No More Learning

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 corruptions of
generations or of ages, which roll along far beneath it in dark eddies.
Its matter may be dishonored 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 depths 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 endeavor 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 intrust 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 in 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; labor 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 it 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
depravity. 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, delicacy
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 civilized 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
unfavorable 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
favored 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 labor of taste in the exterior and
interior 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 favorite 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 labor, 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
honorable 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 the 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 organizations 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 holds
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 colors, and since, in the contest with law and duty, they have
commonly remained masters of the battle-field. 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 fraternizing 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
exercising 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 favor of the taste of 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: civilization only dawned upon them when the
vigor 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 independence for an inglorious
resignation. It is almost superfluous 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 powerful 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 endeavor 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 phenomena, and the living presence of objects, to keep
us on the unproductive ground of abstract idea; 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 elevation as possible, it arrives at
two primary ideas, before which it is obliged to stop and to recognize
its limits. It distinguishes in man something that continues, and
something that changes incessantly. 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 necessary being, are eternally distinct
in the finite being. Notwithstanding 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, because 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 existence 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
independent being, of everything in the process of becoming something
else: that is, of the idea of tine. "Time is the necessary condition of
all processes, of becoming (Werden);" this is an identical proposition,
for it says nothing but this: "That something may follow, there must be a
succession. "

The person which manifested 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 labor brings back to the
idea of humanity, which was my starting-point.




LETTER XII.


This twofold labor 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 realize
their object. The first of these impulsions, which I shall call the
sensuous instinct, issues from the physical existence of man, 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 resist 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 forever, this
impulsion, which tends to maintain personality, can never exact in one
time anything but what it exacts and requires forever. It therefore
decides for always what it decides now, and orders now what it orders
forever. 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 recognize 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 forever 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 forever. If you confess the truth because it is the
truth, and if you practise 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 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
phenomena, 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 in contact with the world in the greatest number
of points possible, and in 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 the one nor the other,
consequently he will be nothing.

In fact, if the sensuous impulsion becomes determining, if the senses
become lawgivers, 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
other two 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 labor 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 phenomena, 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 labor 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 unrecognizable, 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 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, and 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 realized in humanity. For example, the intellectual
man has the ideal 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 coarse nature participates in an increase of force that ought
only to turn 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 is 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 manner 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
aesthetics, 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 a 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 forever, 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 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 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
recognize them in their entire purity and strictness, so that both
conditions are separated in the most definite manner; 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. The former wish to
think of beauty as it works; the latter wish it to work as it is thought.
Both therefore must miss the truth; the former, because they try to
follow infinite nature with their limited thinking power; the others,
because they wish to limit unlimited nature according to their laws of
thought. The first fear to rob beauty of its freedom by a too strict
dissection, the others fear to destroy the distinctness of the conception
by a too violent union. But the former do not reflect that the freedom
in which they very properly place the essence of beauty is not
lawlessness, but harmony of laws; not caprice, but the highest internal
necessity. The others do not remember that distinctness, which they with
equal right demand from beauty, does not consist in the exclusion of
certain realities, but the absolute including of all; that is not
therefore limitation but infinitude. We shall avoid the quicksands on
which both have made shipwreck if we begin from the two elements in which
beauty divides itself before the understanding, but then afterwards rise
to a pure aesthetic unity by which it works on feeling, and in which both
those conditions completely disappear.




LETTER XIX.


Two principal and different states of passive and active capacity of
being determined [Bestimmbarkeit] can be distinguished in man; in like
manner two states of passive and active determination [Bestimmung]. The
explanation of this proposition leads us most readily to our end.

The condition of the state of man before destination or direction is
given him by the impression of the senses is an unlimited capacity of
being determined. The infinite of time and space is given to his
imagination for its free use; and, because nothing is settled in this
kingdom of the possible, and therefore nothing is excluded from it, this
state of absence of determination can be named an empty infiniteness,
which must not by any means be confounded with an infinite void.

Now it is necessary that his sensuous nature should be modified, and that
in the indefinite series of possible determinations one alone should
become real. One perception must spring up in it. That which, in the
previous state of determinableness, was only an empty potency becomes now
an active force, and receives contents; but, at the same time, as an
active force it receives a limit, after having been, as a simple power,
unlimited. Reality exists now, but the infinite has disappeared. To
describe a figure in space, we are obliged to limit infinite space; to
represent to ourselves a change in time, we are obliged to divide the
totality of time. Thus we only arrive at reality by limitation, at the
positive, at a real position, by negation or exclusion; to determination,
by the suppression of our free determinableness.

But mere exclusion would never beget a reality, nor would a mere sensuous
impression ever give birth to a perception, if there were not something
from which it was excluded, if by an absolute act of the mind the
negation were not referred to something positive, and if opposition did
not issue out of non-position. This act of the mind is styled judging or
thinking, and the result is named thought.

