"For the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were the time of woman cultus,

such as has never been before or since seen; it is also the time of the

deepest and simplest and truest, most enthusiastic and faithful

veneration of the Virgin Mary. If we, by a certain effort, manage to

place ourselves back on the standpoint of childlike poetic faith of that

time, and set aside in thought the materializing and exaggeration of the

hagiology and Mariolatry produced by later centuries, rendering the

reaction of the Reformation unavoidable--if now in our age, turned

exclusively to logical ideas and a negative dialectic, we live again by

thought in those ages of feeling and poetry--if we acknowledge all these

things to be something more than harmless play of words and fancy, and as

the true lifelike contents of the period, then we can properly appreciate

this legendary poetry as a necessary link in the crown of pearls of our

ancient poetry."

In short, the first classical period of German literature was a time of

youthful freshness, of pure harmony, plunged in verse and song, full of

the richest tones and the noblest rhythm, so that rhyme and song alone

must be looked for as the form of poetic creations. Accordingly it had

no proper prose. Like our own youth, it was a happy, free, and true

youth, it knew no prose; like us it dreamed to speechless songs; and as

we expressed our youthful language and hopes, woes and joys, in rhyme and

song, thus a whole people and age had its beautiful youth full of song

and verse tones. The life was poetry and poetry was the life.

Then came degeneracy and artifice; after that the great shock of the

Reformation; subsequently a servile and pedantic study of classical forms

without imbibing their spirit, but preparing the way for a truer art

spirit, extracted from their study by the masterly criticism of

Winckelmann and Lessing, till the second classical period of German

literature and poetry bloomed forth in full beauty, blending the national

and legendary elements so well expressed by Herder with the highest

effusions of dramatic poetry, partly creative and partly imitative of the

Greek models, in Schiller and Goethe.

Modern German literature presents a very remarkable spectacle, though far

from unique in history, for there we see criticism begetting genius.

Lessing, the founder of the modern German drama, sought to banish all

pomp from the theatre, and in doing so some critics have thought that he

banished the ideal and fell into affectation. At any rate, his

"Dramaturgy" is full of original ideas, and when he drew out the sphere

of poetry contrasted with that of painting in his "Laocoon," all Germany

resounded with his praise. "With that delight," says Goethe, "we saluted

this luminous ray which a thinker of the first order caused to break

forth from its clouds. It is necessary to have all the fire of youth to

conceive the effect produced on us by the 'Laocoon' of Lessing." Another

great contemporary, whose name is imperishable as that of art, struck a

mortal blow at a false taste in the study of the antique. Winckelmann

questioned the works of the Greek chisel with an intelligence full of

love, and initiated his countrymen into poetry by a feeling for

sculpture! What an enthusiasm he displayed for classical beauty! what a

worship of the form! what a fervor of paganism is found in its eloquent

pages when he also comments on the admirable group of the Laocoon, or the

still purer masterpiece of the Apollo of Belvedere.

These men were the vanguard of the great Germanic army; Schiller and

Goethe alone formed its main column. In them German poetry shows itself

in its perfection, and completely realizes the ideal designed for it by

the critic. Every factitious precept and conventional law was now

overthrown; these poetical Protestants broke away entirely from the yoke

of tradition. Yet their genius was not without a rule. Every work bears

in itself the organic laws of its development. Thus, although they laugh

at the famous precept of the three unities, it is because they dig still

deeper down to the root of things, to grasp the true principle from which

the precept issued. "Men have not understood," said Goethe, "the basis

of this law. The law of the comprehensive--'das Fassliche'--is the

principle; and the three unities have only value as far as they attain

it. When they become an obstacle to the comprehension it is madness to

wish to observe them. The Greeks themselves, from whom the rule is

derived, did not always follow it. In the 'Phaeton' of Euripides, and in

other pieces, there was change, place; accordingly they prefer to give a

perfect exposition of their subject, rather than blindly respect a law

never very essential in itself. The pieces of Shakspeare violate in the

highest degree the unity of time and of place; but they are full of

comprehensiveness; nothing is easier to grasp, and for that reason they

would have found favor with the Greeks. The French poets tried to obey

exactly the law of the three unities; but they violate the law of

comprehensiveness, as they do not expound dramatic subjects by dramas but

by recitals."

Poetical creation was therefore viewed as free, but at the same time

responsible. Immediately, as if fecundity were the reward of

correctness, the German theatre became filled with true and living

characters. The stage widens under their steps that they may have room

to move. History with its great proportions and its terrible lessons, is

now able to take place on the stage. The whole Thirty Years' War passes

before us in "Wallenstein." We hear the tumult of camps, the disorder of

a fanatical and undisciplined army, peasants, recruits, sutlers,

soldiers. The illusion is complete, and enthusiasm breaks out among the

spectators. Similar merits attach to many other of Schiller's plays.

This new drama, which seemed to give all to the natural sphere, concedes

still more to the ideal. An able critic has said the details which are

the truth of history are also its poetry. Here the German school

professes a principle of the highest learning, and one that seems to be

borrowed from its profoundest philosophers; it is that of the universal

beauty of life, of the identity of beauty and existence. "Our

aesthetics," says Goethe, "speak a great deal of poetical or antipoetical

subjects; fundamentally there is no subject that has not its poetry; it

is for the poet to find it there."

Schiller and Goethe divide the empire over modern German poetry, and

represent its two principal powers; the one, Schiller, impassioned and

lyrical, pours his soul over all the subjects he touches; in him every

composition, ode, or drama is always one of his noble ideas, borrowing

its dress and ornament from the external world. He is a poet especially

through the heart, by the force with which he rushes in and carries you

with him. Goethe is especially an epic; no doubt he paints the passions

with admirable truth, but he commands them; like the god of the seas in

Virgil, he raises above the angry waves his calm and sublime forehead.

After this glance at the position and chief characteristics of Schiller,

it may be useful to offer a few remarks on those of the principal works

in this volume, his Aesthetical Letters and Essays. Schiller, in his

Aesthetical Essays, did not choose the pure abstract method of deduction

and conception like Kant, nor the historical like Herder, who strove thus

to account for the genesis of our ideas of beauty and art. He struck out

a middle path, which presents certain deficiencies to the advocates of

either of these two systems. He leans upon Kantian ideas, but without

scholastic constraint. Pure speculation, which seeks to set free the

form from all contents and matter, was remote from his creative genius,

to which the world of matter and sense was no hinderance, but a necessary

envelop for his forms.

His removal to Jena in 1791, and acquaintance with Reinhold, familiarized

him with the Kantian philosophy, but he only appreciated it by halves.

The bare and bald dealing with fundamental principles was at this time

equally repulsive to Goethe and Schiller, the man of the world and the

man of life. But Schiller did not find anywhere at that time justice

done to the dignity of art, or honor to the substantial value of beauty.

The Aesthetical Essays in this volume appeared for the most part since

1792, in the "Thalia" and the "Hours" periodicals. The first "On the

Ground of our Pleasure in Tragic Subjects" (1792), applies Kantian

principles of the sublime to tragedy, and shows Schiller's lofty estimate

of this class of poetry. With Kant he shows that the source of all

pleasure is suitableness; the touching and sublime elicit this feeling,

implying the existence of unsuitableness. In this article he makes the

aim and source of art to consist in giving enjoyment, in pleasing. To

nature pleasure is a mediate object, to art its main object. The same

proposition appears in Schiller's paper on Tragic Art (1792), closely

connected with the former. This article contains views of the affection

of pity that seem to approximate the Aristotelian propositions about

tragedy.

His views on the sublime are expressed in two papers, "The Sublime" and

"The Pathetic," in which we trace considerable influence of Lessing and

Winckelmann. He is led especially to strong antagonism against the

French tragedy, and he indulges in a lengthy consideration of the passage

of Virgil on Laocoon, showing the necessity of suffering and the pathetic

in connection with moral adaptations to interest us deeply.

All these essays bespeak the poet who has tried his hand at tragedy, but

in his next paper, "On Grace and Dignity," we trace more of the moralist.

