsions or instincts, because
they impel us to realise their object. The first of these
impulsions, which I shall call the sensuous instinct, issues from
the physical existence of roan, or from sensuous nature; and it is
this instinct which tends to enclose him in the limits of time and
to make of him a material being; I do not say to give him matter,
for to do that a certain free activity of the personality would be
necessary, which, receiving matter, distinguishes it from the Ego,
or what is permanent. By matter I only understand in this place the
change or reality that fills time. Consequently the instinct
requires that there should be change, and that time should contain
something. This simply filled state of time is named sensation, and
it is only in this state that physical existence manifests itself.

As all that is in time is successive, it follows by that fact alone
that something is: all the remainder is excluded. When one note on
an instrument is touched, among all those that it virtually offers,
this note alone is real. When man is actually modified, the infinite
possibility of all his modifications is limited to this single mode
of existence. Thus, then, the exclusive action of sensuous impulsion
has for its necessary consequence the narrowest limitation. In this
state man is only a unity of magnitude, a complete moment in time;
or, to speak more correctly, he is not, for his personality is
suppressed as long as sensation holds sway over him and carries time
along with it.

This instinct extends its domains over the entire sphere of the
finite in man, and as form is only revealed in matter, and the
absolute by means of its limits, the total manifestation of human
nature is connected on a close analysis with the sensuous instinct.
But though it is only this instinct that awakens and develops what
exists virtually in man, it is nevertheless this very instinct which
renders his perfection impossible. It binds down to the world of
sense by indestructible ties the spirit that tends higher and it
calls back to the limits of the present, abstraction Which had its
free development in the sphere of the infinite. No doubt, thought
can escape it for a moment, and a firm will victoriously resists its
exigencies; but soon compressed nature resumes her rights to give an
imperious reality to our existence, to give it contents, substance,
knowledge, and an aim for our activity.

The second impulsion, which may be named the formal instinct, issues
from the absolute existence of man, or from his rational nature, and
tends to set free, and bring harmony into the diversity of its
manifestations, and to maintain personality notwithstanding all the
changes of state. As this personality, being an absolute and
indivisible unity, can never be in contradiction with itself, as we
are ourselves for ever, this impulsion, which tends to maintain
personality, can never exact in one time anything but what it exacts
and requires for ever. It therefore decides for always what it
decides now, and orders now what it orders for ever. Hence it
embraces the whole series of times, or what comes to the same thing,
it suppresses time and change. It wishes the real to be necessary
and eternal, and it wishes the eternal and the necessary to be real;
in other terms, it tends to truth and justice.

If the sensuous instinct only produces ACCIDENTS, the formal
instinct gives laws, laws for every judgment when it is a question
of knowledge, laws for every will when it is a question of action.
Whether, therefore, we recognise an object or conceive an objective
value to a state of the subject, whether we act in virtue of
knowledge or make of the objective the determining principle of our
state; in both cases we withdraw this state from the jurisdiction of
time, and we attribute to it reality for all men and for all time,
that is, universality and necessity. Feeling can only say: "That is
true FOR THIS SUBJECT AND AT THIS MOMENT," and there may come
another moment, another subject, which withdraws the affirmation
from the actual feeling. But when once thought pronounces and says:
"THAT IS" it decides for ever and ever, and the validity of its
decision is guaranteed by the personality itself, which defies all
change. Inclination can only say: "That is good FOR YOUR
INDIVIDUALITY and PRESENT NECESSITY? " but the changing current of
affairs will sweep them away, and what you ardently desire to-day
will form the object of your aversion to-morrow. But when the moral
feeling says: "That ought to be," it decides for ever. If you
confess the truth because it is the truth, and if you practice
justice because it is justice, you have made of a particular case
the law of all possible cases, and treated one moment of your life
as eternity.

Accordingly, when the formal impulse holds sway and the pure object
acts in us, the being attains its highest expansion, all barriers
disappear, and from the unity of magnitude in which man was enclosed
by a narrow sensuousness, he rises to the UNITY OF IDEA, which
embraces and keeps subject the entire sphere of phenomena. During
this operation we are no longer in time, but time is in us with its
infinite succession. We are no longer individuals but a species; the
judgment of all spirits is expressed by our own, and the choice of
all hearts is represented by our own act.

