No More Learning

LETTER XXIII.


I take up the thread of my researches, which I broke off only to apply
the principles I laid down to practical art and the appreciation of its
works.

The transition from the passivity of sensuousness to the activity of
thought and of will can be effected only by the intermediary state of
aesthetic liberty; and though in itself this state decides nothing
respecting our opinions and our sentiments, and therefore it leaves our
intellectual and moral value entirely problematical, it is, however, the
necessary condition without which we should never attain to an opinion or
a sentiment. In a word, there is no other way to make a reasonable being
out of a sensuous man than by making him first aesthetic.

But, you might object: Is this mediation absolutely indispensable? Could
not truth and duty, one or the other, in themselves and by themselves,
find access to the sensuous man? To this I reply: Not only is it
possible but it is absolutely necessary that they owe solely to
themselves their determining force, and nothing would be more
contradictory to our preceding affirmations than to appear to defend the
contrary opinion. It has been expressly proved that the beautiful
furnishes no result, either for the comprehension or for the will; that
it mingles with no operations, either of thought or of resolution; and
that it confers this double power without determining anything with
regard to the real exercise of this power. Here all foreign help
disappears, and the pure logical form, the idea, would speak immediately
to the intelligence, as the pure moral form, the law, immediately to the
will.

But that the pure form should be capable of it, and that there is in
general a pure form for sensuous man, is that, I maintain, which should
be rendered possible by the aesthetic disposition of the soul. Truth is
not a thing which can be received from without like reality or the
visible existence of objects. It is the thinking force, in his own
liberty and activity, which produces it, and it is just this liberty
proper to it, this liberty which we seek in vain in sensuous man. The
sensuous man is already determined physically, and thenceforth he has no
longer his free determinability; he must necessarily first enter into
possession of this lost determinability before he can exchange the
passive against an active determination. Therefore, in order to recover
it, he must either lose the passive determination that he had, or he
should enclose already in himself the active determination to which he
should pass. If he confined himself to lose passive determination, he
would at the same time lose with it the possibility of an active
determination, because thought needs a body, and form can only be
realized through matter. He must therefore contain already in himself
the active determination, that he may be at once both actively and
passively determined, that is to say, he becomes necessarily aesthetic.

Consequently, by the aesthetic disposition of the soul the proper
activity of reason is already revealed in the sphere of sensuousness, the
power of sense is already broken within its own boundaries, and the
ennobling of physical man carried far enough, for spiritual man has only
to develop himself according to the laws of liberty. The transition from
an aesthetic state to a logical and moral state (from the beautiful to
truth and duty) is then infinitely more easy than the transition from the
physical state to the aesthetic state (from life pure and blind to form).
This transition man can effectuate alone by his liberty, whilst he has
only to enter into possession of himself not to give it himself; but to
separate the elements of his nature, and not to enlarge it. Having
attained to the aesthetic disposition, man will give to his judgments and
to his actions a universal value as soon as he desires it. This passage
from brute nature to beauty, in which an entirely new faculty would
awaken in him, nature would render easier, and his will has no power over
a disposition which, we know, itself gives birth to the will. To bring
the aesthetic man to profound views, to elevated sentiments, he requires
nothing more than important occasions: to obtain the same thing from the
sensuous man, his nature must at first be changed. To make of the former
a hero, a sage, it is often only necessary to meet with a sublime
situation, which exercises upon the faculty of the will the more
immediate action; for the second, it must first be transplanted under
another sky.

One of the most important tasks of culture, then, is to submit man to
form, even in a purely physical life, and to render it aesthetic as far
as the domain of the beautiful can be extended, for it is alone in the
aesthetic state, and not in the physical state, that the moral state can
be developed. If in each particular case man ought to possess the power
to make his judgment and his will the judgment of the entire species; if
he ought to find in each limited existence the transition to an infinite
existence; if, lastly, he ought from every dependent situation to take
his flight to rise to autonomy and to liberty, it must be observed that
at no moment he is only individual and solely obeys the laws of nature.
To be apt and ready to raise himself from the narrow circle of the ends
of nature, to rational ends, in the sphere of the former he must already
have exercised himself in the second; he must already have realized his
physical destiny with a certain liberty that belongs only to spiritual
nature, that is to say according to the laws of the beautiful.

And that he can effect without thwarting in the least degree his physical
aim. The exigencies of nature with regard to him turn only upon what he
does--upon the substance of his acts; but the ends of nature in no degree
determine the way in which he acts, the form of his actions. On the
contrary, the exigencies of reason have rigorously the form of his
activity for its object. Thus, so much as it is necessary for the moral
destination of man, that he be purely moral, that he shows an absolute
personal activity, so much is he indifferent that his physical
destination be entirely physical, that he acts in a manner entirely
passive. Henceforth with regard to this last destination, it entirely
depends on him to fulfil it solely as a sensuous being and natural force
(as a force which acts only as it diminishes) or, at the same time, as
absolute force, as a rational being. To which of these does his dignity
best respond? Of this there can be no question. It is as disgraceful
and contemptible for him to do under sensuous impulsion that which he
ought to have determined merely by the motive of duty, as it is noble and
honorable for him to incline towards conformity with laws, harmony,
independence; there even where the vulgar man only satisfies a legitimate
want. In a word, in the domain of truth and morality, sensuousness must
have nothing to determine; but in the sphere of happiness, form may find
a place, and the instinct of play prevail.

Thus then, in the indifferent sphere of physical life, man ought to
already commence his moral life; his own proper activity ought already to
make way in passivity, and his rational liberty beyond the limits of
sense; he ought already to impose the law of his will upon his
inclinations; he ought--if you will permit me the expression--to carry
into the domain of matter the war against matter, in order to be
dispensed from combating this redoubtable enemy upon the sacred field of
liberty; he ought to learn to have nobler desires, not to be forced to
have sublime volitions. This is the fruit of aesthetic culture, which
submits to the laws of the beautiful, in which neither the laws of nature
nor those of reason suffer, which does not force the will of man, and
which by the form it gives to exterior life already opens internal life.




LETTER XXIV.


Accordingly three different moments or stages of development can be
distinguished, which the individual man, as well as the whole race, must
of necessity traverse in a determinate order if they are to fulfil the
circle of their determination. No doubt, the separate periods can be
lengthened or shortened, through accidental causes which are inherent
either in the influence of external things or under the free caprice of
men: but neither of them can be overstepped, and the order of their
sequence cannot be inverted either by nature or by the will. Man, in his
physical condition, suffers only the power of nature; he gets rid of this
power in the aesthetical condition, and he rules them in the moral state.

What is man before beauty liberates him from free pleasure, and the
serenity of form tames down the savageness of life? Eternally uniform in
his aims, eternally changing in his judgments, self-seeking without being
himself, unfettered without being free, a slave without serving any rule.
At this period, the world is to him only destiny, not yet an object; all
has existence for him only in as far as it procures existence to him; a
thing that neither seeks from nor gives to him is non-existent. Every
phenomenon stands out before him separate and cut off, as he finds
himself in the series of beings. All that is, is to him through the bias
of the moment; every change is to him an entirely fresh creation, because
with the necessary in him, the necessary out of him is wanting, which
binds together all the changing forms in the universe, and which holds
fast the law on the theatre of his action, while the individual departs.
It is in vain that nature lets the rich variety of her forms pass before
him; he sees in her glorious fulness nothing but his prey, in her power
and greatness nothing but his enemy. Either he encounters objects, and
wishes to draw them to himself in desire, or the objects press in a
destructive manner upon him, and he thrusts them away in dismay and
terror. In both cases his relation to the world of sense is immediate
contact; and perpetually anxious through its pressure, restless and
plagued by imperious wants, he nowhere finds rest except in enervation,
and nowhere limits save in exhausted desire.