Those passages where he takes up a medium position between sense and

reason, between Goethe and Kant, are specially attractive. The theme of

this paper is the conception of grace, or the expression of a beautiful

soul and dignity, or that of a lofty mind. The idea of grace has been

developed more deeply and truly by Schiller than by Wieland or

Winckelmann, but the special value of the paper is its constantly

pointing to the ideal of a higher humanity. In it he does full justice

to the sensuous and to the moral, and commencing with the beautiful

nature of the Greeks, to whom sense was never mere sense, nor reason mere

reason, he concludes with an image of perfected humanity in which grace

and dignity are united, the former by architectonic beauty (structure),

the last supported by power.

The following year, 1795, appeared his most important contribution to

aesthetics, in his Aesthetical Letters.

In these letters he remarks that beauty is the work of free

contemplation, and we enter with it into the world of ideas, but without

leaving the world of sense. Beauty is to us an object, and yet at the

same time a state of our subjectivity, because the feeling of the

conditional is under that which we have of it. Beauty is a form because

we consider it, and life because we feel it; in a word, it is at once our

state and our art. And exactly because it is both it serves us as a

triumphant proof that suffering does not exclude activity, nor matter

form, nor limitation the infinite, for in the enjoyment of beauty both

natures are united, and by this is proved the capacity of the infinite to

be developed in the finite, and accordingly the possibility of the

sublimest humanity.

The free play of the faculty of cognition which had been determined by

Kant is also developed by Schiller. His representation of this matter is

this: Man, as a spirit, is reason and will, self-active, determining,

form-giving; this is described by Schiller as the form-instinct; man, as

a sensuous being, is determinable, receptive, termed to matter; Schiller

describes this as the material instinct, "Stofftrieb." In the midst

between these two is situated the beautiful, in which reason and the

sensuous penetrate each other, and their enjoyable product is designated

by Schiller the play instinct. This expression is not happily chosen.

Schiller means to describe by it the free play of the forces, activity

according to nature, which is at once a joy and a happiness; he reminds

us of the life of Olympus, and adds: "Man is only quite a man when he

plays." Personality is that which lasts, the state of feeling is the

changeable in man; he is the fixed unity remaining eternally himself in

the floods of change. Man in contact with the world is to take it up in

himself, but to unite with it the highest freedom and independence, and,

instead of being lost in the world, to subject it to his reason. It is

only by his being independent that there is reality out of him; only by

being susceptible of feeling that there is reality in him. The object of

sensuous instinct is life; that of the purer instinct figure; living

figure or beauty is the object of the play instinct.

Only inasmuch as life is formed in the understanding and form in feeling

does life win a form and form win life, and only thus does beauty arise.

By beauty the sensuous man is led up to reason, the one-sided tension of

special force is strung to harmony, and man made a complete whole.

Schiller adds that beauty knits together thought and feeling; the fullest

unity of spirit and matter. Its freedom is not lack, but harmony, of

laws; its conditions are not exclusions, inclusion of all infinity

determined in itself. A true work of art generates lofty serenity and

freedom of mind. Thus the aesthetic disposition bestows on us the

highest of all gifts, that of a disposition to humanity, and we may call

beauty our second creator.

In these letters Schiller spoke out the mildest and highest sentiments on

art, and in his paper on Simple and Sentimental Poetry (1795) he

constructs the ideal of the perfect poet. This is by far the most

fruitful of Schiller's essays in its results. It has much that is

practically applicable, and contains a very able estimate of German

poetry. The writing is also very pointed and telling, because it is

based upon actual perceptions, and it is interesting because the contrast

drawn out throughout it between the simple and the sentimental has been

referred to his own contrast with Goethe. He also wished to vindicate

modern poetry, which Goethe seemed to wish to sacrifice to the antique.

The sentimental poetry is the fruit of quiet and retirement; simple

poetry the child of life. One is a favor of nature; the sentimental

depends on itself, the simple on the world of experience. The

sentimental is in danger of extending the limits of human nature too far,

of being too ideal, too mystical. Neither character exhausts the ideal

of humanity, but the intimate union of both. Both are founded in human

nature; the contradictions lying at their basis, when cleared in thought

from the poetical faculty, are realism and idealism. These also are

sides of human nature, which, when unconnected, bring forth disastrous

results. Their opposition is as old as the beginning of culture, and

till its end can hardly be set aside, save in the individual. The

idealist is a nobler but a far less perfect being; the realist appears

far less noble, but is more perfect, for the noble lies in the proof of a

great capacity, but the perfect in the general attitude of the whole and

in the real facts.

On the whole it may be said, taking a survey of these labors, that if

Schiller had developed his ideas systematically and the unity of his

intuition of the world, which were present in his feelings, and if he had

based them scientifically, a new epoch in philosophy might have been

anticipated. For he had obtained a view of such a future field of

thought with the deep clairvoyance of his genius.

A few words may be desirable on Schiller's religious standpoint,

especially in connection with his philosophical letters.

Schiller came up ten years later than Goethe, and concluded the cyclus of

genius that Goethe had inaugurated. But as he was the last arrival of

that productive period of tempestuous agitation, he retained more of its

elements in his later life and poetry than any others who had passed

through earlier agitations, such as Goethe. For Goethe cast himself free

in a great measure from the early intoxication of his youthful

imagination, devoting himself partly to nobler matter and partly to purer

forms.

Schiller derived from the stormy times of his youth his direction to the

ideal, to the hostility against the narrow spirit of civil relations, and

to all given conditions of society in general. He derived from it his

disposition, not to let himself be moulded by matter, but to place his

own creative and determining impress on matter, not so much to grasp

reality poetically and represent it poetically as to cast ideas into

reality, a disposition for lively representation and strong oratorical

coloring. All this he derived from the genial period, though later on

somewhat modified, and carried it over into his whole life and poetry;

and for this very reason he is not only together with Goethe, but before

Goethe, the favorite poet of the nation, and especially with that part of

the nation which sympathizes with him in the choice of poetic material

and in his mode of feeling.

Gervinus remarks that Schiller had at Weimar long fallen off from

Christianity, and occupied his mind tranquilly for a time with the views

of Spinoza (realistic pantheism). Like Herder and Goethe, he viewed life

in its great entirety and sacrificed the individual to the species.

Accordingly, through the gods of Greece, he fell out with strict,

orthodox Christians.

But Schiller had deeply religious and even Christian elements, as became

a German and a Kantian. He receives the Godhead in His will, and He

descends from His throne, He dwells in his soul; the poet sees divine

revelations, and as a seer announces them to man. He is a moral educator

of his people, who utters the tones of life in his poetry from youth

upwards. Philosophy was not disclosed to Plato in the highest and purest

thought, nor is poetry to Schiller merely an artificial edifice in the

harmony of speech; philosophy and poetry are to both a vibration of love

in the soul upwards to God, a liberation from the bonds of sense, a

purification of man, a moral art. On this reposes the religious

consecration of the Platonic spirit and of that of Schiller.

Issuing from the philosophical school of Kant, and imbued with the

antagonism of the age against constituted authorities, it is natural that

Schiller should be a rationalist in his religious views. It has been

justly said of him that while Goethe's system was an apotheosis of nature

Schiller's was an apotheosis of man.

Historically he was not prepared enough to test and search the question

of evidence as applied to divine things handed down by testimony, and his

Kantian coloring naturally disposed him to include all religions within

the limits of pure reason, and to seek it rather in the subject than in

anything objective.

In conclusion, we may attempt to classify and give Schiller his place in

the progress of the world's literary history. Progress is no doubt a law

of the individual, of nations, and of the whole race. To grow in

perfection, to exist in some sort at a higher degree, is the task imposed

by God on man, the continuation of the very work of God, the complement

of creation. But this moral growth, this need of increase, may, like all

the forces of nature, yield to a greater force; it is an impulsion rather

than a necessity; it solicits and does not constrain. A thousand

obstacles stay its development in individuals and in societies; moral

liberty may retard or accelerate its effects. Progress is therefore a

law which cannot be abrogated, but which is not invariably obeyed.