LETTER XIII.

On a first survey, nothing appears more opposed than these two
impulsions; one having for its object change, the other
immutability, and yet it is these two notions that exhaust the
notion of humanity, and a third FUNDAMENTAL IMPULSION, holding a
medium between them, is quite inconceivable. How then shall we re-
establish the unity of human nature, a unity that appears completely
destroyed by this primitive and radical opposition?

I admit these two tendencies are contradictory, but it should be
noticed that they are not so in the SAME OBJECTS. But things that do
not meet cannot come into collision. No doubt the sensuous impulsion
desires change; but it does not wish that it should extend to
personality and its field, nor that there should be a change of
principles. The formal impulsion seeks unity and permanence, but it
does not wish the condition to remain fixed with the person, that
there should be identity of feeling. Therefore these two impulsions
are not divided by nature, and if, nevertheless, they appear so, it
is because they have become divided by transgressing nature freely,
by ignoring themselves, and by confounding their spheres. The office
of culture is to watch over them and to secure to each one its
proper LIMITS; therefore culture has to give equal justice to both,
and to defend not only the rational impulsion against the sensuous,
but also the latter against the former. Hence she has to act a
twofold part: first, to protect sense against the attacks of
freedom; secondly, to secure personality against the power of
sensations. One of these ends is attained by the cultivation of the
sensuous, the other by that of the reason.

Since the world is developed in time, or change, the perfection of
the faculty that places men in relation with the world will
necessarily be the greatest possible mutability and extensiveness.
Since personality is permanence in change, the perfection of this
faculty, which must be opposed to change, will be the greatest
possible freedom of action (autonomy) and intensity. The more the
receptivity is developed under manifold aspects, the more it is
movable and offers surfaces to phaenomena, the larger is the part of
the world seized upon by man, and the more virtualities he develops
in himself. Again, in proportion as man gains strength and depth,
and depth and reason gain in freedom, in that proportion man TAKES
IN a larger share of the world, and throws out forms outside
himself. Therefore his culture will consist, first, in placing his
receptivity on contact with the world in the greatest number of
points possible, and is raising passivity to the highest exponent on
the side of feeling; secondly, in procuring for the determining
faculty the greatest possible amount of independence, in relation to
the receptive power, and in raising activity to the highest degree
on the side of reason. By the union of these two qualities man will
associate the highest degree of self-spontaneity (autonomy) and of
freedom with the fullest plenitude of existence, and instead of
abandoning himself to the world so as to get lost in it, he will
rather absorb it in himself, with all the infinitude of its
phenomena, and subject it to the unity of his reason.

But man can invert this relation, and thus fail in attaining his
destination in two ways. He can hand over to the passive force the
intensity demanded by the active force; he can encroach by material
impulsion on the formal impulsion, and convert the receptive into
the determining power. He can attribute to the active force the
extensiveness belonging to the passive force, he can encroach by the
formal impulsion on the material impulsion, and substitute the
determining for the receptive power. In the former case, he will
never be an Ego, a personality; in the second case, he will never be
a Non-Ego, and hence in both cases he will be NEITHER ONE NOR THE
OTHER, consequently he will nothing.

In fact, if the sensuous impulsion becomes determining, if the
senses become law-givers, and if the world stifles personality, he
loses as object what he gains in force. It may be said of man that
when he is only the contents of time, he is not and consequently HE
HAS no other contents. His condition is destroyed at the same time
as his personality, because these are two correlative ideas, because
change presupposes permanence, and a limited reality implies an
infinite reality. If the formal impulsion becomes receptive, that
is, if thought anticipates sensation, and the person substitutes
itself in the place of the world, it loses as a subject and
autonomous force what it gains as object, because immutability
implies change, and that to manifest itself also absolute reality
requires limits. As soon as man is only form, he has no form, and
the personality vanishes with the condition. In a word, it is only
inasmuch as he is spontaneous, autonomous, that there is reality out
of him, that he is also receptive; and it is only inasmuch as he is
receptive that there is reality in him, that he is a thinking force.