"True, his is the powerful breast, and the mighty hand
of the Titans. . . .
A certain inheritance; yet the god welded
Round his forehead a brazen band;
Advice, moderation, wisdom, and patience,--
Hid it from his shy, sinister look.
Every desire is with him a rage,
And his rage prowls around limitless. "--Iphigenia in Tauris.

Ignorant of his own human dignity, he is far removed from honoring it in
others, and conscious of his own savage greed, he fears it in every
creature that he sees like himself. He never sees others in himself,
only himself in others, and human society, instead of enlarging him to
the race, only shuts him up continually closer in his individuality.
Thus limited, he wanders through his sunless life, till favoring nature
rolls away the load of matter from his darkened senses, reflection
separates him from things, and objects show themselves at length in the
afterglow of the consciousness.

It is true we cannot point out this state of rude nature as we have here
portrayed it in any definite people and age. It is only an idea, but an
idea with which experience agrees most closely in special features. It
may be said that man was never in this animal condition, but he has not,
on the other hand, ever entirely escaped from it. Even in the rudest
subjects, unmistakable traces of rational freedom can be found, and even
in the most cultivated, features are not wanting that remind us of that
dismal natural condition. It is possible for man, at one and the same
time, to unite the highest and the lowest in his nature; and if his
dignity depends on a strict separation of one from the other, his
happiness depends on a skilful removal of this separation. The culture
which is to bring his dignity into agreement with his happiness will
therefore have to provide for the greatest purity of these two principles
in their most intimate combination.

Consequently the first appearance of reason in man is not the beginning
of humanity. This is first decided by his freedom, and reason begins
first by making his sensuous dependence boundless; a phenomenon that does
not appear to me to have been sufficiently elucidated, considering its
importance and universality. We know that the reason makes itself known
to man by the demand for the absolute--the self-dependent and necessary.
But as this want of the reason cannot be satisfied in any separate or
single state of his physical life, he is obliged to leave the physical
entirely and to rise from a limited reality to ideas. But although the
true meaning of that demand of the reason is to withdraw him from the
limits of time and to lead him from the world of sense to an ideal world,
yet this same demand of reason, by misapplication--scarcely to be avoided
in this life, prone to sensuousness--can direct him to physical life,
and, instead of making man free, plunge him in the most terrible slavery.

Facts verify this supposition. Man raised on the wings of imagination
leaves the narrow limits of the present, in which mere animality is
enclosed, in order to strive on to an unlimited future. But while the
limitless is unfolded to his dazed imagination, his heart has not ceased
to live in the separate, and to serve the moment. The impulse towards
the absolute seizes him suddenly in the midst of his animality, and as in
this cloddish condition all his efforts aim only at the material and
temporal, and are limited by his individuality, he is only led by that
demand of the reason to extend his individuality into the infinite,
instead of to abstract from it. He will be led to seek instead of form
an inexhaustible matter, instead of the unchangeable an everlasting
change and an absolute securing of his temporal existence. The same
impulse which, directed to his thought and action, ought to lead to truth
and morality, now directed to his passion and emotional state, produces
nothing but an unlimited desire and an absolute want. The first fruits,
therefore, that he reaps in the world of spirits are cares and fear--both
operations of the reason; not of sensuousness, but of a reason that
mistakes its object and applies its categorical imperative to matter.
All unconditional systems of happiness are fruits of this tree, whether
they have for their object the present day or the whole of life, or what
does not make them any more respectable, the whole of eternity, for their
object. An unlimited duration of existence and of well-being is only an
ideal of the desires; hence a demand which can only be put forth by an
animality striving up to the absolute. Man, therefore, without gaining
anything for his humanity by a rational expression of this sort, loses
the happy limitation of the animal, over which he now only possesses the
unenviable superiority of losing the present for an endeavor after what
is remote, yet without seeking in the limitless future anything but the
present.

But even if the reason does not go astray in its object, or err in the
question, sensuousness will continue to falsify the answer for a long
time. As soon as man has begun to use his understanding and to knit
together phenomena in cause and effect, the reason, according to its
conception, presses on to an absolute knitting together and to an
unconditional basis. In order, merely, to be able to put forward this
demand, man must already have stepped beyond the sensuous, but the
sensuous uses this very demand to bring back the fugitive.

In fact, it is now that he ought to abandon entirely the world of sense
in order to take his flight into the realm of ideas; for the intelligence
remains eternally shut up in the finite and in the contingent, and does
not cease putting questions without reaching the last link of the chain.
But as the man with whom we are engaged is not yet capable of such an
abstraction, and does not find it in the sphere of sensuous knowledge,
and because he does not look for it in pure reason, he will seek for it
below in the region of sentiment, and will appear to find it. No doubt
the sensuous shows him nothing that has its foundation in itself, and
that legislates for itself, but it shows him something that does not care
for foundation or law; therefore, thus not being able to quiet the
intelligence by showing it a final cause, he reduces it to silence by the
conception which desires no cause; and being incapable of understanding
the sublime necessity of reason, he keeps to the blind constraint of
matter. As sensuousness knows no other end than its interest, and is
determined by nothing except blind chance, it makes the former the motive
of its actions, and the latter the master of the world.

Even the divine part in man, the moral law, in its first manifestation in
the sensuous cannot avoid this perversion. As this moral law is only
prohibited, and combats in man the interest of sensuous egotism, it must
appear to him as something strange until he has come to consider this
self-love as the stranger, and the voice of reason as his true self.
Therefore he confines himself to feeling the fetters which the latter
imposes on him, without having the consciousness of the infinite
emancipation which it procures for him. Without suspecting in himself
the dignity of lawgiver, he only experiences the constraint and the
impotent revolt of a subject fretting under the yoke, because in this
experience the sensuous impulsion precedes the moral impulsion, he gives
to the law of necessity a beginning in him, a positive origin, and by the
most unfortunate of all mistakes he converts the immutable and the
eternal in himself into a transitory accident. He makes up his mind to
consider the notions of the just and the unjust as statutes which have
been introduced by a will, and not as having in themselves an eternal
value. Just as in the explanation of certain natural phenomena he goes
beyond nature and seeks out of her what can only be found in her, in her
own laws; so also in the explanation of moral phenomena he goes beyond
reason and makes light of his humanity, seeking a god in this way. It is
not wonderful that a religion which he has purchased at the cost of his
humanity shows itself worthy of this origin, and that he only considers
as absolute and eternally binding laws that have never been binding from
all eternity. He has placed himself in relation with, not a holy being,
but a powerful. Therefore the spirit of his religion, of the homage that
he gives to God, is a fear that abases him, and not a veneration that
elevates him in his own esteem.

Though these different aberrations by which man departs from the ideal of
his destination cannot all take place at the same time, because several
degrees have to be passed over in the transition from the obscure of
thought to error, and from the obscure of will to the corruption of the
will; these degrees are all, without exception, the consequence of his
physical state, because in all the vital impulsion sways the formal
impulsion. Now, two cases may happen: either reason may not yet have
spoken in man, and the physical may reign over him with a blind
necessity, or reason may not be sufficiently purified from sensuous
impressions, and the moral may still be subject to the physical; in both
cases the only principle that has a real power over him is a material
principle, and man, at least as regards his ultimate tendency, is a
sensuous being. The only difference is, that in the former case he is an
animal without reason, and in the second case a rational animal. But he
ought to be neither one nor the other: he ought to be a man. Nature
ought not to rule him exclusively; nor reason conditionally. The two
legislations ought to be completely independent, and yet mutually
complementary.




LETTER XXV.


Whilst man, in his first physical condition, is only passively affected
by the world of sense, he is still entirely identified with it; and for
this reason the external world, as yet, has no objective existence for
him. When he begins in his aesthetic state of mind to regard the world
objectively, then only is his personality severed from it, and the world
appears to him an objective reality, for the simple reason that he has
ceased to form an identical portion of it.