Nevertheless, in proportion to the increase of the mass of individuals,

the caprices of chance and of liberty neutralize each other to allow the

providential action that presides over our destinies to prevail. Looking

at the same total of the life of the world, humanity undoubtedly

advances: there are in our time fewer moral miseries, fewer physical

miseries, than were known in the past.

Consequently art and literature, which express the different states of

society, must share in some degree in this progressive march. But there

are two things in literary work: on the one hand the ideas and social

manners which it expresses, on the other the intelligence, the feeling,

the imagination of the writer who becomes its interpreter. While the

former of these elements tends incessantly to a greater perfection, the

latter is subject to all the hazards of individual genius. Accordingly

the progressive literature is only in the inspiration, and so to speak in

the matter; it may and must therefore not be continuous in form.

But more than this: in very advanced societies the very grandeur of

ideas, the abundance of models, the satiety of the public render the task

of the artist more and more difficult. The artist himself has no longer

the enthusiasm of the first ages, the youth of imagination and of the

heart; he is an old man whose riches have increased, but who enjoys his

wealth less.

If all the epochs of literature are considered as a whole it will be seen

that they succeed each other in a constant order. After the period when

the idea and the form combined in a harmonious manner comes another where

the social idea is superabundant, and destroys the literary form of the

preceding epoch.

The middle ages introduced spiritualism in art; before this new idea the

smiling untruths of Greek poetry fled away frightened. The classical

form so beautiful, so pure, cannot contain high Catholic thought. A new

art is formed; on this side the Alps it does not reach the maturity that

produces masterpieces. But at that time all Europe was one fatherland;

Italy completes what is lacking in France and elsewhere.

The renaissance introduces new ideas into civilization; it resuscitates

the traditions of antique science and seeks to unite them to the truths

of Christianity. The art of the middle ages, as a vessel of too limited

capacity, is broken by the new flood poured into it. These different

ideas are stirred up and in conflict in the sixteenth century; they

became co-ordinate and attain to an admirable expression in the following

age.

In the eighteenth century there is a new invasion of ideas; all is

examined and questioned; religion, government, society, all becomes a

matter of discussion for the school called philosophical. Poetry

appeared dying out, history drying up, till a truer spirit was breathed

into the literary atmosphere by the criticism of Lessing, the philosophy

of Kant, and the poetry of Klopstock. It was at this transition period

that Schiller appeared, retaining throughout his literary career much of

the revolutionary and convulsive spirit of his early days, and faithfully

reflecting much of the dominant German philosophy of his time.

Part of the nineteenth century seems to take in hand the task of

reconstructing the moral edifice and of giving back to thought a larger

form. The literary result of its effects is the renaissance of lyrical

poetry with an admirable development in history.

Schiller's most brilliant works were in the former walk, his histories

have inferior merit, and his philosophical writings bespeak a deep

thinking nature with great originality of conception, such as naturally

results from a combination of high poetic inspiration with much

intellectual power.

Schiller, like all great men of genius, was a representative man of his

country and of his age. A German, a Protestant free-thinker, a

worshipper of the classical, he was the expression of these aspects of

national and general thought.

The religious reformation was the work of the North. The instinct of

races came in it to complicate the questions of dogmas. The awakening of

individual nationalities was one of the characters of the epoch.

The nations compressed in the severe unity of the Middle Ages escaped in

the Reformation from the uniform mould that had long enveloped them, and

tended to that other unity, still very distant, which must spring from

the spontaneous view of the same truth by all men, result from the free

and original development of each nation, and, as in a vast concert, unite

harmonious dissonances. Europe, without being conscious of its aim,

seized greedily at the means--insurrection; the only thought was to

overthrow, without yet thinking of a reconstruction. The sixteenth

century was the vanguard of the eighteenth. At all times the North had

fretted under the antipathetic yoke of the South. Under the Romans,

Germany, though frequently conquered, had never been subdued. She had

invaded the Empire and determined its fall. In the Middle Ages the

struggle had continued; not only instincts, but ideas, were in conflict;

force and spirit, violence and polity, feudalism and the Catholic

hierarchy, hereditary and elective forms, represented the opposition of

two races. In the sixteenth century the schism long anticipated took

place. The Catholic dogma had hitherto triumphed over all outbreaks--

over Arnaldo of Brescia, the Waldenses, and Wickliffe. But Luther

appeared, and the work was accomplished: Catholic unity was broken.

And this breaking with authority went on fermenting in the nations till

its last great outburst at the French Revolution; and Schiller was born

at this convulsive period, and bears strong traces of his parentage in

his anti-dogmatic spirit.

Yet there is another side to Germanism which is prone to the ideal and

the mystical, and bears still the trace of those lovely legends of

mediaeval growth to which we have adverted. For Christianity was not a

foreign and antagonistic importation in Germany; rather, the German

character obtained its completeness through Christianity. The German

found himself again in the Church of Christ, only raised, transfigured,

and sanctified. The apostolic representation of the Church as the bride

of Christ has found its fullest and truest correspondence in that of

Germany. Hence when the German spirit was thoroughly espoused to the

Christian spirit, we find that character of love, tenderness, and depth

so characteristic of the early classics of German poetry, and reappearing

in glorious afterglow in the second classics, in Klopstock, Herder, and,

above all, Schiller.

It is this special instinct for the ideal and mystical in German nature

that has enabled spirits born of negation and revolution, like Schiller,

to unite with those elements the most genial and creative inspirations of

poetry.

VOCABULARY OF TERMINOLOGY.

Absolute, The. A conception, or, more strictly, in Kantian language, an

idea of the pure reason, embracing the fundamental and necessary yet free

ground of all things.

Antinomy. The conflict of the laws of pure reason; as in the question of

free will and necessity.

Autonomy (autonomous). Governing itself by the spontaneous action of

free will.

Aesthetics. The science of beauty; as ethics of duty.

Cognition (knowledge; Germanice, "Erkenntniss") is either an intuition or

a conception. The former has an immediate relation to the object, and is

singular and individual; the latter has but a mediate relation, by means

of a characteristic mark, which may be common to several things.

Cognition is an objective perception.

Conception. A conception is either empirical or pure. A pure

conception, in so far as it has its origin in the understanding alone,

and is not the conception of a pure sensuous image, is called notio.

Conceptions are distinguished on the one hand from sensation and

perception, and on the other hand from the intuitions of pure reason or

ideas. They are distinctly the product of thought and of the

understanding, except when quite free from empirical elements.

Feeling (Gefuehl). That part of our nature which relates to passion and

instinct. Feelings are connected both with our sensuous nature, our

imagination, and the pure reason.

Form. See Matter.

Ideas. The product of the pure reason (Vernunft) or intuitive faculty.

Wherever the absolute is introduced in thought we have ideas. Perfection

in all its aspects is an idea, virtue and wisdom in their perfect purity

and ideas. Kant remarks ("Critique of Pure Reason," Meiklejohn's

translation, p. 256): "It is from the understanding alone that pure and

transcendental conceptions take their origin; the reason does not

properly give birth to any conception, but only frees the conception of

the understanding from the unavoidable limitation of possible experience.

A conception formed from notions which transcend the possibility of

experience is an idea or a conception of reason."

Intuition (Anschauung) as used by Kant, is external or internal.

External, sensuous intuition is identical with perception; internal

intuition gives birth to ideas.

Matter and Form. "These two conceptions are at the foundation of all

other reflection, being inseparably connected with every mode of

exercising the understanding. By the former is implied that which can be

determined in general; the second implies its determination, both in a

transcendental sense, abstraction being made of any difference in that

which is given, and of the mode in which it is determined. That which in

the phenomenon corresponds to the sensation, I term its matter; but that

which effects that the content of the phenomenon can be arranged under

certain relations, I call its form."--Kant, "Critique," op. cit.

Objective. What is inherent or relative to an object, or not Myself,

except in the case when I reflect on myself, in which case my states of

mind are objective to my thoughts. In a popular sense objective means

external, as contrasted with the subjective or internal.