Consequently these two impulsions require limits, and looked upon as
forces, they need tempering; the former that it may not encroach on
the field of legislation, the latter that it may not invade the
ground of feeling. But this tempering and moderating the sensuous
impulsion ought not to be the effect of physical impotence or of a
blunting of sensations, which is always a matter for contempt. It
must be a free act, an activity of the person, which by its moral
intensity moderates the sensuous intensity, and by the sway of
impressions takes from them in depth what it gives them in surface
or breadth. The character must place limits to temperament, for the
senses have only the right to lose elements if it be to the
advantage of the mind. In its turn, the tempering of the formal
impulsion must not result from moral impotence, from a relaxation of
thought and will, which would degrade humanity. It is necessary that
the glorious source of this second tempering should be the fulness
of sensations; it is necessary that sensuousness itself should
defend its field with a victorious arm and resist the violence that
the invading activity of the mind would do to it. In a word, it is
necessary that the material impulsion should be contained in the
limits of propriety by personality, and the formal impulsion by
receptivity or nature.

LETTER XIV.

We have been brought to the idea of such a correlation between the
two impulsions that the action of the one establishes and limits at
the same time the action of the other, and that each of them, taken
in isolation, does arrive at its highest manifestation just because
the other is active.

No doubt this correlation of the two impulsions is simply a problem
advanced by reason, and which man will only be able to solve in the
perfection of his being. It is in the strictest signification of the
term: the idea of his humanity; accordingly, it is an infinite to
which he can approach nearer and nearer in the course of time, but
without ever reaching it. "He ought not to aim at form to the injury
of reality, nor to reality to the detriment of the form. He must
rather seek the absolute being by means of a determinate being, and
the determinate being by means of an infinite being. He must set the
world before him because he is a person, and he must be a person
because he has the world before him. He must feel because he has a
consciousness of himself, and he must have a consciousness of
himself because he feels. " It is only in conformity with this idea
that he is a man in the full sense of the word; but he cannot be
convinced of this so long as he gives himself up exclusively to one
of these two impulsions, or only satisfies them one after the other.
For as long as he only feels, his absolute personality and existence
remain a mystery to him, and as long as he only thinks, his
condition or existence in time escapes him. But if there were cases
in which he could have at once this twofold experience in which he
would have the consciousness of his freedom and the feeling of his
existence together, in which he would simultaneously feel as matter
and know himself as spirit, in such cases, and in such only, would
he have a complete intuition of his humanity, and the object that
would procure him this intuition would be a symbol of his
accomplished destiny, and consequently serve to express the infinite
to him--since this destination can only be fulfilled in the fulness
of time.

Presuming that cases of this kind could present themselves in
experience, they would awake in him a new impulsion, which,
precisely because the two other impulsions would co-operate in it,
would be opposed to each of them taken in isolation, and might, with
good grounds, be taken for a new impulsion. The sensuous impulsion
requires that there should be change, that time should have
contents; the formal impulsion requires that time should be
suppressed, that there should be no change. Consequently, the
impulsion in which both of the others act in concert--allow me to
call it the instinct of play, till I explain the term--the instinct
of play would have as its object to suppress time in time to
conciliate the state of transition or becoming with the absolute
being, change with identity.

The sensuous instinct wishes to be determined, it wishes to receive
an object; the formal instinct wishes to determine itself, it wishes
to produce an object. Therefore the instinct of play will endeavor
to receive as it would itself have produced, and to produce as it
aspires to receive.

The sensuous impulsion excludes from its subject all autonomy and
freedom; the formal impulsion excludes all dependence and passivity.
But the exclusion of freedom is physical necessity; the exclusion of
passivity is moral necessity. Thus the two impulsions subdue the
mind: the former to the laws of nature, the latter to the laws of
reason. It results from this that the instinct of play, which unites
the double action of the two other instincts, will content the mind
at once morally and physically. Hence, as it suppresses all that is
contingent, it will also suppress all coercion, and will set man
free physically and morally. When we welcome with effusion some one
who deserves our contempt, we feel painfully that nature is
constrained. When we have a hostile feeling against a person who
commands our esteem, we feel painfully the constraint of reason. But
if this person inspires us with interest, and also wins our esteem,
the constraint of feeling vanishes together with the constraint of
reason, and we begin to love him, that is to say, to play, to take
recreation, at once with our inclination and our esteem.