That which first connects man with the surrounding universe is the power
of reflective contemplation. Whereas desire seizes at once its object,
reflection removes it to a distance and renders it inalienably her own by
saving it from the greed of passion. The necessity of sense which he
obeyed during the period of mere sensations, lessens during the period of
reflection; the senses are for the time in abeyance; even ever-fleeting
time stands still whilst the scattered rays of consciousness are
gathering and shape themselves; an image of the infinite is reflected
upon the perishable ground. As soon as light dawns in man, there is no,
longer night outside of him; as soon as there is peace within him the
storm lulls throughout the universe, and the contending forces of nature
find rest within prescribed limits. Hence we cannot wonder if ancient
traditions allude to these great changes in the inner man as to a
revolution in surrounding nature, and symbolize thought triumphing over
the laws of time, by the figure of Zeus, which terminates the reign of
Saturn.

As long as man derives sensations from a contact with nature, he is her
slave; but as soon as he begins to reflect upon her objects and laws he
becomes her lawgiver. Nature, which previously ruled him as a power, now
expands before him as an object. What is objective to him can have no
power over him, for in order to become objective it has to experience his
own power. As far and as long as he impresses a form upon matter, he
cannot be injured by its effect; for a spirit can only be injured by that
which deprives it of its freedom. Whereas he proves his own freedom by
giving a form to the formless; where the mass rules heavily and without
shape, and its undefined outlines are for ever fluctuating between
uncertain boundaries, fear takes up its abode; but man rises above any
natural terror as soon as he knows how to mould it, and transform it into
an object of his art. As soon as he upholds his independence towards
phenomenal natures he maintains his dignity toward her as a thing of
power, and with a noble freedom he rises against his gods. They throw
aside the mask with which they had kept him in awe during his infancy,
and to his surprise his mind perceives the reflection of his own image.
The divine monster of the Oriental, which roams about changing the world
with the blind force of a beast of prey, dwindles to the charming outline
of humanity in Greek fable; the empire of the Titans is crushed, and
boundless force is tamed by infinite form.

But whilst I have been merely searching for an issue from the material
world, and a passage into the world of mind, the bold flight of my
imagination has already taken me into the very midst of the latter world.
The beauty of which we are in search we have left behind by passing from
the life of mere sensations to the pure form and to the pure object.
Such a leap exceeds the condition of human nature; in order to keep pace
with the latter we must return to the world of sense.

Beauty is indeed the sphere of unfettered contemplation and reflection;
beauty conducts us into the world of ideas, without however taking us
from the world of sense, as occurs when a truth is perceived and
acknowledged. This is the pure product of a process of abstraction from
everything material and accidental, a pure object free from every
subjective barrier, a pure state of self-activity without any admixture
of passive sensations. There is indeed a way back to sensation from the
highest abstraction; for thought teaches the inner sensation, and the
idea of logical or moral unity passes into a sensation of sensual accord.
But if we delight in knowledge we separate very accurately our own
conceptions from our sensations; we look upon the latter as something
accidental, which might have been omitted without the knowledge being
impaired thereby, without truth being less true. It would, however, be a
vain attempt to suppress this connection of the faculty of feeling with
the idea of beauty, consequently, we shall not succeed in representing to
ourselves one as the effect of the other, but we must look upon them both
together and reciprocally as cause and effect. In the pleasure which we
derive from knowledge we readily distinguish the passage from the active
to the passive state, and we clearly perceive that the first ends when
the second begins. On the contrary, from the pleasure which we take in
beauty, this transition from the active to the passive is not
perceivable, and reflection is so intimately blended with feeling that we
believe we feel the form immediately. Beauty is then an object to us, it
is true, because reflection is the condition of the feeling which we have
of it; but it is also a state of our personality (our Ego) because the
feeling is the condition of the idea we conceive of it: beauty is
therefore doubtless form, because we contemplate it, but it is equally
life because we feel it. In a word, it is at once our state and our act.
And precisely because it is at the same time both a state and an act, it
triumphantly proves to us that the passive does not exclude the active,
neither matter nor form, neither the finite nor the infinite; and that
consequently the physical dependence to which man is necessarily devoted
does not in any way destroy his moral liberty. This is the proof of
beauty, and I ought to add that this alone can prove it. In fact, as in
the possession of truth or of logical unity, feeling is not necessarily
one with the thought, but follows it accidentally; it is a fact which
only proves that a sensitive nature can succeed a rational nature, and
vice versa; not that they co-exist, that they exercise a reciprocal
action one over the other; and, lastly, that they ought to be united in
an absolute and necessary manner. From this exclusion of feeling as long
as there is thought, and of thought so long as there is feeling, we
should on the contrary conclude that the two natures are incompatible, so
that in order to demonstrate that pure reason is to be realized in
humanity, the best proof given by the analysis is that this realization
is demanded. But, as in the realization of beauty or of aesthetic unity,
there is a real union, mutual substitution of matter and of form, of
passive and of active, by this alone is proved the compatibility of the
two natures, the possible realization of the infinite in the finite, and
consequently also the possibility of the most sublime humanity.

Henceforth we need no longer be embarrassed to find a transition from
dependent feeling to moral liberty, because beauty reveals to us the fact
that they can perfectly coexist, and that to show himself a spirit, man
need not escape from matter. But if on one side he is free, even in his
relation with a visible world, as the fact of beauty teaches, and if on
the other side freedom is something absolute and supersensuous, as its
idea necessarily implies, the question is no longer how man succeeds in
raising himself from the finite to the absolute, and opposing himself in
his thought and will to sensuality, as this has already been produced in
the fact of beauty. In a word, we have no longer to ask how he passes
from virtue to truth which is already included in the former, but how he
opens a way for himself from vulgar reality to aesthetic reality, and
from the ordinary feelings of life to the perception of the beautiful.




LETTER XXVI.


I have shown in the previous letters that it is only the aesthetic
disposition of the soul that gives birth to liberty, it cannot therefore
be derived from liberty nor have a moral origin. It must be a gift of
nature; the favor of chance alone can break the bonds of the physical
state and bring the savage to duty. The germ of the beautiful will find
an equal difficulty in developing itself in countries where a severe
nature forbids man to enjoy himself, and in those where a prodigal nature
dispenses him from all effort; where the blunted senses experience no
want, and where violent desire can never be satisfied. The delightful
flower of the beautiful will never unfold itself in the case of the
Troglodyte hid in his cavern always alone, and never finding humanity
outside himself; nor among nomads, who, travelling in great troops, only
consist of a multitude, and have no individual humanity. It will only
flourish in places where man converses peacefully with himself in his
cottage, and with the whole race when he issues from it. In those
climates where a limpid ether opens the senses to the lightest
impression, whilst a life-giving warmth develops a luxuriant nature,
where even in the inanimate creation the sway of inert matter is
overthrown, and the victorious form ennobles even the most abject
natures; in this joyful state and fortunate zone, where activity alone
leads to enjoyment, and enjoyment to activity, from life itself issues a
holy harmony, and the laws of order develop life, a different result
takes place. When imagination incessantly escapes from reality, and does
not abandon the simplicity of nature in its wanderings: then and there
only the mind and the senses, the receptive force and the plastic force,
are developed in that happy equilibrium which is the soul of the
beautiful and the condition of humanity.

What phenomenon accompanies the initiation of the savage into humanity?
However far we look back into history the phenomenon is identical among
all people who have shaken off the slavery of the animal state: the love
of appearance, the inclination for dress and for games.