Perception, if it relates only to the subject as a modification of its

state, is a sensation. An objective perception is a cognition

(Erkenntniss).

Phenomena (Erscheinnngen). The undetermined object of an empirical

intuition is called phenomenon.

Reason (pure; Germanice, "Vernunft"). The source of ideas of moral

feelings and of conceptions free from all elements taken up from

experience.

Representation (Vorstellung). All the products of the mind are styled

representations (except emotions and mere sensations) and the term is

applied to the whole genus.

Representation with consciousness is perceptio.

Sensation. The capacity of receiving representations through the mode in

which we are affected by objects is called sensibility. By means of

sensibility objects are given to us, and it alone furnishes with

intentions meaning sensuous intuitions. By the understanding they are

thought, and from it arise conceptions.

Subjective. What has its source in and relation to the personality, to

Myself, I, or the Ego; opposed to the objective, or what is inherent in

and relative to the object. Not myself, except in the case when my

states of mind are the object of my own reflection.

Supersensuous. Contrasted with and opposed to the sensuous. What is

exclusively related to sense or imparted through the sensuous ideas is

supersensuous. See Transcendental.

Transcendental. What exceeds the limits of sense and empirical

observation. "I apply the term transcendental to all knowledge which is

not so much occupied with objects as with the mode of our cognition of

these objects, so far as this mode of cognition is possible a priori."

Kant's "Critique," op. cit. p. 16.

Understanding (Verstand). The thought of faculty, the source of

conceptions and notions (Begriffe) of the laws of logic, the categories,

and judgment.

LETTERS ON THE AESTHETICAL EDUCATION OF MAN.

LETTER I.

By your permission I lay before you, in a series of letters, the results

of my researches upon beauty and art. I am keenly sensible of the

importance as well as of the charm and dignity of this undertaking. I

shall treat a subject which is closely connected with the better portion

of our happiness and not far removed from the moral nobility of human

nature. I shall plead this cause of the beautiful before a heart by

which her whole power is felt and exercised, and which will take upon

itself the most difficult part of my task in an investigation where one

is compelled to appeal as frequently to feelings as to principles.

That which I would beg of you as a favor, you generously impose upon me

as a duty; and, when I solely consult my inclination, you impute to me a

service. The liberty of action you prescribe is rather a necessity for

me than a constraint. Little exercised in formal rules, I shall scarcely

incur the risk of sinning against good taste by any undue use of them; my

ideas, drawn rather from within than from reading or from an intimate

experience with the world, will not disown their origin; they would

rather incur any reproach than that of a sectarian bias, and would prefer

to succumb by their innate feebleness than sustain themselves by borrowed

authority and foreign support.

In truth, I will not keep back from you that the assertions which follow

rest chiefly upon Kantian principles; but if in the course of these

researches you should be reminded of any special school of philosophy,

ascribe it to my incapacity, not to those principles. No; your liberty

of mind shall be sacred to me; and the facts upon which I build will be

furnished by your own sentiments; your own unfettered thought will

dictate the laws according to which we have to proceed.

With regard to the ideas which predominate in the practical part of

Kant's system, philosophers only disagree, whilst mankind, I am confident

of proving, have never done so. If stripped of their technical shape,

they will appear as the verdict of reason pronounced from time immemorial

by common consent, and as facts of the moral instinct which nature, in

her wisdom, has given to man in order to serve as guide and teacher until

his enlightened intelligence gives him maturity. But this very technical

shape which renders truth visible to the understanding conceals it from

the feelings; for, unhappily, understanding begins by destroying the

object of the inner sense before it can appropriate the object. Like the

chemist, the philosopher finds synthesis only by analysis, or the

spontaneous work of nature only through the torture of art. Thus, in

order to detain the fleeting apparition, he must enchain it in the

fetters of rule, dissect its fair proportions into abstract notions, and

preserve its living spirit in a fleshless skeleton of words. Is it

surprising that natural feeling should not recognize itself in such a

copy, and if in the report of the analyst the truth appears as paradox?

Permit me therefore to crave your indulgence if the following researches

should remove their object from the sphere of sense while endeavoring to

draw it towards the understanding. That which I before said of moral

experience can be applied with greater truth to the manifestation of "the

beautiful." It is the mystery which enchants, and its being is

extinguished with the extinction of the necessary combination of its

elements.

LETTER II.

But I might perhaps make a better use of the opening you afford me if I

were to direct your mind to a loftier theme than that of art. It would

appear to be unseasonable to go in search of a code for the aesthetic

world, when the moral world offers matter of so much higher interest, and

when the spirit of philosophical inquiry is so stringently challenged by

the circumstances of our times to occupy itself with the most perfect of

all works of art--the establishment and structure of a true political

freedom.

It is unsatisfactory to live out of your own age and to work for other

times. It is equally incumbent on us to be good members of our own age

as of our own state or country. If it is conceived to be unseemly and

even unlawful for a man to segregate himself from the customs and manners

of the circle in which he lives, it would be inconsistent not to see that

it is equally his duty to grant a proper share of influence to the voice

of his own epoch, to its taste and its requirements, in the operations in

which he engages.

But the voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all

events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The course

of events has given a direction to the genius of the time that threatens

to remove it continually further from the ideal of art. For art has to

leave reality, it has to raise itself boldly above necessity and

neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its

prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and

not by that of matter. But in our day it is necessity, neediness, that

prevails, and lends a degraded humanity under its iron yoke. Utility is

the great idol of the time, to which all powers do homage and all

subjects are subservient. In this great balance on utility, the

spiritual service of art has no weight, and, deprived of all

encouragement, it vanishes from the noisy Vanity Fair of our time. The

very spirit of philosophical inquiry itself robs the imagination of one

promise after another, and the frontiers of art are narrowed in

proportion as the limits of science are enlarged.

The eyes of the philosopher as well as of the man of the world are

anxiously turned to the theatre of political events, where it is presumed

the great destiny of man is to be played out. It would almost seem to

betray a culpable indifference to the welfare of society if we did not

share this general interest. For this great commerce in social and moral

principles is of necessity a matter of the greatest concern to every

human being, on the ground both of its subject and of its results. It

must accordingly be of deepest moment to every man to think for himself.

It would seem that now at length a question that formerly was only

settled by the law of the stronger is to be determined by the calm

judgment of the reason, and every man who is capable of placing himself

in a central position, and raising his individuality into that of his

species, can look upon himself as in possession of this judicial faculty

of reason; being moreover, as man and member of the human family, a party

in the case under trial and involved more or less in its decisions. It

would thus appear that this great political process is not only engaged

with his individual case, it has also to pronounce enactments, which he

as a rational spirit is capable of enunciating and entitled to pronounce.

It is evident that it would have been most attractive to me to inquire

into an object such as this, to decide such a question in conjunction

with a thinker of powerful mind, a man of liberal sympathies, and a heart

imbued with a noble enthusiasm for the weal of humanity. Though so

widely separated by worldly position, it would have been a delightful

surprise to have found your unprejudiced mind arriving at the same result

as my own in the field of ideas. Nevertheless, I think I can not only

excuse, but even justify by solid grounds, my step in resisting this

attractive purpose and in preferring beauty to freedom. I hope that I

shall succeed in convincing you that this matter of art is less foreign

to the needs than to the tastes of our age; nay, that, to arrive at a

solution even in the political problem, the road of aesthetics must be

pursued, because it is through beauty that we arrive at freedom. But I

cannot carry out this proof without my bringing to your remembrance the

principles by which the reason is guided in political legislation.

LETTER III.

Man is not better treated by nature in his first start than her other

works are; so long as he is unable to act for himself as an independent

intelligence she acts for him. But the very fact that constitutes him a

man is that he does not remain stationary, where nature has placed him,

that he can pass with his reason, retracing the steps nature had made him

anticipate, that he can convert the work of necessity into one of free

solution, and elevate physical necessity into a moral law.

