No More Learning

Considered in its most lofty accomplishment, this twofold
labour brings us back to the idea of humanity which was my starting-
point.

LETTER XII.

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

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

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

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

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

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

LETTER XIII.

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

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

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

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

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

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

LETTER XIV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

LETTER XV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LETTER XVI.

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

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

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

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

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

LETTER XVII.

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

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

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

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

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

LETTER XVIII.

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

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

But this requires two very different operations, which must
necessarily support each other in this inquiry. Beauty it is said,
weds two conditions with one another which are opposite to each
other, and can never be one. We must start from this opposition; we
must grasp and recognise them in their entire purity and strictness,
so that both conditions are separated in the most definite matter;
otherwise we mix, but we do not unite them. Secondly, it is usual to
say, beauty unites those two opposed conditions, and therefore
removes the opposition. But because both conditions remain eternally
opposed to one another, they cannot be united in any other way than
by being suppressed. Our second business is therefore to make this
connection perfect, to carry them out with such purity and
perfection that both conditions disappear entirely in a third one,
and no trace of separation remains in the whole; otherwise we
segregate, but do not unite. All the disputes that have ever
prevailed and still prevail in the philosophical world respecting
the conception of beauty have no other origin than their commencing
without a sufficiently strict distinction, or that it is not carried
out fully to a pure union. Those philosophers who blindly follow
their feeling in reflecting on this topic can obtain no other
conception of beauty, because they distinguish nothing separate in
the totality of the sensuous impression. Other philosophers, who
take the understanding as their exclusive guide, can never obtain a
conception of beauty, because they never see anything else in the
whole than the parts, and spirit and matter remain eternally
separate, even in their most perfect unity. The first fear to
suppress beauty dynamically, that is, as a working power, if they
must separate what is united in the feeling. The others fear to
suppress beauty logically, that is, as a conception, when they have
to hold together what in the understanding is separate. 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 [Footnote: Bestimmbarkeit] can be distinguished in
man; in like manner two states of passive and active determination.
[Footnote: 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 impressions 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 these 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. Neither abstraction
nor experience can bring us back to the source whence issue our
ideas of necessity and of universality; this source is concealed in
its origin in time from the observer, and its super-sensuous origin
from the researches of the metaphysician. But, to sum up in a few
words, consciousness is there, and, together with its immutable
unity, the law of all that is for man is established, as well as of
all that is to be by man, for his understanding and his activity.
The ideas of truth and of right present themselves inevitable,
incorruptible, immeasurable, even in the age of sensuousness; and
without our being able to say why or how, we see eternity in time,
the necessary following the contingent. It is thus that, without any
share on the part of the subject, the sensation and self-consciousness
arise, and the origin of both is beyond our volition, as it is out
of the sphere of our knowledge.

But as soon as these two faculties have passed into action, and man
has verified by experience, through the medium of sensation, a
determinate existence, and through the medium of consciousness, its
absolute existence, the two fundamental impulses exert their
influence directly their object is given. The sensuous impulse is
awakened with the experience of life--with the beginning of the
individual; the rational impulsion with the experience of law--with
the beginning of his personality; and it is only when these two
inclinations have come into existence that the human type is
realised. Up to that time, everything takes place in man according
to the law of necessity; but now the hand of nature lets him go, and
it is for him to keep upright humanity which nature places as a germ
in his heart. And thus we see that directly the two opposite and
fundamental impulses exercise their influence in him, both lose
their constraint, and the autonomy of two necessities gives birth to
freedom. LETTER XX.

That freedom Is an active and not a passive principle results from
its very conception; but that liberty itself should be an effect of
nature (taking this word in its widest sense), and not the work of
man, and therefore that it can be favoured or thwarted by natural
means, is the necessary consequence of that which precedes. It
begins only when man is complete, and when these two fundamental
impulsions have been developed. It will then be wanting whilst he is
incomplete, and while one of these impulsions is excluded, and it
will be re-established by all that gives back to man his integrity.

Thus it is possible, both with regard to the entire species as to
the individual, to remark the moment when man is yet incomplete, and
when one of the two exclusions acts solely in him. We know that man
commences by life simply, to end by form; that he is more of an
individual than a person, and that he starts from the limited or
finite to approach the infinite. The sensuous impulsion comes into
play therefore before the rational impulsion, because sensation
precedes consciousness; and in this priority of sensuous impulsion
we find the key of the history of the whole of human liberty.