Extreme stupidity and extreme intelligence have a certain affinity in
only seeking the real and being completely insensible to mere appearance.
The former is only drawn forth by the immediate presence of an object in
the senses, and the second is reduced to a quiescent state only by
referring conceptions to the facts of experience. In short, stupidity
cannot rise above reality, nor the intelligence descend below truth.
Thus, in as far as the want of reality and attachment to the real are
only the consequence of a want and a defect, indifference to the real and
an interest taken in appearances are a real enlargement of humanity and a
decisive step towards culture. In the first place it is the proof of an
exterior liberty, for as long as necessity commands and want solicits,
the fancy is strictly chained down to the real: it is only when want is
satisfied that it develops without hinderance. But it is also the proof
of an internal liberty, because it reveals to us a force which,
independent of an external substratum, sets itself in motion, and has
sufficient energy to remove from itself the solicitations of nature. The
reality of things is effected by things, the appearance of things is the
work of man, and a soul that takes pleasure in appearance does not take
pleasure in what it receives but in what it makes.

It is self-evident that I am speaking of aesthetical evidence different
from reality and truth, and not of logical appearance identical with
them. Therefore if it is liked it is because it is an appearance, and
not because it is held to be something better than it is: the first
principle alone is a play, whilst the second is a deception. To give a
value to the appearance of the first kind can never injure truth, because
it is never to be feared that it will supplant it--the only way in which
truth can be injured. To despise this appearance is to despise in
general all the fine arts of which it is the essence. Nevertheless, it
happens sometimes that the understanding carries its zeal for reality as
far as this intolerance, and strikes with a sentence of ostracism all the
arts relating to beauty in appearance, because it is only an appearance.
However, the intelligence only shows this vigorous spirit when it calls
to mind the affinity pointed out further back. I shall find some day the
occasion to treat specially of the limits of beauty in its appearance.

It is nature herself which raises man from reality to appearance by
endowing him with two senses which only lead him to the knowledge of the
real through appearance. In the eye and the ear the organs of the senses
are already freed from the persecutions of nature, and the object with
which we are immediately in contact through the animal senses is remoter
from us. What we see by the eye differs from what we feel; for the
understanding to reach objects overleaps the light which separates us
from them. In truth, we are passive to an object: in sight and hearing
the object is a form we create. While still a savage, man only enjoys
through touch merely aided by sight and sound. He either does not rise
to perception through sight, or does not rest there. As soon as he
begins to enjoy through sight, vision has an independent value, he is
aesthetically free, and the instinct of play is developed.

The instinct of play likes appearance, and directly it is awakened it is
followed by the formal imitative instinct which treats appearance as an
independent thing. Directly man has come to distinguish the appearance
from the reality, the form from the body, he can separate, in fact he has
already done so. Thus the faculty of the art of imitation is given with
the faculty of form in general. The inclination that draws us to it
reposes on another tendency I have not to notice here. The exact period
when the aesthetic instinct, or that of art, develops, depends entirely
on the attraction that mere appearance has for men.

As every real existence proceeds from nature as a foreign power, whilst
every appearance comes in the first place from man as a percipient
subject, he only uses his absolute sight in separating semblance from
essence, and arranging according to subjective law. With an unbridled
liberty he can unite what nature has severed, provided he can imagine his
union, and he can separate what nature has united, provided this
separation can take place in his intelligence. Here nothing can be
sacred to him but his own law: the only condition imposed upon him is to
respect the border which separates his own sphere from the existence of
things or from the realm of nature.

This human right of ruling is exercised by man in the art of appearance;
and his success in extending the empire of the beautiful, and guarding
the frontiers of truth, will be in proportion with the strictness with
which he separates form from substance: for if he frees appearance from
reality, he must also do the converse.

But man possesses sovereign power only in the world of appearance, in the
unsubstantial realm of imagination, only by abstaining from giving being
to appearance in theory, and by giving it being in practice. It follows
that the poet transgresses his proper limits when he attributes being to
his ideal, and when he gives this ideal aim as a determined existence.
For he can only reach this result by exceeding his right as a poet, that
of encroaching by the ideal on the field of experience, and by pretending
to determine real existence in virtue of a simple possibility, or else he
renounces his right as a poet by letting experience encroach on the
sphere of the ideal, and by restricting possibility to the conditions of
reality.

It is only by being frank or disclaiming all reality, and by being
independent or doing without reality, that the appearance is aesthetical.
Directly it apes reality or needs reality for effect, it is nothing more
than a vile instrument for material ends, and can prove nothing for the
freedom of the mind. Moreover, the object in which we find beauty need
not be unreal if our judgment disregards this reality; for if it regards
this the judgment is no longer aesthetical. A beautiful woman, if
living, would no doubt please us as much and rather more than an equally
beautiful woman seen in painting; but what makes the former please men is
not her being an independent appearance; she no longer pleases the pure
aesthetic feeling. In the painting, life must only attract as an
appearance, and reality as an idea. But it is certain that to feel in a
living object only the pure appearance requires a greatly higher
aesthetic culture than to do without life in the appearance.

When the frank and independent appearance is found in man separately, or
in a whole people, it may be inferred they have mind, taste, and all
prerogatives connected with them. In this case the ideal will be seen to
govern real life, honor triumphing over fortune, thought over enjoyment,
the dream of immortality over a transitory existence.

In this case public opinion will no longer be feared, and an olive crown
will be more valued than a purple mantle. Impotence and perversity alone
have recourse to false and paltry semblance, and individuals as well as
nations who lend to reality the support of appearance, or to the
aesthetic appearance the support of reality, show their moral
unworthiness and their aesthetical impotence. Therefore, a short and
conclusive answer can be given to this question--how far will appearance
be permitted in the moral world? It will run thus in proportion as this
appearance will be aesthetical, that is, an appearance that does not try
to make up for reality, nor requires to be made up for by it. The
aesthetical appearance can never endanger the truth of morals: wherever
it seems to do so the appearance is not aesthetical. Only a stranger to
the fashionable world can take the polite assurances, which are only a
form, for proofs of affection, and say he has been deceived; but only a
clumsy fellow in good society calls in the aid of duplicity and flatters
to become amiable. The former lacks the pure sense for independent
appearance; therefore he can only give a value to appearance by truth.
The second lacks reality, and wishes to replace it by appearance.
Nothing is more common than to hear depreciators of the times utter these
paltry complaints--that all solidity has disappeared from the world, and
that essence is neglected for semblance. Though I feel by no means
called upon to defend this age against these reproaches, I must say that
the wide application of these criticisms shows that they attach blame to
the age, not only on the score of the false, but also of the frank
appearance. And even the exceptions they admit in favor of the beautiful
have for their object less the independent appearance than the needy
appearance.
Not only do they attack the artificial coloring that hides
truth and replaces reality, but also the beneficent appearance that fills
a vacuum and clothes poverty; and they even attack the ideal appearance
that ennobles a vulgar reality. Their strict sense of truth is rightly
offended by the falsity of manners; unfortunately, they class politeness
in this category. It displeases them that the noisy and showy so often
eclipse true merit, but they are no less shocked that appearance is also
demanded from merit, and that a real substance does not dispense with an
agreeable form. They regret the cordiality, the energy, and solidity of
ancient times; they would restore with them ancient coarseness,
heaviness, and the old Gothic profusion. By judgments of this kind they
show an esteem for the matter itself unworthy of humanity, which ought
only to value the matter inasmuch as it can receive a form and enlarge
the empire of ideas. Accordingly, the taste of the age need not much
fear these criticisms if it can clear itself before better judges. Our
defect is not to grant a value to aesthetic appearance (we do not do this
enough): a severe judge of the beautiful might rather reproach us with
not having arrived at pure appearance, with not having separated clearly
enough existence from the phenomenon, and thus established their limits.
We shall deserve this reproach so long as we cannot enjoy the beautiful
in living nature without desiring it; as long as we cannot admire the
beautiful in the imitative arts without having an end in view; as long as
we do not grant to imagination an absolute legislation of its own; and as
long as we do not inspire it with care for its dignity by the esteem we
testify for its works.