When man is raised from his slumber in the senses he feels that he is a

man; he surveys his surroundings and finds that he is in a state. He was

introduced into this state by the power of circumstances, before he could

freely select his own position. But as a moral being he cannot possibly

rest satisfied with a political condition forced upon him by necessity,

and only calculated for that condition; and it would be unfortunate if

this did satisfy him. In many cases man shakes off this blind law of

necessity, by his free spontaneous action, of which among many others we

have an instance, in his ennobling by beauty and suppressing by moral

influence the powerful impulse implanted in him by nature in the passion

of love. Thus, when arrived at maturity, he recovers his childhood by an

artificial process, he founds a state of nature in his ideas, not given

him by any experience, but established by the necessary laws and

conditions of his reason, and he attributes to this ideal condition an

object, an aim, of which he was not cognizant in the actual reality of

nature. He gives himself a choice of which he was not capable before,

and sets to work just as if he were beginning anew, and were exchanging

his original state of bondage for one of complete independence, doing

this with complete insight and of his free decision. He is justified in

regarding this work of political thraldom as non-existing, though a wild

and arbitrary caprice may have founded its work very artfully; though it

may strive to maintain it with great arrogance and encompass it with a

halo of veneration. For the work of blind powers possesses no authority

before which freedom need bow, and all must be made to adapt itself to

the highest end which reason has set up in his personality. It is in

this wise that a people in a state of manhood is justified in exchanging

a condition of thraldom for one of moral freedom.

Now the term natural condition can be applied to every political body

which owes its establishment originally to forces and not to laws, and

such a state contradicts the moral nature of man, because lawfulness can

alone have authority over this. At the same time this natural condition

is quite sufficient for the physical man, who only gives himself laws in

order to get rid of brute force. Moreover, the physical man is a

reality, and the moral man problematical. Therefore when the reason

suppresses the natural condition, as she must if she wishes to substitute

her own, she weighs the real physical man against the problematical moral

man, she weighs the existence of society against a possible, though

morally necessary, ideal of society. She takes from man something which

he really possesses, and without which he possesses nothing, and refers

him as a substitute to something that he ought to possess and might

possess; and if reason had relied too exclusively on him she might, in

order to secure him a state of humanity in which he is wanting and can

want without injury to his life, have robbed him even of the means of

animal existence, which is the first necessary condition of his being a

man. Before he had opportunity to hold firm to the law with his will,

reason would have withdrawn from his feet the ladder of nature.

The great point is, therefore, to reconcile these two considerations, to

prevent physical society from ceasing for a moment in time, while the

moral society is being formed in the idea; in other words, to prevent its

existence from being placed in jeopardy for the sake of the moral dignity

of man. When the mechanic has to mend a watch he lets the wheels run

out; but the living watchworks of the state have to be repaired while

they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for another during its

revolutions. Accordingly props must be sought for to support society and

keep it going while it is made independent of the natural condition from

which it is sought to emancipate it.

This prop is not found in the natural character of man, who, being

selfish and violent, directs his energies rather to the destruction than

to the preservation of society. Nor is it found in his moral character,

which has to be formed, which can never be worked upon or calculated on

by the lawgiver, because it is free and never appears. It would seem,

therefore, that another measure must be adopted. It would seem that the

physical character of the arbitrary must be separated from moral freedom;

that it is incumbent to make the former harmonize with the laws and the

latter dependent on impressions; it would be expedient to remove the

former still farther from matter and to bring the latter somewhat more

near to it; in short, to produce a third character related to both the

others--the physical and the moral--paving the way to a transition from

the sway of mere force to that of law, without preventing the proper

development of the moral character, but serving rather as a pledge in the

sensuous sphere of a morality in the unseen.

LETTER IV.

Thus much is certain. It is only when a third character, as previously

suggested, has preponderance that a revolution in a state according to

moral principles can be free from injurious consequences; nor can

anything else secure its endurance. In proposing or setting up a moral

state, the moral law is relied upon as a real power, and free-will is

drawn into the realm of causes, where all hangs together mutually with

stringent necessity and rigidity. But we know that the condition of the

human will always remains contingent, and that only in the Absolute Being

physical coexists with moral necessity. Accordingly, if it is wished to

depend on the moral conduct of man as on natural results, this conduct

must become nature, and he must be led by natural impulse to such a

course of action as can only and invariably have moral results. But the

will of man is perfectly free between inclination and duty, and no

physical necessity ought to enter as a sharer in this magisterial

personality. If, therefore, he is to retain this power of solution, and

yet become a reliable link in the causal concatenation of forces, this

can only be effected when the operations of both these impulses are

presented quite equally in the world of appearances. It is only possible

when, with every difference of form, the matter of man's volition remains

the same, when all his impulses agreeing with his reason are sufficient

to have the value of a universal legislation.

It may be urged that every individual man carries within himself, at

least in his adaptation and destination, a purely ideal man. The great

problem of his existence is to bring all the incessant changes of his

outer life into conformity with the unchanging unity of this ideal. This

pure ideal man, which makes itself known more or less clearly in every

subject, is represented by the state, which is the objective, and, so to

speak, canonical form in which the manifold differences of the subjects

strive to unite. Now two ways present themselves to the thought in which

the man of time can agree with the man of idea, and there are also two

ways in which the state can maintain itself in individuals. One of these

ways is when the pure ideal man subdues the empirical man, and the state

suppresses the individual, or again when the individual becomes the

state, and the man of time is ennobled to the man of idea.

I admit that in a one-sided estimate from the point of view of morality

this difference vanishes, for the reason is satisfied if her law prevails

unconditionally. But when the survey taken is complete and embraces the

whole man (anthropology), where the form is considered together with the

substance, and a living feeling has a voice, the difference will become

far more evident. No doubt the reason demands unity, and nature variety,

and both legislations take man in hand. The law of the former is stamped

upon him by an incorruptible consciousness, that of the latter by an

ineradicable feeling. Consequently education will always appear

deficient when the moral feeling can only be maintained with the

sacrifice of what is natural; and a political administration will always

be very imperfect when it is only able to bring about unity by

suppressing variety. The state ought not only to respect the objective

and generic, but also the subjective and specific in individuals; and

while diffusing the unseen world of morals, it must not depopulate the

kingdom of appearance, the external world of matter.

When the mechanical artist places his hand on the formless block, to give

it a form according to his intention, he has not any scruples in doing

violence to it. For the nature on which he works does not deserve any

respect in itself, and he does not value the whole for its parts, but the

parts on account of the whole. When the child of the fine arts sets his

hand to the same block, he has no scruples either in doing violence to

it, he only avoids showing this violence. He does not respect the matter

in which he works any more than the mechanical artist; but he seeks by an

apparent consideration for it to deceive the eye which takes this matter

under its protection. The political and educating artist follows a very

different course, while making man at once his material and his end. In

this case the aim or end meets in the material, and it is only because

the whole serves the parts that the parts adapt themselves to the end.

The political artist has to treat his material--man--with a very

different kind of respect than that shown by the artist of fine art to

his work. He must spare man's peculiarity and personality, not to

produce a defective effect on the senses, but objectively and out of

consideration for his inner being.

But the state is an organization which fashions itself through itself and

for itself, and for this reason it can only be realized when the parts

have been accorded to the idea of the whole. The state serves the

purpose of a representative, both to pure ideal and to objective

humanity, in the breast of its citizens, accordingly it will have to

observe the same relation to its citizens in which they are placed to it;

and it will only respect their subjective humanity in the same degree

that it is ennobled to an objective existence. If the internal man is

one with himself he will be able to rescue his peculiarity, even in the

greatest generalization of his conduct, and the state will only become

the exponent of his fine instinct, the clearer formula of his internal

legislation. But if the subjective man is in conflict with the

objective, and contradicts him in the character of a people, so that only

the oppression of the former can give victory to the latter, then the

state will take up the severe aspect of the law against the citizen, and

in order not to fall a sacrifice, it will have to crush under foot such a

hostile individuality without any compromise.