Moreover, as the sensuous impulsion controls us physically, and the
formal impulsion morally, the former makes our formal constitution
contingent, and the latter makes our material constitution
contingent, that is to say, there is contingence in the agreement of
our happiness with our perfection, and reciprocally. The instinct of
play, in which both act in concert, will render both our formal and
our material constitution contingent; accordingly, our perfection
and our happiness in like manner. And on the other hand, exactly
because it makes both of them contingent, and because the contingent
disappears with necessity, it will suppress this contingence in
both, and will thus give form to matter and reality to form. In
proportion that it will lessen the dynamic influence of feeling and
passion, it will place them in harmony with rational ideas, and by
taking from the laws of reason their moral constraint, it will
reconcile them with the interest of the senses.

LETTER XV.

I approach continually nearer to the end to which I lead you, by a
path offering few attractions. Be pleased to follow me a few steps
further, and a large horizon will open up to you and a delightful
prospect will reward you for the labour of the way.

The object of the sensuous instinct, expressed in a universal
conception, is named Life in the widest acceptation: a conception
that expresses all material existence and all that is immediately
present in the senses. The object of the formal instinct, expressed
in a universal conception, is called shape or form, as well in an
exact as in an inexact acceptation; a conception that embraces all
formal qualities of things and all relations of the same to the
thinking powers. The object of the play instinct, represented in a
general statement, may therefore bear the name of living form; a
term that serves to describe all aesthetic qualities of phaenomena,
and what people style, in the widest sense, beauty.

Beauty is neither extended to the whole field of all living things
nor merely enclosed in this field. A marble block, though it is and
remains lifeless, can nevertheless become a living form by the
architect and sculptor; a man, though he lives and has a form, is
far from being a living form on that account. For this to be the
case, it is necessary that his form should be life, and that his
life should be a form. As long as we only think of his form, it is
lifeless, a mere abstraction; as long as we only feel his life, it
is without form, a mere impression. It is only when his form lives
in our feeling, and his life in our understanding, he is the living
form, and this will everywhere be the case where we judge him to be
beautiful.

But the genesis of beauty is by no means declared because we know
how to point out the component parts, which in their combination
produce beauty. For to this end it would be necessary to comprehend
that combination itself, which continues to defy our exploration, as
well as all mutual operation between the finite and the infinite.
The reason, on transcendental grounds, makes the following demand:
There shall be a communion between the formal impulse and the
material impulse-that is, there shall be a play instinct--because it
is only the unity of reality with the form, of the accidental with
the necessary, of the passive state with freedom, that the
conception of humanity is completed. Reason is obliged to make this
demand, because her nature impels her to completeness and to the
removal of all bounds; while every exclusive activity of one or the
other impulse leaves human nature incomplete and places a limit in
it. Accordingly, as soon as reason issues the mandate, "a humanity
shall exist," it proclaims at the same time the law, "there shall be
a beauty. " Experience can answer us if there is a beauty, and we
shall know it as soon as she has taught us if a humanity can exist.
But neither reason nor experience can tell us how beauty can be, and
how a humanity is possible.