LETTER XXVII.


Do not fear for reality and truth. Even if the elevated idea of
aesthetic appearance become general, it would not become so, as long as
man remains so little cultivated as to abuse it; and if it became
general, this would result from a culture that would prevent all abuse of
it. The pursuit of independent appearance requires more power of
abstraction, freedom of heart, and energy of will than man requires to
shut himself up in reality; and he must have left the latter behind him
if he wishes to attain to aesthetic appearance. Therefore, a man would
calculate very badly who took the road of the ideal to save himself that
of reality. Thus, reality would not have much to fear from appearance,
as we understand it; but, on the other hand, appearance would have more
to fear from reality. Chained to matter, man uses appearance for his
purposes before he allows it a proper personality in the art of the
ideal: to come to that point a complete revolution must take place in his
mode of feeling, otherwise, he would not be even on the way to the ideal.
Consequently, when we find in man the signs of a pure and disinterested
esteem, we can infer that this revolution has taken place in his nature,
and that humanity has really begun in him. Signs of this kind are found
even in the first and rude attempts that he makes to embellish his
existence, even at the risk of making it worse in its material
conditions. As soon as he begins to prefer form to substance and to risk
reality for appearance (known by him to be such), the barriers of animal
life fall, and he finds himself on a track that has no end.

Not satisfied with the needs of nature, he demands the superfluous.
First, only the superfluous of matter, to secure his enjoyment beyond the
present necessity; but afterward; he wishes a superabundance in matter,
an aesthetical supplement to satisfy the impulse for the formal, to
extend enjoyment beyond necessity. By piling up provisions simply for a
future use, and anticipating their enjoyment in the imagination, he
outsteps the limits of the present moment, but not those of time in
general. He enjoys more; he does not enjoy differently. But as soon as
he makes form enter into his enjoyment, and he keeps in view the forms of
the objects which satisfy his desires, he has not only increased his
pleasure in extent and intensity, but he has also ennobled it in mode and
species.

No doubt nature has given more than is necessary to unreasoning beings;
she has caused a gleam of freedom to shine even in the darkness of animal
life. When the lion is not tormented by hunger, and when no wild beast
challenges him to fight, his unemployed energy creates an object for
himself; full of ardor, he fills the re-echoing desert with his terrible
roars, and his exuberant force rejoices in itself, showing itself without
an object. The insect flits about rejoicing in life in the sunlight, and
it is certainly not the cry of want that makes itself heard in the
melodious song of the bird; there is undeniably freedom in these
movements, though it is not emancipation from want in general, but from a
determinate external necessity.

The animal works, when a privation is the motor of its activity, and it
plays when the plenitude of force is this motor, when an exuberant life
is excited to action. Even in inanimate nature a luxury of strength and
a latitude of determination are shown, which in this material sense might
be styled play. The tree produces numberless germs that are abortive
without developing, and it sends forth more roots, branches, and leaves,
organs of nutrition, than are used for the preservation of the species.
Whatever this tree restores to the elements of its exuberant life,
without using it or enjoying it, may be expended by life in free and
joyful movements. It is thus that nature offers in her material sphere a
sort of prelude to the limitless, and that even there she suppresses
partially the chains from which she will be completely emancipated in the
realm of form. The constraint of superabundance or physical play answers
as a transition from the constraint of necessity, or of physical
seriousness, to aesthetical play; and before shaking off, in the supreme
freedom of the beautiful, the yoke of any special aim, nature already
approaches, at least remotely, this independence, by the free movement
which is itself its own end and means.

The imagination, like the bodily organs, has in man its free movement and
its material play, a play in which, without any reference to form, it
simply takes pleasure in its arbitrary power and in the absence of all
hinderance. These plays of fancy, inasmuch as form is not mixed up with
them, and because a free succession of images makes all their charm,
though confined to man, belong exclusively to animal life, and only prove
one thing--that he is delivered from all external sensuous constraint
without our being entitled to infer that there is in it an independent
plastic force.

From this play of free association of ideas, which is still quite
material in nature and is explained by simple natural laws, the
imagination, by making the attempt of creating a free form, passes at
length at a jump to the aesthetic play: I say at one leap, for quite a
new force enters into action here; for here, for the first time, the
legislative mind is mixed with the acts of a blind instinct, subjects the
arbitrary march of the imagination to its eternal and immutable unity,
causes its independent permanence to enter in that which is transitory,
and its infinity in the sensuous. Nevertheless, as long as rude nature,
which knows of no other law than running incessantly from change to
change, will yet retain too much strength, it will oppose itself by its
different caprices to this necessity; by its agitation to this
permanence; by its manifold needs to this independence, and by its
insatiability to this sublime simplicity. It will be also troublesome to
recognize the instinct of play in its first trials, seeing that the
sensuous impulsion, with its capricious humor and its violent appetites,
constantly crosses. It is on that account that we see the taste, still
coarse, seize that which is new and startling, the disordered, the
adventurous and the strange, the violent and the savage, and fly from
nothing so much as from calm and simplicity. It invents grotesque
figures, it likes rapid transitions, luxurious forms, sharply-marked
changes, acute tones, a pathetic song. That which man calls beautiful at
this time is that which excites him, that which gives him matter; but
that which excites him to give his personality to the object, that which
gives matter to a possible plastic operation, for otherwise it would not
be the beautiful for him. A remarkable change has therefore taken place
in the form of his judgments; he searches for these objects, not because
they affect him, but because they furnish him with the occasion of
acting; they please him, not because they answer to a want, but because
they satisfy a law which speaks in his breast, although quite low as yet.

Soon it will not be sufficient for things to please him; he will wish to
please: in the first place, it is true, only by that which belongs to
him; afterwards by that which he is. That which he possesses, that which
he produces, ought not merely to bear any more the traces of servitude,
nor to mark out the end, simply and scrupulously, by the form.
Independently of the use to which it is destined, the object ought also
to reflect the enlightened intelligence which imagines it, the hand which
shaped it with affection, the mind free and serene which chose it and
exposed it to view. Now, the ancient German searches for more
magnificent furs, for more splendid antlers of the stag, for more elegant
drinking-horns; and the Caledonian chooses the prettiest shells for his
festivals. The arms themselves ought to be no longer only objects of
terror, but also of pleasure; and the skilfully-worked scabbard will not
attract less attention than the homicidal edge of the sword. The
instinct of play, not satisfied with bringing into the sphere of the
necessary an aesthetic superabundance for the future more free, is at
last completely emancipated from the bonds of duty, and the beautiful
becomes of itself an object of man's exertions. He adorns himself. The
free pleasure comes to take a place among his wants, and the useless soon
becomes the best part of his joys. Form, which from the outside
gradually approaches him, in his dwelling, his furniture, his clothing,
begins at last to take possession of the man himself, to transform him,
at first exteriorly, and afterwards in the interior. The disordered
leaps of joy become the dance, the formless gesture is changed into an
amiable and harmonious pantomime, the confused accents of feeling are
developed, and begin to obey measures and adapt themselves to song.
When, like the flight of cranes, the Trojan army rushes on to the field
of battle with thrilling cries, the Greek army approaches in silence and
with a noble and measured step. On the one side we see but the
exuberance of a blind force, on the other the triumph of form, and the
simple majesty of law.