Now man can be opposed to himself in a twofold manner; either as a

savage, when his feelings rule over his principles; or as a barbarian,

when his principles destroy his feelings. The savage despises art, and

acknowledges nature as his despotic ruler; the barbarian laughs at

nature, and dishonors it, but he often proceeds in a more contemptible

way than the savage to be the slave of his senses. The cultivated man

makes of nature his friend, and honors its friendship, while only

bridling its caprice.

Consequently, when reason brings her moral unity into physical society,

she must not injure the manifold in nature. When nature strives to

maintain her manifold character in the moral structure of society, this

must not create any breach in moral unity; the victorious form is equally

remote from uniformity and confusion. Therefore, totality of character

must be found in the people which is capable and worthy to exchange the

state of necessity for that of freedom.

LETTER V.

Does the present age, do passing events, present this character? I

direct my attention at once to the most prominent object in this vast

structure.

It is true that the consideration of opinion is fallen; caprice is

unnerved, and, although still armed with power, receives no longer any

respect. Man has awakened from his long lethargy and self-deception, and

he demands with impressive unanimity to be restored to his imperishable

rights. But he does not only demand them; he rises on all sides to seize

by force what, in his opinion, has been unjustly wrested from him. The

edifice of the natural state is tottering, its foundations shake, and a

physical possibility seems at length granted to place law on the throne,

to honor man at length as an end, and to make true freedom the basis of

political union. Vain hope! The moral possibility is wanting, and the

generous occasion finds an unsusceptible rule.

Man paints himself in his actions, and what is the form depicted in the

drama of the present time? On the one hand, he is seen running wild, on

the other, in a state of lethargy; the two extremest stages of human

degeneracy, and both seen in one and the same period.

In the lower larger masses, coarse, lawless impulses come to view,

breaking loose when the bonds of civil order are burst asunder, and

hastening with unbridled fury to satisfy their savage instinct.

Objective humanity may have had cause to complain of the state; yet

subjective man must honor its institutions. Ought he to be blamed

because he lost sight of the dignity of human nature, so long as he was

concerned in preserving his existence? Can we blame him that he

proceeded to separate by the force of gravity, to fasten by the force of

cohesion, at a time when there could be no thought of building or raising

up? The extinction of the state contains its justification. Society set

free, instead of hastening upward into organic life, collapses into its

elements.

On the other hand, the civilized classes give us the still more repulsive

sight of lethargy, and of a depravity of character which is the more

revolting because it roots in culture. I forget who of the older or more

recent philosophers makes the remark, that what is more noble is the more

revolting in its destruction. The remark applies with truth to the world

of morals. The child of nature, when he breaks loose, becomes a madman;

but the art scholar, when he breaks loose, becomes a debased character.

The enlightenment of the understanding, on which the more refined classes

pride themselves with some ground, shows on the whole so little of an

ennobling influence on the mind that it seems rather to confirm

corruption by its maxims. We deny nature on her legitimate field and

feel her tyranny in the moral sphere, and while resisting her

impressions, we receive our principles from her. While the affected

decency of our manners does not even grant to nature a pardonable

influence in the initial stage, our materialistic system of morals allows

her the casting vote in the last and essential stage. Egotism has

founded its system in the very bosom of a refined society, and without

developing even a sociable character, we feel all the contagions and

miseries of society. We subject our free judgment to its despotic

opinions, our feelings to its bizarre customs, and our will to its

seductions. We only maintain our caprice against her holy rights. The

man of the world has his heart contracted by a proud self-complacency,

while that of the man of nature often beats in sympathy; and every man

seeks for nothing more than to save his wretched property from the

general destruction, as it were from some great conflagration. It is

conceived that the only way to find a shelter against the aberrations of

sentiment is by completely foregoing its indulgence, and mockery, which

is often a useful chastener of mysticism, slanders in the same breath the

noblest aspirations. Culture, far from giving us freedom, only develops,

as it advances, new necessities; the fetters of the physical close more

tightly around us, so that the fear of loss quenches even the ardent

impulse toward improvement, and the maxims of passive obedience are held

to be the highest wisdom of life. Thus the spirit of the time is seen to

waver between perversion and savagism, between what is unnatural and mere

nature, between superstition and moral unbelief, and it is often nothing

but the equilibrium of evils that sets bounds to it.

LETTER VI.

Have I gone too far in this portraiture of our times? I do not

anticipate this stricture, but rather another--that I have proved too

much by it. You will tell me that the picture I have presented resembles

the humanity of our day, but it also bodies forth all nations engaged in

the same degree of culture, because all, without exception, have fallen

off from nature by the abuse of reason, before they can return to it

through reason.

But if we bestow some serious attention to the character of our times, we

shall be astonished at the contrast between the present and the previous

form of humanity, especially that of Greece. We are justified in

claiming the reputation of culture and refinement, when contrasted with a

purely natural state of society, but not so comparing ourselves with the

Grecian nature. For the latter was combined with all the charms of art

and with all the dignity of wisdom, without, however, as with us,

becoming a victim to these influences. The Greeks have put us to shame

not only by their simplicity, which is foreign to our age; they are at

the same time our rivals, nay, frequently our models, in those very

points of superiority from which we seek comfort when regretting the

unnatural character of our manners. We see that remarkable people

uniting at once fulness of form and fulness of substance, both

philosophizing and creating, both tender and energetic, uniting a

youthful fancy to the virility of reason in a glorious humanity.

At the period of Greek culture, which was an awakening of the powers of

the mind, the senses and the spirit had no distinctly separated property;

no division had yet torn them asunder, leading them to partition in a

hostile attitude, and to mark off their limits with precision. Poetry

had not as yet become the adversary of wit, nor had speculation abused

itself by passing into quibbling. In cases of necessity both poetry and

wit could exchange parts, because they both honored truth only in their

special way. However high might be the flight of reason, it drew matter

in a loving spirit after it, and while sharply and stiffly defining it,

never mutilated what it touched. It is true the Greek mind displaced

humanity, and recast it on a magnified scale in the glorious circle of

its gods; but it did this not by dissecting human nature, but by giving

it fresh combinations, for the whole of human nature was represented in

each of the gods. How different is the course followed by us moderns!

We also displace and magnify individuals to form the image of the

species, but we do this in a fragmentary way, not by altered

combinations, so that it is necessary to gather up from different

individuals the elements that form the species in its totality. It would

almost appear as if the powers of mind express themselves with us in real

life or empirically as separately as the psychologist distinguishes them

in the representation. For we see not only individual subjects, but

whole classes of men, uphold their capacities only in part, while the

rest of their faculties scarcely show a germ of activity, as in the case

of the stunted growth of plants.

I do not overlook the advantages to which the present race, regarded as a

unity and in the balance of the understanding, may lay claim over what is

best in the ancient world; but it is obliged to engage in the contest as

a compact mass, and measure itself as a whole against a whole. Who among

the moderns could step forth, man against man, and strive with an

Athenian for the prize of higher humanity.

Whence comes this disadvantageous relation of individuals coupled with

great advantages of the race? Why could the individual Greek be

qualified as the type of his time; and why can no modern dare to offer

himself as such? Because all-uniting nature imparted its forms to the

Greek, and an all-dividing understanding gives our forms to us.

It was culture itself that gave these wounds to modern humanity. The

inner union of human nature was broken, and a destructive contest divided

its harmonious forces directly; on the one hand, an enlarged experience

and a more distinct thinking necessitated a sharper separation of the

sciences, while, on the other hand, the more complicated machinery of

states necessitated a stricter sundering of ranks and occupations.

Intuitive and speculative understanding took up a hostile attitude in

opposite fields, whose borders were guarded with jealousy and distrust;

and by limiting its operation to a narrow sphere, men have made unto

themselves a master who is wont not unfrequently to end by subduing and

oppressing all the other faculties. Whilst on the one hand a luxuriant

imagination creates ravages in the plantations that have cost the

intelligence so much labor; on the other hand, a spirit of abstraction

suffocates the fire that might have warmed the heart and inflamed the

imagination.