There is a moment, in fact, when the instinct of life, not yet
opposed to the instinct of form, acts as nature and as necessity;
when the sensuous is a power because man has not begun; for even in
man there can be no other power than his will. But when man shall
have attained to the power of thought, reason, on the contrary, will
be a power, and moral or logical necessity will take the place of
physical necessity. Sensuous power must then be annihilated before
the law which must govern it can be established. It is not enough
that something shall begin which as yet was not; previously
something must end which had begun. Man cannot pass immediately from
sensuousness to thought. He must step backwards, for it is only when
one determination is suppressed that the contrary determination can
take place. Consequently, in order to exchange passive against
active liberty, a passive determination against an active, he must
be momentarily free from all determination, and must traverse a
state of pure determinability. He has then to return in some degree
to that state of pure negative indetermination in which he was
before his senses were affected by anything. But this state was
absolutely empty of all contents, and now the question is to
reconcile an equal determination and a determinability equally
without limit, with the greatest possible fulness, because from this
situation something positive must immediately follow. The
determination which man received by sensation must be preserved,
because he should not lose the reality; but at the same time, in so
far as finite, it should be suppressed, because a determinability
without limit would take place. The problem consists then in
annihilating the determination of the mode of existence, and yet at
the same time in preserving it, which is only possible in one way:
in opposing to it another. The two sides of a balance are in
equilibrium when empty; they are also in equilibrium when their
contents are of equal weight.

Thus, to pass from sensation to thought, the soul traverses a medium
position, in which sensibility and reason are at the same time
active, and thus they mutually destroy their determinant power, and
by their antagonism produce a negation. This medium situation in
which the soul is neither physically nor morally constrained, and
yet is in both ways active, merits essentially the name of a free
situation; and if we call the state of sensuous determination
physical, and the state of rational determination logical or moral,
that state of real and active determination should be called the
aesthetic.

LETTER XXI.

I have remarked in the beginning of the foregoing letter that there
is a twofold condition of determinableness and a twofold condition
of determination. And now I can clear up this proposition.

The mind can be determined--is determinate--only in as far as it is
not determined; it is, however, determinable also, in as far as it
is not exclusively determined; that is, if it is not confined in its
determination. The former is only a want of determination--it is
without limits, because it is without reality; but the latter, the
aesthetic determinableness, has no limits, because it unites all
reality.

The mind is determined, inasmuch as it is only limited; but it is
also determined because it limits itself of its own absolute
capacity. It is situated in the former position when it feels, in
the second when it thinks. Accordingly the aesthetic constitution is
in relation to determinableness what thought is in relation to
determination. The latter is a negative from internal and infinite
completeness, the former a limitation from internal infinite power.
Feeling and thought come into contact in one single point, the mind
is determined in both conditions, the man becomes something and
exists--either as individual or person--by exclusion; in other cases
these two faculties stand infinitely apart. Just in the same manner,
the aesthetic determinableness comes in contact with the mere want
of determination in a single point, by both excluding every distinct
determined existence, by thus being in all other points nothing and
all, and hence by being infinitely different. Therefore, if the
latter, in the absence of determination from deficiency, is
represented as an empty infiniteness, the aesthetic freedom of
determination, which forms the proper counterpart to the former, can
be considered, as a completed infiniteness; a representation which
exactly agrees with the teachings of the previous investigations.

Man is therefore nothing in the aesthetic state, if attention is
given to the single result, and not to the whole faculty, and if we
regard only the absence or want of every special determination. We
must therefore do justice to those who pronounce the beautiful, and
the disposition in which it places the mind, as entirely indifferent
and unprofitable, in relation to knowledge and feeling. They are
perfectly right; for it is certain that beauty gives no separate,
single result, either for the understanding or for the will; it does
not carry out a single intellectual or moral object; it discovers no
truth, does not help us to fulfil a single duty, and, in one word,
is equally unfit to found the character or to clear the head.
Accordingly, the personal worth of a man, or his dignity, as far as
this can only depend on himself, remains entirely undetermined by
aesthetic culture, and nothing further is attained than that, on the
part of nature, it is made profitable for him to make of himself
what he will; that the freedom to be what he ought to be is restored
perfectly to him.