Before we determine a place in space, there is no space for us; but
without absolute space we could never determine a place. The same is the
case with time. Before we have an instant, there is no time to us: but
without infinite time--eternity--we should never have a representation of
the instant. Thus, therefore, we can only arrive at the whole by the
part, to the unlimited through limitation; but reciprocally we only
arrive at the part through the whole, at limitation through the
unlimited.

It follows from this, that when it is affirmed of beauty that it mediates
for man, the transition from feeling to thought, this must not be
understood to mean that beauty can fill up the gap that separates feeling
from thought, the passive from the active. This gap is infinite; and,
without the interposition of a new and independent faculty, it is
impossible for the general to issue from the individual, the necessary
from the contingent. Thought is the immediate act of this absolute
power, which, I admit, can only be manifested in connection with sensuous
impressions, but which in this manifestation depends so little on the
sensuous that it reveals itself specially in an opposition to it. The
spontaneity or autonomy with which it acts excludes every foreign
influence; and it is not in as far as it helps thought--which comprehends
a manifest contradiction but only in as far as it procures for the
intellectual faculties the freedom to manifest themselves in conformity
with their proper laws. It does it only because the beautiful can become
a means of leading man from matter to form, from feeling to laws, from a
limited existence to an absolute existence.

But this assumes that the freedom of the intellectual faculties can be
balked, which appears contradictory to the conception of an autonomous
power. For a power which only receives the matter of its activity from
without can only be hindered in its action by the privation of this
matter, and consequently by way of negation; it is therefore a
misconception of the nature of the mind to attribute to the sensuous
passions the power of oppressing positively the freedom of the mind.
Experience does indeed present numerous examples where the rational
forces appear compressed in proportion to the violence of the sensuous
forces. But instead of deducing this spiritual weakness from the energy
of passion, this passionate energy must rather be explained by the
weakness of the human mind. For the sense can only have a sway such as
this over man when the mind has spontaneously neglected to assert its
power.

Yet in trying by these explanations to move one objection, I appear to
have exposed myself to another, and I have only saved the autonomy of the
mind at the cost of its unity. For how can the mind derive at the same
time from itself the principles of inactivity and of activity, if it is
not itself divided, and if it is not in opposition with itself?

Here we must remember that we have before us, not the infinite mind, but
the finite. The finite mind is that which only becomes active through
the passive, only arrives at the absolute through limitation, and only
acts and fashions in as far as it receives matter. Accordingly, a mind
of this nature must associate with the impulse towards form or the
absolute, an impulse towards matter or limitation, conditions without
which it could not have the former impulse nor satisfy it. How can two
such opposite tendencies exist together in the same being? This is a
problem that can no doubt embarrass the metaphysician, but not the
transcendental philosopher. The latter does not presume to explain the
possibility of things, but he is satisfied with giving a solid basis to
the knowledge that makes us understand the possibility of experience.
And as experience would be equally impossible without this autonomy in
the mind, and without the absolute unity of the mind, it lays down these
two conceptions as two conditions of experience equally necessary without
troubling itself any more to reconcile them. Moreover, this immanence of
two fundamental impulses does not in any degree contradict the absolute
unity of the mind, as soon as the mind itself, its selfhood, is
distinguished from those two motors. No doubt, these two impulses exist
and act in it, but itself is neither matter nor form, nor the sensuous
nor reason, and this is a point that does not seem always to have
occurred to those who only look upon the mind as itself acting when its
acts are in harmony with reason, and who declare it passive when its acts
contradict reason.

Arrived at its development, each of these two fundamental impulsions
tends of necessity and by its nature to satisfy itself; but precisely
because each of them has a necessary tendency, and both nevertheless have
an opposite tendency, this twofold constraint mutually destroys itself,
and the will preserves an entire freedom between them both. It is
therefore the will that conducts itself like a power--as the basis of
reality--with respect to both these impulses; but neither of them can by
itself act as a power with respect to the other. A violent man, by his
positive tendency to justice, which never fails in him, is turned away
from injustice; nor can a temptation of pleasure, however strong, make a
strong character violate its principles. There is in man no other power
than his will; and death alone, which destroys man, or some privation of
self-consciousness, is the only thing that can rob man of his internal
freedom.

An external necessity determines our condition, our existence in time, by
means of the sensuous. The latter is quite involuntary, and directly it
is produced in us we are necessarily passive. In the same manner an
internal necessity awakens our personality in connection with sensations,
and by its antagonism with them; for consciousness cannot depend on the
will, which presupposes it. This primitive manifestation of personality
is no more a merit to us than its privation is a defect in us. Reason
can only be required in a being who is self-conscious, for reason is an
absolute consecutiveness and universality of consciousness; before this
is the case he is not a man, nor can any act of humanity be expected from
him. The metaphysician can no more explain the limitation imposed by
sensation on a free and autonomous mind than the natural philosopher can
understand the infinite, which is revealed in consciousness in connection
with these limits.