Now, a nobler necessity binds the two sexes mutually, and the interests
of the heart contribute in rendering durable an alliance which was at
first capricious and changing like the desire that knits it. Delivered
from the heavy fetters of desire, the eye, now calmer, attends to the
form, the soul contemplates the soul, and the interested exchange of
pleasure becomes a generous exchange of mutual inclination. Desire
enlarges and rises to love, in proportion as it sees humanity dawn in its
object; and, despising the vile triumphs gained by the senses, man tries
to win a nobler victory over the will. The necessity of pleasing
subjects the powerful nature to the gentle laws of taste; pleasure may be
stolen, but love must be a gift. To obtain this higher recompense, it is
only through the form and not through matter that it can carry on the
contest. It must cease to act on feeling as a force, to appear in the
intelligence as a simple phenomenon; it must respect liberty, as it is
liberty it wishes to please. The beautiful reconciles the contrast of
different natures in its simplest and purest expression. It also
reconciles the eternal contrast of the two sexes in the whole complex
framework of society, or at all events it seeks to do so; and, taking as
its model the free alliance it has knit between manly strength and
womanly gentleness, it strives to place in harmony, in the moral world,
all the elements of gentleness and of violence. Now, at length, weakness
becomes sacred, and an unbridled strength disgraces; the injustice of
nature is corrected by the generosity of chivalrous manners. The being
whom no power can make tremble, is disarmed by the amiable blush of
modesty, and tears extinguish a vengeance that blood could not have
quenched. Hatred itself hears the delicate voice of honor, the
conqueror's sword spares the disarmed enemy, and a hospitable hearth
smokes for the stranger on the dreaded hillside where murder alone
awaited him before.

In the midst of the formidable realm of forces, and of the sacred empire
of laws, the aesthetic impulse of form creates by degrees a third and a
joyous realm, that of play and of the appearance, where she emancipates
man from fetters, in all his relations, and from all that is named
constraint, whether physical or moral.

If in the dynamic state of rights men mutually move and come into
collision as forces, in the moral (ethical) state of duties, man opposes
to man the majesty of the laws, and chains down his will. In this realm
of the beautiful or the aesthetic state, man ought to appear to man only
as a form, and an object of free play. To give freedom through freedom
is the fundamental law of this realm.

The dynamic state can only make society simple possibly by subduing
nature through nature; the moral (ethical) state can only make it morally
necessary by submitting the will of the individual to the general will.

The aesthetic state alone can make it real, because it carries out the
will of all through the nature of the individual. If necessity alone
forces man to enter into society, and if his reason engraves on his soul
social principles, it is beauty only that can give him a social
character; taste alone brings harmony into society, because it creates
harmony in the individual. All other forms of perception divide the man,
because they are based exclusively either in the sensuous or in the
spiritual part of his being. It is only the perception of beauty that
makes of him an entirety, because it demands the co-operation of his two
natures. All other forms of communication divide society, because they
apply exclusively either to the receptivity or to the private activity of
its members, and therefore to what distinguishes men one from the other.
The aesthetic communication alone unites society because it applies to
what is common to all its members. We only enjoy the pleasures of sense
as individuals, without the nature of the race in us sharing in it;
accordingly, we cannot generalize our individual pleasures, because we
cannot generalize our individuality. We enjoy the pleasures of knowledge
as a race, dropping the individual in our judgment; but we cannot
generalize the pleasures of the understanding, because we cannot
eliminate individuality from the judgments of others as we do from our
own. Beauty alone can we enjoy both as individuals and as a race, that
is, as representing a race. Good appertaining to sense can only make one
person happy, because it is founded on inclination, which is always
exclusive; and it can only make a man partially happy, because his real
personality does not share in it. Absolute good can only render a man
happy conditionally, for truth is only the reward of abnegation, and a
pure heart alone has faith in a pure will. Beauty alone confers
happiness on all, and under its influence every being forgets that he is
limited.

Taste does not suffer any superior or absolute authority, and the sway of
beauty is extended over appearance. It extends up to the seat of
reason's supremacy, suppressing all that is material. It extends down to
where sensuous impulse rules with blind compulsion, and form is
undeveloped. Taste ever maintains its power on these remote borders,
where legislation is taken from it. Particular desires must renounce
their egotism, and the agreeable, otherwise tempting the senses, must in
matters of taste adorn the mind with the attractions of grace.

Duty and stern necessity must change their forbidding tone, only excused
by resistance, and do homage to nature by a nobler trust in her. Taste
leads our knowledge from the mysteries of science into the open expanse
of common sense, and changes a narrow scholasticism into the common
property of the human race. Here the highest genius must leave its
particular elevation, and make itself familiar to the comprehension even
of a child. Strength must let the Graces bind it, and the arbitrary lion
must yield to the reins of love. For this purpose taste throws a veil
over physical necessity, offending a free mind by its coarse nudity, and
dissimulating our degrading parentage with matter by a delightful
illusion of freedom. Mercenary art itself rises from the dust; and the
bondage of the bodily, at its magic touch, falls off from the inanimate
and animate. In the aesthetic state the most slavish tool is a free
citizen, having the same rights as the noblest; and the intellect which
shapes the mass to its intent must consult it concerning its destination.
Consequently, in the realm of aesthetic appearance, the idea of equality
is realized, which the political zealot would gladly see carried out
socially. It has often been said that perfect politeness is only found
near a throne. If thus restricted in the material, man has, as elsewhere
appears, to find compensation in the ideal world.

Does such a state of beauty in appearance exist, and where? It must be
in every finely-harmonized soul; but as a fact, only in select circles,
like the pure ideal of the church and state--in circles where manners are
not formed by the empty imitations of the foreign, but by the very beauty
of nature; where man passes through all sorts of complications in all
simplicity and innocence, neither forced to trench on another's freedom
to preserve his own, nor to show grace at the cost of dignity.






AESTHETICAL ESSAYS.




THE MORAL UTILITY OF AESTHETIC MANNERS.


The author of the article which appeared in the eleventh number of "The
Hours," of 1795, upon "The Danger of Aesthetic Manners," was right to
hold as doubtful a morality founded only on a feeling for the beautiful,
and which has no other warrant than taste; but it is evident that a
strong and pure feeling for the beautiful ought to exercise a salutary
influence upon the moral life; and this is the question of which I am
about to treat.

When I attribute to taste the merit of contributing to moral progress, it
is not in the least my intention to pretend that the interest that good
taste takes in an action suffices to make an action moral; morality could
never have any other foundation than her own. Taste can be favorable to
morality in the conduct, as I hope to point out in the present essay; but
alone, and by its unaided influence, it could never produce anything
moral.

It is absolutely the same with respect to internal liberty as with
external physical liberty. I act freely in a physical sense only when,
independently of all external influence, I simply obey my will. But for
the possibility of thus obeying without hinderance my own will, it is
probable, ultimately, that I am indebted to a principle beyond or
distinct from myself immediately it is admitted that this principle would
hamper my will. The same also with regard to the possibility of
accomplishing such action in conformity with duty--it may be that I owe
it, ultimately, to a principle distinct from my reason; that is possible,
the moment the idea of this principle is recognized as a force which
could have constrained my independence. Thus the same as we can say of a
man, that he holds his liberty from another man, although liberty in its
proper sense consists in not being forced to be regulated by another--in
like manner we can also say that taste here obeys virtue, although virtue
herself expressly carries this idea, that in the practice of virtue she
makes use of no other foreign help. An action does not in any degree
cease to be free, because he who could hamper its accomplishment should
fortunately abstain from putting any obstacle in the way; it suffices to
know that this agent has been moved by his own will without any
consideration of another will. In the same way, an action of the moral
order does not lose its right to be qualified as a moral action, because
the temptations which might have turned it in another direction did not
present themselves; it suffices to admit that the agent obeyed solely the
decree of his reason to the exclusion of all foreign springs of action.
The liberty of an external act is established as soon as it directly
proceeds from the will of a person; the morality of an interior action is
established from the moment that the will of the agent is at once
determined to it by the laws of reason.

It may be rendered easier or more difficult to act as free men according
as we meet or not in our path forces adverse to our will that must be
overcome. In this sense liberty is more or less susceptible. It is
greater, or at least more visible, when we enable it to prevail over the
opposing forces, however energetic their opposition; but it is not
suspended because our will should have met with no resistance, or that a
foreign succor coming to our aid should have destroyed this resistance,
without any help from ourselves.