But by this, something infinite is attained. But as soon as we
remember that freedom is taken from man by the one-sided compulsion
of nature in feeling, and by the exclusive legislation of the reason
in thinking, we must consider the capacity restored to him by the
aesthetical disposition, as the highest of all gifts, as the gift of
humanity. I admit that he possesses this capacity for humanity,
before every definite determination in which he may be placed. But
as a matter of fact, he loses it with every determined condition,
into which he may come, and if he is to pass over to an opposite
condition, humanity must be in every case restored to him by the
aesthetic life.

It is therefore not only a poetical license, but also
philosophically correct, when beauty is named our second creator.
Nor is this inconsistent with the fact that she only makes it
possible for us to attain and realise humanity, leaving this to our
free will. For in this she acts in common with our original creator,
nature, which has imparted to us nothing further than this capacity
for humanity, but leaves the use of it to our own determination of
will.

LETTER XXII.

Accordingly, if the aesthetic disposition of the mind must be looked
upon in one respect as nothing--that is, when we confine our view to
separate and determined operations--it must be looked upon in
another respect as a state of the highest reality, in as far as we
attend to the absence of all limits and the sum of powers which are
commonly active in it. Accordingly we cannot pronounce them, again,
to be wrong who describe the aesthetic state to be the most
productive in relation to knowledge and morality. They are perfectly
right, for a state of mind which comprises the whole of humanity in
itself must of necessity include in itself also--necessarily and
potentially--every separate expression of it. Again, a disposition
of mind that removes all limitation from the totality of human
nature must also remove it from every social expression of the same.
Exactly because its "aesthetic disposition" does not exclusively
shelter any separate function of humanity, it is favourable to all
without distinction, nor does it favour any particular functions,
precisely because it is the foundation of the possibility of all.
All other exercises give to the mind some special aptitude, but for
that very reason give it some definite limits; only the aesthetical
leads him to the unlimited. Every other condition, in which we can
live, refers us to a previous condition, and requires for its
solution a following condition; only the aesthetic is a complete
whole in itself, for it unites in itself all conditions of its
source and of its duration. Here alone we feel ourselves swept out
of time, and our humanity expresses itself with purity and integrity
as if it had not yet received any impression or interruption from
the operation of external powers.

That which flatters our senses in immediate sensation opens our weak
and volatile spirit to every impression, but makes us in the same
degree less apt for exertion. That which stretches our thinking
power and invites to abstract conceptions strengthens our mind for
every kind of resistance, but hardens it also in the same
proportion, and deprives us of susceptibility in the same ratio that
it helps us to greater mental activity. For this very reason, one as
well as the other brings us at length to exhaustion, because matter
cannot long do without the shaping, constructive force, and the
force cannot do without the constructible material. But on the other
hand, if we have resigned ourselves to the enjoyment of genuine
beauty, we are at such a moment of our passive and active powers in
the same degree master, and we shall turn with ease from grave to
gay, from rest to movement, from submission to resistance, to
abstract thinking and intuition.

This high indifference and freedom of mind, united with power and
elasticity, is the disposition in which a true work of art ought to
dismiss us, and there is no better test of true aesthetic
excellence. If after an enjoyment of this kind we find ourselves
specially impelled to a particular mode of feeling or action, and
unfit for other modes, this serves as an infallible proof that we
have not experienced any pure aesthetic effect, whether this is
owing to the object, to our own mode of feeling--as generally
happens--or to both together.

