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
æsthetics.
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 law’s; 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 æsthetic unity by which it works on
feeling, and in which both those conditions completely disappear.