We know that man is neither exclusively matter nor exclusively
spirit. Accordingly, beauty, as the consummation of humanity, can
neither be exclusively mere life, as has been asserted by sharp-
sighted observers, who kept too close to the testimony of
experience, and to which the taste of the time would gladly degrade
it; Nor can beauty be merely form, as has been judged by speculative
sophists, who departed too far from experience, and by philosophic
artists, who were led too much by the necessity of art in explaining
beauty; it is rather the common object of both impulses, that is, of
the play instinct. The use of language completely justifies this
name, as it is wont to qualify with the word play what is neither
subjectively nor objectively accidental, and yet does not impose
necessity either externally or internally. As the mind in the
intuition of the beautiful finds itself in a happy medium between
law and necessity, it is, because it divides itself between both,
emancipated from the pressure of both. The formal impulse and the
material impulse are equally earnest in their demands, because one
relates in its cognition to things in their reality and the other to
their necessity; because in action the first is directed to the
preservation of life, the second to the preservation of dignity, and
therefore both to truth and perfection. But life becomes more
indifferent when dignity is mixed up with it, and duty no longer
coerces when inclination attracts. In like manner the mind takes in
the reality of things, material truth, more freely and tranquilly as
soon as it encounters formal truth, the law of necessity; nor does
the mind find itself strung by abstraction as soon as immediate
intuition can accompany it. In one word, when the mind comes into
communion with ideas, all reality loses its serious value because it
becomes small; and as it comes in contact with feeling, necessity
parts also with its serious value because it is easy.

But perhaps the objection has for some time occurred to you, Is not
the beautiful degraded by this, that it is made a mere play? and is
it not reduced to the level of frivolous objects which have for ages
passed under that name? Does it not contradict the conception of the
reason and the dignity of beauty, which is nevertheless regarded as
an instrument of culture, to confine it to the work of being a mere
play? and does it not contradict the empirical conception of play,
which can coexist with the exclusion of all taste, to confine it
merely to beauty?

But what is meant by a MERE PLAY, when we know that in all
conditions of humanity that very thing is play, and only that is
play which makes man complete and develops simultaneously his
twofold nature? What you style LIMITATION, according to your
representation of the matter, according to my views, which I have
justified by proofs, I name ENLARGEMENT. Consequently, I should have
said exactly the reverse: man is serious ONLY with the agreeable,
with the good, and with the perfect, but he PLAYS with beauty. In
saying this we must not indeed think of the plays that are in vogue
in real life, and which commonly refer only to his material state.
But in real life we should also seek in vain for the beauty of which
we are here speaking. The actually present beauty is worthy of the
really, of the actually, present play-impulse; but by the ideal of
beauty, which is set up by the reason, an ideal of the play-instinct
is also presented, which man ought to have before his eyes in all
his plays.

Therefore, no error will ever be incurred if we seek the ideal of
beauty on the same road on which we satisfy our play-impulse. We can
immediately understand why the ideal form of a Venus, of a Juno, and
of an Apollo, is to be sought not at Rome, but in Greece, if we
contrast the Greek population, delighting in the bloodless athletic
contests of boxing, racing, and intellectual rivalry at Olympia,
with the Roman people gloating over the agony of a gladiator. Now
the reason pronounces that the beautiful must not only be life and
form, but a living form, that is, beauty, inasmuch as it dictates to
man the twofold law of absolute formality and absolute reality.
Reason also utters the decision that man shall only PLAY with
beauty, and he SHALL ONLY PLAY with BEAUTY.

For, to speak out once for all, man only plays when in the full
meaning of the word he is a man, and HE IS ONLY COMPLETELY A MAN
WHEN HE PLAYS. This proposition, which at this moment perhaps
appears paradoxical, will receive a great and deep meaning if we
have advanced far enough to apply it to the twofold seriousness of
duty and of destiny. I promise you that the whole edifice of
aesthetic art and the still more difficult art of life will be
supported by this principle. But this proposition is only unexpected
in science; long ago it lived and worked in art and in the feeling
of the Greeks, her most accomplished masters; only they removed to
Olympus what ought to have been preserved on earth. Influenced by
the truth of this principle, they effaced from the brow of their
gods the earnestness and labour which furrow the cheeks of mortals,
and also the hollow lust that smoothes the empty face. They set free
the ever serene from the chains of every purpose, of every duty, of
every care, and they made INDOLENCE and INDIFFERENCE the envied
condition of the godlike race; merely human appellations for the
freest and highest mind. As well the material pressure of natural
laws as the spiritual pressure of moral laws lost itself in its
higher idea of necessity, which embraced at the same time both
worlds, and out of the union of these two necessities issued true
freedom. Inspired by this spirit, the Greeks also effaced from the
features of their ideal, together with DESIRE or INCLINATION, all
traces of VOLITION, or, better still, they made both unrecognisable,
because they knew how to wed them both in the closest alliance. It
is neither charm nor is it dignity which speaks from the glorious
face of the Juno Ludovici; it is neither of these, for it is both at
once. While the female god challenges our veneration, the godlike
woman at the same time kindles our love. But while in ecstacy we
give ourselves up to the heavenly beauty, the heavenly self-repose
awes us back. The whole form rests and dwells in itself--a fully
complete creation in itself--and as if she were out of space,
without advance or resistance; it shows no force contending with
force, no opening through which time could break in. Irresistibly
carried away and attracted by her womanly charm, kept off at a
distance by her godly dignity, we also find ourselves at length in
the state of the greatest repose, an4 the result is a wonderful
impression, for which the understanding has no idea and language no
name.