As in reality no purely aesthetical effect can be met with--for man
can never leave his dependence on material forces--the excellence of
a work of art can only consist in its greater approximation to its
ideal of aesthetic purity, and however high we may raise the freedom
of this effect, we shall always leave it with a particular
disposition and a particular bias. Any class of productions or
separate work in the world of art is noble and excellent in
proportion to the universality of the disposition and the unlimited
character of the bias thereby presented to our mind. This truth can
be applied to works in various branches of art, and also to
different works in the same branch. We leave a grand musical
performance with our feelings excited, the reading of a noble poem
with a quickened imagination, a beautiful statue or building with an
awakened understanding; but a man would not choose an opportune
moment who attempted to invite us to abstract thinking after a high
musical enjoyment, or to attend to a prosaic affair of common life
after a high poetical enjoyment, or to kindle our imagination and
astonish our feelings directly after inspecting a fine statue or
edifice. The reason of this is that music, BY ITS MATTER, even when
most spiritual, presents a greater affinity with the senses than is
permitted by aesthetic liberty; it is because even the most happy
poetry, having FOR TIS MEDIUM the arbitrary and contingent play of
the imagination, always shares in it more than the intimate
necessity of the really beautiful allows; it is because the best
sculpture touches on severe science BY WHAT IS DETERMINATE IN ITS
CONCEPTION. However, these particular affinities are lost in
proportion as the works of these three kinds of art rise to a
greater elevation, and it is a natural and necessary consequence of
their perfection, that, without confounding their objective limits,
the different arts come to resemble each other more and more, in the
action WHICH THEY EXERCISE ON THE MIND. At its highest degree of
ennobling, music ought to become a form, and act on us with the calm
power of an antique statue; in its most elevated perfection, the
plastic art ought to become music and move us by the immediate
action exercised on the mind by the senses; in its most complete
developmentment, poetry ought both to stir us powerfully like music
and like plastic art to surround us with a peaceful light. In each
art, the perfect style consists exactly in knowing how to remove
specific limits, while sacrificing at the same time the particular
advantages of the art, and to give it by a wise use of what belongs
to it specially a more general character.

Nor is it only the limits inherent in the specific character of each
kind of art that the artist ought to overstep in putting his hand to
the work; he must also triumph over those which are inherent in the
particular subject of which he treats. In a really beautiful work of
art, the substance ought to be inoperative, the form should do
everything; for by the form, the whole man is acted on; the
substance acts on nothing but isolated forces. Thus, however vast
and sublime it may be, the substance always exercises a restrictive
action on the mind, and true aesthetic liberty can only be expected
from the form. Consequently the true search of the master consists
in destroying matter by the form; and the triumph of art is great in
proportion as it overcomes matter and maintains its sway over those
who enjoy its work. It is great particularly in destroying matter
when most imposing, ambitious, and attractive, when therefore matter
has most power to produce the effect proper to it, or, again, when
it leads those who consider it more closely to enter directly into
relation with it. The mind of the spectator and of the hearer must
remain perfectly free and intact; it must issue pure and entire from
the magic circle of the artist, as from the hands of the Creator.
The most frivolous subject ought to be treated in such a way that we
preserve the faculty to exchange it immediately for the most serious
work. The arts which have passion for their object, as a tragedy for
example, do not present a difficulty here; for, in the first place
these arts are not entirely free, because they are in the service of
a particular end (the pathetic), and then no connoisseur will deny
that even in this class a work is perfect in proportion as amidst
the most violent storms of passion it respects the liberty of the
soul. There is a fine art of passion, but an impassioned fine art is
a contradiction in terms, for the infallible effect of the beautiful
is emancipation from the passions. The idea of an instructive fine
art (didactic art) or improving (moral) art is no less contradictory,
for nothing agrees less with the idea of the beautiful than to give
a determinate tendency to the mind.

However, from the fact that a work produces effects only by its
substance, it must not always be inferred that there is a want of
form in this work; this conclusion may quite as well testify to a
want of form in the observer. If his mind is too stretched or too
relaxed, if it is only accustomed to receive things either by the
senses or the intelligence, even in the most perfect combination, it
will only stop to look at the parts, and it will only see matter in
the most beautiful form. Only sensible of the coarse elements, he
must first destroy the aesthetic organisation of a work to find
enjoyment in it, and carefully disinter the details which genius has
caused to vanish, with infinite art, in the harmony of the whole.
The interest he takes in the work is either solely moral or
exclusively physical; the only thing wanting to it is to be exactly
what it ought to be--aesthetical. The readers of this class enjoy a
serious and pathetic poem as they do a sermon; a simple and playful
work, as an inebriating draught; and if on the one hand they have so
little taste as to demand edification from a tragedy or from an
epos, even such as the "Messias," on the other hand they will be
infallibly scandalised by a piece after the fashion of Anacreon and
Catullus.

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
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 I 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 realised 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 is he
only individual and solely obeys the law 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 realised 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
honourable 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 combatting 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.