This subversion, commenced by art and learning in the inner man, was

carried out to fulness and finished by the spirit of innovation in

government. It was, no doubt, reasonable to expect that the simple

organization of the primitive republics should survive the quaintness of

primitive manners and of the relations of antiquity. But, instead of

rising to a higher and nobler degree of animal life, this organization

degenerated into a common and coarse mechanism. The zoophyte condition

of the Grecian states, where each individual enjoyed an independent life,

and could, in cases of necessity, become a separate whole and unit in

himself, gave way to an ingenious mechanism, when, from the splitting up

into numberless parts, there results a mechanical life in the

combination. Then there was a rupture between the state and the church,

between laws and customs; enjoyment was separated from labor, the means

from the end, the effort from the reward. Man himself, eternally chained

down to a little fragment of the whole, only forms a kind of fragment;

having nothing in his ears but the monotonous sound of the perpetually

revolving wheel, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead

of imprinting the seal of humanity on his being, he ends by being nothing

more than the living impress of the craft to which he devotes himself, of

the science that he cultivates. This very partial and paltry relation,

linking the isolated members to the whole, does not depend on forms that

are given spontaneously; for how could a complicated machine, which shuns

the light, confide itself to the free will of man? This relation is

rather dictated, with a rigorous strictness, by a formulary in which the

free intelligence of man is chained down. The dead letter takes the

place of a living meaning, and a practised memory becomes a safer guide

than genius and feeling.

If the community or state measures man by his function, only asking of

its citizens memory, or the intelligence of a craftsman, or mechanical

skill, we cannot be surprised that the other faculties of the mind are

neglected for the exclusive culture of the one that brings in honor and

profit. Such is the necessary result of an organization that is

indifferent about character, only looking to acquirements, whilst in

other cases it tolerates the thickest darkness, to favor a spirit of law

and order; it must result if it wishes that individuals in the exercise

of special aptitudes should gain in depth what they are permitted to lose

in extension. We are aware, no doubt, that a powerful genius does not

shut up its activity within the limits of its functions; but mediocre

talents consume in the craft fallen to their lot the whole of their

feeble energy; and if some of their energy is reserved for matters of

preference, without prejudice to its functions, such a state of things at

once bespeaks a spirit soaring above the vulgar. Moreover, it is rarely

a recommendation in the eye of a state to have a capacity superior to

your employment, or one of those noble intellectual cravings of a man of

talent which contend in rivalry with the duties of office. The state is

so jealous of the exclusive possession of its servants that it would

prefer--nor can it be blamed in this--for functionaries to show their

powers with the Venus of Cytherea rather than the Uranian Venus.

It is thus that concrete individual life is extinguished, in order that

the abstract whole may continue its miserable life, and the state remains

forever a stranger to its citizens, because feeling does not discover it

anywhere. The governing authorities find themselves compelled to

classify, and thereby simplify the multiplicity of citizens, and only to

know humanity in a representative form and at second-hand. Accordingly

they end by entirely losing sight of humanity, and by confounding it with

a simple artificial creation of the understanding, whilst on their part

the subject-classes cannot help receiving coldly laws that address

themselves so little to their personality. At length, society, weary of

having a burden that the state takes so little trouble to lighten, falls

to pieces and is broken up--a destiny that has long since attended most

European states. They are dissolved in what may be called a state of

moral nature, in which public authority is only one function more, hated

and deceived by those who think it necessary, respected only by those who

can do without it.

Thus compressed between two forces, within and without, could humanity

follow any other course than that which it has taken? The speculative

mind, pursuing imprescriptible goods and rights in the sphere of ideas,

must needs have become a stranger to the world of sense, and lose sight

of matter for the sake of form. On its part, the world of public

affairs, shut up in a monotonous circle of objects, and even there

restricted by formulas, was led to lose sight of the life and liberty of

the whole, while becoming impoverished at the same time in its own

sphere. Just as the speculative mind was tempted to model the real after

the intelligible, and to raise the subjective laws of its imagination

into laws constituting the existence of things, so the state spirit

rushed into the opposite extreme, wished to make a particular and

fragmentary experience the measure of all observation, and to apply

without exception to all affairs the rules of its own particular craft.

The speculative mind had necessarily to become the prey of a vain

subtlety, the state spirit of a narrow pedantry; for the former was

placed too high to see the individual, and the latter too low to survey

the whole. But the disadvantage of this direction of mind was not

confined to knowledge and mental production; it extended to action and

feeling. We know that the sensibility of the mind depends, as to degree,

on the liveliness, and for extent on the richness of the imagination.

Now the predominance of the faculty of analysis must necessarily deprive

the imagination of its warmth and energy, and a restricted sphere of

objects must diminish its wealth. It is for this reason that the

abstract thinker has very often a cold heart, because he analyzes

impressions, which only move the mind by their combination or totality;

on the other hand, the man of business, the statesman, has very often a

narrow heart, because, shut up in the narrow circle of his employment,

his imagination can neither expand nor adapt itself to another manner of

viewing things.

My subject has led me naturally to place in relief the distressing

tendency of the character of our own times and to show the sources of the

evil, without its being my province to point out the compensations

offered by nature. I will readily admit to you that, although this

splitting up of their being was unfavorable for individuals, it was the

only open road for the progress of the race. The point at which we see

humanity arrived among the Greeks was undoubtedly a maximum; it could

neither stop there nor rise higher. It could not stop there, for the sum

of notions acquired forced infallibly the intelligence to break with

feeling and intuition, and to lead to clearness of knowledge. Nor could

it rise any higher; for it is only in a determinate measure that

clearness can be reconciled with a certain degree of abundance and of

warmth. The Greeks had attained this measure, and to continue their

progress in culture, they, as we, were obliged to renounce the totality

of their being, and to follow different and separate roads in order to

seek after truth.

There was no other way to develop the manifold aptitudes of man than to

bring them in opposition with one another. This antagonism of forces is

the great instrument of culture, but it is only an instrument: for as

long as this antagonism lasts man is only on the road to culture. It is

only because these special forces are isolated in man, and because they

take on themselves to impose all exclusive legislation, that they enter

into strife with the truth of things, and oblige common sense, which

generally adheres imperturbably to external phenomena, to dive into the

essence of things. While pure understanding usurps authority in the

world of sense, and empiricism attempts to subject this intellect to the

conditions of experience, these two rival directions arrive at the

highest possible development, and exhaust the whole extent of their

sphere. While, on the one hand, imagination, by its tyranny, ventures to

destroy the order of the world, it forces reason, on the other side, to

rise up to the supreme sources of knowledge, and to invoke against this

predominance of fancy the help of the law of necessity.

By an exclusive spirit in the case of his faculties, the individual is

fatally led to error; but the species is led to truth. It is only by

gathering up all the energy of our mind in a single focus, and

concentrating a single force in our being, that we give in some sort

wings to this isolated force, and that we draw it on artificially far

beyond the limits that nature seems to have imposed upon it. If it be

certain that all human individuals taken together would never have

arrived, with the visual power given them by nature, to see a satellite

of Jupiter, discovered by the telescope of the astronomer, it is just as

well established that never would the human understanding have produced

the analysis of the infinite, or the critique of pure reason, if in

particular branches, destined for this mission, reason had not applied

itself to special researches, and it, after having, as it were, freed

itself from all matter, it had not, by the most powerful abstraction

given to the spiritual eye of man the force necessary, in order to look

into the absolute. But the question is, if a spirit thus absorbed in

pure reason and intuition will be able to emancipate itself from the

rigorous fetters of logic, to take the free action of poetry, and seize

the individuality of things with a faithful and chaste sense? Here

nature imposes even on the most universal genius a limit it cannot pass,

and truth will make martyrs as long as philosophy will be reduced to make

its principal occupation the search for arms against errors.