LETTER XVI.

From the antagonism of the two impulsions, and from the association
of two opposite principles, we have seen beauty to result, of which
the highest ideal must therefore be sought in the most perfect union
and equilibrium possible of the reality and of the form. But this
equilibrium remains always an idea that reality can never completely
reach. In reality, there will always remain a preponderance of one
of these elements over the other, and the highest point to which
experience can reach will consist in an oscillation between two
principles, when sometimes reality and at others form will have the
advantage. Ideal beauty is therefore eternally one and indivisible,
because there can only be one single equilibrium; on the contrary,
experimental beauty will be eternally double, because in the
oscillation the equilibrium may be destroyed in two ways--this side
and that.

I have called attention in the foregoing letters to a fact that can
also be rigorously deduced from the considerations that have engaged
our attention to the present point; this fact is that an exciting
and also a moderating action may be expected from the beautiful. The
TEMPERING action is directed to keep within proper limits the
sensuous and the formal impulsions; the EXCITING, to maintain both
of them in their full force. But these two modes of action of beauty
ought to be completely identified in the idea. The beautiful ought
to temper while uniformly exciting the two natures, and it ought
also to excite while uniformly moderating them. This result flows at
once from the idea of a correlation, in virtue of which the two
terms mutually imply each other, and are the reciprocal condition
one of the other, a correlation of which the purest product is
beauty. But experience does not offer an example of so perfect a
correlation. In the field of experience it will always happen more
or less that excess on the one side will give rise to deficiency on
the other, and deficiency will give birth to excess. It results from
this that what in the beau-ideal is only distinct in the idea, is
different in reality in empirical beauty, The beau-ideal, though
simple and indivisible, discloses, when viewed in two different
aspects, on the one hand a property of gentleness and grace, and on
the other an energetic property; in experience there is a gentle and
graceful beauty, and there is an energetic beauty. It is so, and it
will be always so, so long as the absolute is enclosed in the limits
of time, and the ideas of reason have to be realised in humanity.
For example, the intellectual man has the idea of virtue, of truth,
and of happiness; but the active man will only practise VIRTUES,
will only grasp TRUTHS, and enjoy HAPPY DAYS. The business of
physical and moral education is to bring back this multiplicity to
unity, to put morality in the place of manners, science in the place
of knowledge; the business of aesthetic education is to make out of
beauties the beautiful.