The same with respect to morality; we might have more or less resistance
to offer in order on the instant to obey our reason, according as it
awakens or not in us those instincts which struggle against its precepts,
and which must be put aside. In this sense morality is susceptible of
more or of less. Our morality is greater, or at least more in relief,
when we immediately obey reason, however powerful the instincts are which
push us in a contrary direction; but it is not suspended because we have
had no temptation to disobey, or that this force had been paralyzed by
some other force other than our will. We are incited to an action solely
because it is moral, without previously asking ourselves if it is the
most agreeable. It is enough that such an action is morally good, and it
would preserve this character even if there were cause to believe that we
should have acted differently if the action had cost us any trouble, or
had deprived us of a pleasure.

It can be admitted, for the honor of humanity, that no man could fall so
low as to prefer evil solely because it is evil, but rather that every
man, without exception, would prefer the good because it is the good, if
by some accidental circumstance the good did not exclude the agreeable,
or did not entail trouble. Thus in reality all moral action seems to
have no other principle than a conflict between the good and the
agreeable; or, that which comes to the same thing, between desire and
reason; the force of our sensuous instincts on one side, and, on the
other side, the feebleness of will, the moral faculty: such apparently is
the source of all our faults.

There may be, therefore, two different ways of favoring morality, the
same as there are two kinds of obstacles which thwart it: either we must
strengthen the side of reason, and the power of the good will, so that no
temptation can overcome it; or we must break the force of temptation, in
order that the reason and the will, although feebler, should yet be in a
state to surmount it.

It might be said, without doubt, that true morality gains little by this
second proceeding, because it happens without any modification of the
will, and yet that it is the nature of the will that alone give to
actions their moral character. But I say also, in the case in question,
a change of will is not at all necessary; because we do not suppose a bad
will which should require to be changed, but only a will turned to good,
but which is feeble. Therefore, this will, inclined to good, but too
feeble, does not fail to attain by this route to good actions, which
might not have happened if a stronger impulsion had drawn it in a
contrary sense. But every time that a strong will towards good becomes
the principle of an action, we are really in presence of a moral action.
I have therefore no scruple in advancing this proposition--that all which
neutralizes the resistance offered to the law of duty really favors
morality.

Morality has within us a natural enemy, the sensuous instinct; this, as
soon as some object solicits its desires, aspires at once to gratify it,
and, as soon as reason requires from it anything repugnant, it does not
fail to rebel against its precepts. This sensuous instinct is constantly
occupied in gaining the will on its side. The will is nevertheless under
the jurisdiction of the moral law, and it is under an obligation never to
be in contradiction with that which reason demands.

But the sensuous instinct does not recognize the moral law; it wishes to
enjoy its object and to induce the will to realize it also,
notwithstanding what the reason may advance. This tendency of the
faculty of our appetites, of immediately directing the will without
troubling itself about superior laws, is perpetually in conflict with our
moral destination, and it is the most powerful adversary that man has to
combat in his moral conduct. The coarse soul, without either moral or
aesthetic education, receives directly the law of appetite, and acts only
according to the good pleasure of the senses. The moral soul, but which
wants aesthetic culture, receives in a direct manner the law of reason,
and it is only out of respect for duty that it triumphs over temptation.
In the purified aesthetic soul, there is moreover another motive, another
force, which frequently takes the place of virtue when virtue is absent,
and which renders it easier when it is present--that is, taste.

Taste demands of us moderation and dignity; it has a horror of everything
sharp, hard and violent; it likes all that shapes itself with ease and
harmony. To listen to the voice of reason amidst the tempest of the
senses, and to know where to place a limit to nature in its most
brutified explosions, is, as we are aware, required by good breeding,
which is no other than an aesthetic law; this is required of every
civilized man. Well, then, this constraint imposed upon civilized man in
the expression of his feelings, confers upon him already a certain degree
of authority over them, or at least develops in him a certain aptitude to
rise above the purely passive state of the soul, to interrupt this state
by an initiative act, and to stop by reflection the petulance of the
feelings, ever ready to pass from affections to acts. Therefore
everything that interrupts the blind impetuosity of these movements of
the affections does not as yet, however, produce, I own, a virtue (for
virtue ought never to have any other active principle than itself), but
that at least opens the road to the will, in order to turn it on the side
of virtue. Still, this victory of taste over brutish affections is by no
means a moral action, and the freedom which the will acquires by the
intervention of taste is as yet in no way a moral liberty. Taste
delivers the soul from the yoke of instinct, only to impose upon it
chains of its own; and in discerning the first enemy, the declared enemy
of moral liberty, it remains itself, too often, as a second enemy,
perhaps even the more dangerous as it assumes the aspect of a friend.
Taste effectively governs the soul itself only by the attraction of
pleasure; it is true of a nobler type, because its principle is reason,
but still as long as the will is determined by pleasure there is not yet
morality.

Notwithstanding this, a great point is gained already by the intervention
of taste in the operations of the will. All those material inclinations
and brutal appetites, which oppose with so much obstinacy and vehemence
the practice of good, the soul is freed from through the aesthetic taste;
and in their place, it implants in us nobler and gentler inclinations,
which draw nearer to order, to harmony, and to perfection; and although
these inclinations are not by themselves virtues, they have at least
something in common with virtue; it is their object. Thenceforth, if it
is the appetite that speaks, it will have to undergo a rigorous control
before the sense of the beautiful; if it is the reason which speaks, and
which commands in its acts conformity with order, harmony, and
perfection, not only will it no longer meet with an adversary on the side
of inclination, but it will find the most active competition. If we
survey all the forms under which morality can be produced, we shall see
that all these forms can be reduced to two; either it is sensuous nature
which moves the soul either to do this thing or not to do the other, and
the will finally decides after the law of the reason; or it is the reason
itself which impels the motion, and the will obeys it without seeking
counsel of the senses.

The Greek princess, Anna Comnena, speaks of a rebel prisoner, whom her
father Alexis, then a simple general of his predecessor, had been charged
to conduct to Constantinople. During the journey, as they were riding
side by side, Alexis desired to halt under the shade of a tree to refresh
himself during the great heat of the day. It was not long before he fell
asleep, whilst his companion, who felt no inclination to repose with the
fear of death awaiting him before his eyes, remained awake. Alexis
slumbered profoundly, with his sword hanging upon a branch above his
head; the prisoner perceived the sword, and immediately conceived the
idea of killing his guardian and thus of regaining his freedom. Anna
Comnena gives us to understand that she knows not what might have been
the result had not Alexis fortunately awoke at that instant. In this
there is a moral of the highest kind, in which the sensuous instinct
first raised its voice, and of which the reason had only afterwards taken
cognizance in quality of judge. But suppose that the prisoner had
triumphed over the temptation only out of respect for justice, there
could be no doubt the action would have been a moral action.

When the late Duke Leopold of Brunswick, standing upon the banks of the
raging waters of the Oder, asked himself if at the peril of his life he
ought to venture into the impetuous flood in order to save some
unfortunates who without his aid were sure to perish; and when--I suppose
a case--simply under the influence of duty, he throws himself into the
boat into which none other dares to enter, no one will contest doubtless
that he acted morally. The duke was here in a contrary position to that
of the preceding one. The idea of duty, in this circumstance, was the
first which presented itself, and afterwards only the instinct of
self-preservation was roused to oppose itself to that prescribed by
reason, But in both cases the will acted in the same way; it obeyed
unhesitatingly the reason, yet both of them are moral actions.