Energetic beauty can no more preserve a man from a certain residue
of savage violence and harshness than graceful beauty can secure him
against a certain degree of effeminacy and weakness. As it is the
effect of the energetic beauty to elevate the mind in a physical and
moral point of view and to augment its momentum, it only too often
happens that the resistance of the temperament and of the character
diminishes the aptitude to receive impressions, that the delicate
part of humanity suffers an oppression which ought only to affect
its grosser part, and that this course nature participates in an
increase of force that ought only to tun? to the account of free
personality. It is for this reason that at the periods when we find
much strength and abundant sap in humanity, true greatness of
thought is seen associated with what is gigantic and extravagant,
and the sublimest feeling is found coupled with the most horrible
excess of passion. It is also the reason why, in the periods
distinguished for regularity and form, nature is as often oppressed
as it is governed, as often outraged as it isi surpassed. And as the
action of gentle and graceful beauty is to relax the mind in the
moral sphere as well as the physical, it happens quite as easily
that the energy of feelings is extinguished with the violence of
desires, and that character shares in the loss of strength which
ought only to affect the passions. This is the reason why, in ages
assumed to be refined, it is not a rare thing to see gentleness
degenerate into effeminacy, politeness into platitude, correctness
into empty sterility, liberal ways into arbitrary caprice, ease into
frivolity, calm into apathy, and, lastly, a most miserable
caricature treads on the heels of the noblest, the most beautiful
type of humanity. Gentle and graceful beauty is therefore a want to
the man who suffers the constraint of matter and of forms, for he is
moved by grandeur and strength long before he becomes sensible to
harmony and grace. Energetic beauty is a necessity to the man who is
under the indulgent sway of taste, for in his state of refinement he
is only too much disposed to make light of the strength that he
retained in his state of rude savagism.

I think I have now answered and also cleared up the contradiction
commonly met in the judgments of men respecting the influence of the
beautiful, and the appreciation of aesthetic culture. This
contradiction is explained directly we remember that there are two
sorts of experimental beauty, and that on both hands an affirmation
is extended to the entire race, when it can only be proved of one of
the species. This contradiction disappears the moment we distinguish
a twofold want in humanity to which two kinds of beauty correspond.
It is therefore probable that both sides would make good their
claims if they come to an understanding respecting the kind of
beauty and the form of humanity that they have in view.

Consequently in the sequel of my researches I shall adopt the course
that nature herself follows with man considered from the point of
view of sesthetics, and setting out from the two kinds of beauty, I
shall rise to the idea of the genus. I shall examine the effects
produced on man by the gentle and graceful beauty when its springs
of action are in full play, and also those produced by energetic
beauty when they are relaxed. I shall do this to confound these two
sorts of beauty in the unity of the beau-ideal, in the same way that
the two opposite forms and modes of being of humanity are absorbed
in the unity of the ideal man.

LETTER XVII.

While we were only engaged in deducing the universal idea of beauty
from the conception of human nature in general, we had only to
consider in the latter the limits established essentially in itself,
and inseparable from the notion of the finite. Without attending to
the contingent restrictions that human nature may undergo in the
real world of phenomena, we have drawn the conception of this nature
directly from reason, as a source of every necessity, and the ideal
of beauty has been given us at the same time with the ideal of
humanity.

But now we are coming down from the region of ideas to the scene of
reality, to find man in a DETERMINATE STATE, and consequently in
limits which are not derived from the pure conception of humanity,
but from external circumstances and from an accidental use of his
freedom. But although the limitation of the idea of humanity may be
very manifold in the individual, the contents of this idea suffice
to teach us that we can only depart from it by TWO opposite roads.
For if the perfection of man consist in the harmonious energy of his
sensuous and spiritual forces, he can only lack this perfection
through the want of harmony and the want of energy. Thus then,
before having received on this point the testimony of experience,
reason suffices to assure us that we shall find the real and
consequently limited man in a state of tension or relaxation,
according as the exclusive activity of isolated forces troubles the
harmony of his being, or as the unity of his nature is based on the
uniform relaxation of his physical and spiritual forces. These
opposite limits are, as we have now to prove, suppressed by the
beautiful, which re-establishes harmony in man when excited, and
energy in man when relaxed; and which, in this way, in conformity
with the nature of the beautiful, restores the state of limitation
to an absolute state, and makes of man a whole, complete in himself.

Thus the beautiful by no means belies in reality the idea which we
have made of it in speculation; only its action is much less free in
it than in the field of theory, where we were able to apply it to
the pure conception of humanity. In man, as experience shows him to
us, the beautiful finds a matter, already damaged and resisting,
which robs him in IDEAL perfection of what it communicates to him of
its individual mode of being. Accordingly in reality the beautiful
will always appear a peculiar and limited species, and not as the
pure genus; in excited minds in the state of tension, it will lose
its freedom and variety; in relaxed minds, it will lose its
vivifying force; but we, who have become familiar with the true
character of this contradictory phenomenon, cannot be led astray by
it. We shall not follow the great crowd of critics, in determining
their conception by separate experiences, and to make them
answerable for the deficiencies which man shows under their
influence. We know rather that it is man who transfers the
imperfections of his individuality over to them, who stands
perpetually in the way of their perfection by his subjective
limitation, and lowers their absolute ideal to two limited forms of
phenomena.

It was advanced that soft beauty is for an unstrung mind, and the
energetic beauty for the tightly strung mind. But I apply the term
unstrung to a man when he is rather under the pressure of feelings
than under the pressure of conceptions. Every exclusive sway of one
of his two fundamental impulses is for man a state of compulsion and
violence, and freedom only exists in the co-operation of his two
natures. Accordingly, the man governed preponderately by feelings,
or sensuously unstrung, is emancipated and set free by matter. The
soft and graceful beauty, to satisfy this twofold problem, must
therefore show herself under two aspects--in two distinct forms.
First as a form in repose, she will tone down savage life, and pave
the way from feeling to thought. She will, secondly, as a living
image equip the abstract form with sensuous power, and lead back the
conception to intuition and law to feeling. The former service she
does to the man of nature, the second to the man of art. But because
she does not in both cases hold complete sway over her matter, but
depends on that which is furnished either by formless nature or
unnatural art, she will in both cases bear traces of her origin, and
lose herself in one place in material life and in another in mere
abstract form.

To be able to arrive at a conception how beauty can become a means
to remove this twofold relaxation, we must explore its source in the
human mind. Accordingly, make up your mind to dwell a little longer
in the region of speculation, in order then to leave it for ever,
and to advance with securer footing on the ground of experience.

LETTER XVIII.

By beauty the sensuous man is led to form and to thought; by beauty
the spiritual man is brought back to matter and restored to the
world of sense. From this statement it would appear to follow that
between matter and form, between passivity and activity, there must
be a middle state, and that beauty plants us in this state. It
actually happens that the greater part of mankind really form this
conception of beauty as soon as they begin to reflect on its
operations, and all experience I seems to point to this conclusion.
But, on the other hand, nothing is more unwarrantable and
contradictory than such a conception, because the aversion of matter
and form, the passive and the active, feeling and thought, is
eternal and I cannot be mediated in any way. How can we remove this
contradiction? Beauty weds the two opposed conditions of feeling and
thinking, and yet there is absolutely no medium between them. The
former is immediately certain through experience, the other through
the reason.

This is the point to which the whole question of beauty leads, and
if we succeed in settling this point in a satisfactory way, we have
at length found the clue that will conduct us through the whole
labyrinth of aesthetics.

But this requires two very different operations, which must
necessarily support each other in this inquiry. Beauty it is said,
weds two conditions with one another which are opposite to each
other, and can never be one. We must start from this opposition; we
must grasp and recognise them in their entire purity and strictness,
so that both conditions are separated in the most definite matter;
otherwise we mix, but we do not unite them. Secondly, it is usual to
say, beauty unites those two opposed conditions, and therefore
removes the opposition. But because both conditions remain eternally
opposed to one another, they cannot be united in any other way than
by being suppressed. Our second business is therefore to make this
connection perfect, to carry them out with such purity and
perfection that both conditions disappear entirely in a third one,
and no trace of separation remains in the whole; otherwise we
segregate, but do not unite. All the disputes that have ever
prevailed and still prevail in the philosophical world respecting
the conception of beauty have no other origin than their commencing
without a sufficiently strict distinction, or that it is not carried
out fully to a pure union. Those philosophers who blindly follow
their feeling in reflecting on this topic can obtain no other
conception of beauty, because they distinguish nothing separate in
the totality of the sensuous impression. Other philosophers, who
take the understanding as their exclusive guide, can never obtain a
conception of beauty, because they never see anything else in the
whole than the parts, and spirit and matter remain eternally
separate, even in their most perfect unity. The first fear to
suppress beauty dynamically, that is, as a working power, if they
must separate what is united in the feeling. The others fear to
suppress beauty logically, that is, as a conception, when they have
to hold together what in the understanding is separate.