But would the action have continued moral in both cases, if we suppose
the aesthetic taste to have taken part in it? For example, suppose that
the first, who was tempted to commit a bad action, and who gave it up
from respect for justice, had the taste sufficiently cultivated to feel
an invincible horror aroused in him against all disgraceful or violent
action, the aesthetic sense alone will suffice to turn him from it; there
is no longer any deliberation before the moral tribunal, before the
conscience; another motive, another jurisdiction has already pronounced.
But the aesthetic sense governs the will by the feeling and not by laws.
Thus this man refuses to enjoy the agreeable sensation of a life saved,
because he cannot support his odious feelings of having committed a
baseness. Therefore all, in this, took place before the feelings alone,
and the conduct of this man, although in conformity with the law, is
morally indifferent; it is simply a fine effect of nature.

Now let us suppose that the second, he to whom his reason prescribed to
do a thing against which natural instinct protested; suppose that this
man had to the same extent a susceptibility for the beautiful, so that
all which is great and perfect enraptured him; at the same moment, when
reason gave the order, the feelings would place themselves on the same
side, and he would do willingly that which without the inclination for
the beautiful he would have had to do contrary to inclination. But would
this be a reason for us to find it less perfect? Assuredly not, because
in principle it acts out of pure respect for the prescriptions of reason;
and if it follows these injunctions with joy, that can take nothing away
from the moral purity of the act. Thus, this man will be quite as
perfect in the moral sense; and, on the contrary, he will be incomparably
more perfect in the physical sense, because he is infinitely more capable
of making a virtuous subject.

Thus, taste gives a direction to the soul which disposes it to virtue, in
keeping away such inclinations as are contrary to it, and in rousing
those which are favorable. Taste could not injure true virtue, although
in every case where natural instinct speaks first, taste commences by
deciding for its chief that which conscience otherwise ought to have
known; in consequence it is the cause that, amongst the actions of those
whom it governs, there are many more actions morally indifferent than
actions truly moral. It thus happens that the excellency of the man does
not consist in the least degree in producing a larger sum of vigorously
moral particular actions, but by evincing as a whole a greater conformity
of all his natural dispositions with the moral law; and it is not a thing
to give people a very high idea of their country or of their age to hear
morality so often spoken of and particular acts boasted of as traits of
virtue. Let us hope that the day when civilization shall have
consummated its work (if we can realize this term in the mind) there will
no longer be any question of this. But, on the other side, taste can
become of possible utility to true virtue, in all cases when, the first
instigations issuing from reason, its voice incurs the risk of being
stifled by the more powerful solicitations of natural instinct. Thus,
taste determines our feelings to take the part of duty, and in this
manner renders a mediocre moral force of will sufficient for the practice
of virtue.

In this light, if the taste never injures true morality, and if in many
cases it is of evident use--and this circumstance is very important--then
it is supremely favorable to the legality of our conduct. Suppose that
aesthetic education contributes in no degree to the improvement of our
feelings, at least it renders us better able to act, although without
true moral disposition, as we should have acted if our soul had been
truly moral. Therefore, it is quite true that, before the tribunal of
the conscience, our acts have absolutely no importance but as the
expression of our feelings: but it is precisely the contrary in the
physical order and in the plan of nature: there it is no longer our
sentiments that are of importance; they are only important so far as they
give occasion to acts which conduce to the aims of nature. But the
physical order which is governed by forces, and the moral order which
governs itself by laws, are so exactly made one for the other, and are so
intimately blended, that the actions which are by their form morally
suitable, necessarily contain also a physical suitability; and as the
entire edifice of nature seems to exist only to render possible the
highest of all aims, which is the good, in the same manner the good can
in its turn be employed as the means of preserving the edifice. Thus,
the natural order has been rendered dependent upon the morality of our
souls, and we cannot go against the moral laws of the world without at
the same time provoking a perturbation in the physical world.

If, then, it is impossible to expect that human nature, as long as it is
only human nature, should act without interruption or feebleness,
uniformly and constantly as pure reason, and that it never offend the
laws of moral order; if fully persuaded, as we are, both of the necessity
and the possibility of pure virtue, we are forced to avow how subject to
accident is the exercise of it, and how little we ought to reckon upon
the steadfastness of our best principles; if with this conviction of
human fragility we bear in mind that each of the infractions of the moral
law attacks the edifice of nature, if we recall all these considerations
to our memory, it would be assuredly the most criminal boldness to place
the interests of the entire world at the mercy of the uncertainty of our
virtue. Let us rather draw from it the following conclusion, that it is
for us an obligation to satisfy at the very least the physical order by
the object of our acts, even when we do not satisfy the exigencies of the
moral order by the form of these acts; to pay, at least, as perfect
instruments the aims of nature, that which we owe as imperfect persons to
reason, in order not to appear shamefaced before both tribunals. For if
we refused to make any effort to conform our acts to it because simple
legality is without moral merit, the order of the world might in the
meanwhile be dissolved, and before we had succeeded in establishing our
principles all the links of society might be broken. No, the more our
morality is subjected to chance, the more is it necessary to take
measures in order to assure its legality; to neglect, either from levity
or pride, this legality is a fault for which we shall have to answer
before morality. When a maniac believes himself threatened with a fit of
madness, he leaves no knife within reach of his hands, and he puts
himself under constraint, in order to avoid responsibility in a state of
sanity for the crimes which his troubled brain might lead him to commit.
In a similar manner it is an obligation for us to seek the salutary bonds
which religion and the aesthetic laws present to us, in order that during
the crisis when our passion is dominant it shall not injure the physical
order.

It is not unintentionally that I have placed religion and taste in one
and the same class; the reason is that both one and the other have the
merit, similar in effect, although dissimilar in principle and in value,
to take the place of virtue properly so called, and to assure legality
where there is no possibility to hope for morality. Doubtless that would
hold an incontestably higher rank in the order of pure spirits, as they
would need neither the attraction of the beautiful nor the perspective of
eternal life, to conform on every occasion to the demands of reason; but
we know man is short-sighted, and his feebleness forces the most rigid
moralist to temper in some degree the rigidity of his system in practice,
although he will yield nothing in theory; it obliges him, in order to
insure the welfare of the human race, which would be ill protected by a
virtue subjected to chance, to have further recourse to two strong
anchors--those of religion and taste.




ON THE SUBLIME.


"Man is never obliged to say, I must--must," says the Jew Nathan
[Lessing's play, "Nathan the Wise," act i. scene 3. ] to the dervish; and
this expression is true in a wider sense than man might be tempted to
suppose. The will is the specific character of man, and reason itself is
only the eternal rule of his will. All nature acts reasonably; all our
prerogative is to act reasonably, with consciousness and with will. All
other objects obey necessity; man is the being who wills.

It is exactly for this reason that there is nothing more inconsistent
with the dignity of man than to suffer violence, for violence effaces
him. He who does violence to us disputes nothing less than our humanity;
he who submits in a cowardly spirit to the violence abdicates his quality
of man. But this pretension to remain absolutely free from all that is
violence seems to imply a being in possession of a force sufficiently
great to keep off all other forces. But if this pretension is found in a
being who, in the order of forces, cannot claim the first rank, the
result is an unfortunate contradiction between his instinct and his
power.

Man is precisely in this case. Surrounded by numberless forces, which
are all superior to him and hold sway over him, he aspires by his nature
not to have to suffer any injury at their hands. It is true that by his
intelligence he adds artificially to his natural forces, and that up to a
certain point he actually succeeds in reigning physically over everything
that is physical. The proverb says, "there is a remedy for everything
except death;" but this exception, if it is one in the strictest
acceptation of the term, would suffice to entirely ruin the very idea of
our nature. Never will man be the cause that wills, if there is a case,
a single case, in which, with or without his consent, he is forced to
what he does not wish. This single terrible exception, to be or to do
what is necessary and not what he wishes, this idea will pursue him as a
phantom; and as we see in fact among the greater part of men, it will
give him up a prey to the blind terrors of imagination.