But whatever may be the final profit for the totality of the world, of

this distinct and special perfecting of the human faculties, it cannot be

denied that this final aim of the universe, which devotes them to this

kind of culture, is a cause of suffering, and a kind of malediction for

individuals. I admit that the exercises of the gymnasium form athletic

bodies; but beauty is only developed by the free and equal play of the

limbs. In the same way the tension of the isolated spiritual forces may

make extraordinary men; but it is only the well-tempered equilibrium of

these forces that can produce happy and accomplished men. And in what

relation should we be placed with past and future ages if the perfecting

of human nature made such a sacrifice indispensable? In that case we

should have been the slaves of humanity, we should have consumed our

forces in servile work for it during some thousands of years, and we

should have stamped on our humiliated, mutilated nature the shameful

brand of this slavery--all this in order that future generations, in a

happy leisure, might consecrate themselves to the cure of their moral

health, and develop the whole of human nature by their free culture.

But can it be true that man has to neglect himself for any end whatever?

Can nature snatch from us, for any end whatever, the perfection which is

prescribed to us by the aim of reason? It must be false that the

perfecting of particular faculties renders the sacrifice of their

totality necessary; and even if the law of nature had imperiously this

tendency, we must have the power to reform by a superior art this

totality of our being, which art has destroyed.

LETTER VII.

Can this effect of harmony be attained by the state? That is not

possible, for the state, as at present constituted, has given occasion to

evil, and the state as conceived in the idea, instead of being able to

establish this more perfect humanity, ought to be based upon it. Thus

the researches in which I have indulged would have brought me back to the

same point from which they had called me off for a time. The present

age, far from offering us this form of humanity, which we have

acknowledged as a necessary condition of an improvement of the state,

shows us rather the diametrically opposite form. If, therefore, the

principles I have laid down are correct, and if experience confirms the

picture I have traced of the present time, it would be necessary to

qualify as unseasonable every attempt to effect a similar change in the

state, and all hope as chimerical that would be based on such an attempt,

until the division of the inner man ceases, and nature has been

sufficiently developed to become herself the instrument of this great

change and secure the reality of the political creation of reason.

In the physical creation, nature shows us the road that we have to follow

in the moral creation. Only when the struggle of elementary forces has

ceased in inferior organizations, nature rises to the noble form of the

physical man. In like manner, the conflict of the elements of the moral

man and that of blind instincts must have ceased, and a coarse antagonism

in himself, before the attempt can be hazarded. On the other hand, the

independence of man's character must be secured, and his submission to

despotic forms must have given place to a suitable liberty, before the

variety in his constitution can be made subordinate to the unity of the

ideal. When the man of nature still makes such an anarchial abuse of his

will, his liberty ought hardly to be disclosed to him. And when the man

fashioned by culture makes so little use of his freedom, his free will

ought not to be taken from him. The concession of liberal principles

becomes a treason to social order when it is associated with a force

still in fermentation, and increases the already exuberant energy of its

nature. Again, the law of conformity under one level becomes tyranny to

the individual when it is allied to a weakness already holding sway and

to natural obstacles, and when it comes to extinguish the last spark of

spontaneity and of originality.

The tone of the age must therefore rise from its profound moral

degradation; on the one hand it must emancipate itself from the blind

service of nature, and on the other it must revert to its simplicity, its

truth, and its fruitful sap; a sufficient task for more than a century.

However, I admit readily, more than one special effort may meet with

success, but no improvement of the whole will result from it, and

contradictions in action will be a continual protest against the unity of

maxims. It will be quite possible, then, that in remote corners of the

world humanity may be honored in the person of the negro, while in Europe

it may be degraded in the person of the thinker. The old principles will

remain, but they will adopt the dress of the age, and philosophy will

lend its name to an oppression that was formerly authorized by the

church. In one place, alarmed at the liberty which in its opening

efforts always shows itself an enemy, it will cast itself into the arms

of a convenient servitude. In another place, reduced to despair by a

pedantic tutelage, it will be driven into the savage license of the state

of nature. Usurpation will invoke the weakness of human nature, and

insurrection will invoke its dignity, till at length the great sovereign

of all human things, blind force, shall come in and decide, like a vulgar

pugilist, this pretended contest of principles.

LETTER VIII.

Must philosophy therefore retire from this field, disappointed in its

hopes? Whilst in all other directions the dominion of forms is extended,

must this the most precious of all gifts be abandoned to a formless

chance? Must the contest of blind forces last eternally in the political

world, and is social law never to triumph over a hating egotism?

Not in the least. It is true that reason herself will never attempt

directly a struggle with this brutal force which resists her arms, and

she will be as far as the son of Saturn in the "Iliad" from descending

into the dismal field of battle, to fight them in person. But she

chooses the most deserving among the combatants, clothes him with divine

arms as Jupiter gave them to his son-in-law, and by her triumphing force

she finally decides the victory.

Reason has done all that she could in finding the law and promulgating

it; it is for the energy of the will and the ardor of feeling to carry it

out. To issue victoriously from her contest with force, truth herself

must first become a force, and turn one of the instincts of man into her

champion in the empire of phenomena. For instincts are the only motive

forces in the material world. If hitherto truth has so little manifested

her victorious power, this has not depended on the understanding, which

could not have unveiled it, but on the heart which remained closed to it

and on instinct which did not act with it.

Whence, in fact, proceeds this general sway of prejudices, this might of

the understanding in the midst of the light disseminated by philosophy

and experience? The age is enlightened, that is to say, that knowledge,

obtained and vulgarized, suffices to set right at least on practical

principles. The spirit of free inquiry has dissipated the erroneous

opinions which long barred the access to truth, and has undermined the

ground on which fanaticism and deception had erected their throne.

Reason has purified itself from the illusions of the senses and from a

mendacious sophistry, and philosophy herself raises her voice and exhorts

us to return to the bosom of nature, to which she had first made us

unfaithful. Whence then is it that we remain still barbarians?

There must be something in the spirit of man--as it is not in the objects

themselves--which prevents us from receiving the truth, notwithstanding

the brilliant light she diffuses, and from accepting her, whatever may be

her strength for producing conviction. This something was perceived and

expressed by an ancient sage in this very significant maxim: sapere aude

[dare to be wise.]

Dare to be wise! A spirited courage is required to triumph over the

impediments that the indolence of nature as well as the cowardice of the

heart oppose to our instruction. It was not without reason that the

ancient Mythos made Minerva issue fully armed from the head of Jupiter,

for it is with warfare that this instruction commences. From its very

outset it has to sustain a hard fight against the senses, which do not

like to be roused from their easy slumber. The greater part of men are

much too exhausted and enervated by their struggle with want to be able

to engage in a new and severe contest with error. Satisfied if they

themselves can escape from the hard labor of thought, they willingly

abandon to others the guardianship of their thoughts. And if it happens

that nobler necessities agitate their soul, they cling with a greedy

faith to the formula that the state and the church hold in reserve for

such cases. If these unhappy men deserve our compassion, those others

deserve our just contempt, who, though set free from those necessities by

more fortunate circumstances, yet willingly bend to their yoke. These

latter persons prefer this twilight of obscure ideas, where the feelings

have more intensity, and the imagination can at will create convenient

chimeras, to the rays of truth which put to flight the pleasant illusions

of their dreams. They have founded the whole structure of their

happiness on these very illusions, which ought to be combated and

dissipated by the light of knowledge, and they would think they were

paying too dearly for a truth which begins by robbing them of all that

has value in their sight. It would be necessary that they should be

already sages to love wisdom: a truth that was felt at once by him to

whom philosophy owes its name. [The Greek word means, as is known, love

of wisdom.]

It is therefore not going far enough to say that the light of the

understanding only deserves respect when it reacts on the character; to a

certain extent it is from the character that this light proceeds; for the

road that terminates in the head must pass through the heart.

Accordingly, the most pressing need of the present time is to educate the

sensibility, because it is the means, not only to render efficacious in

practice the improvement of ideas, but to call this improvement into

existence.

LETTER IX.

But perhaps there is a vicious circle in our previous reasoning!

Theoretical culture must it seems bring along with it practical culture,

and yet the latter must be the condition of the former. All improvement

in the political sphere must proceed from the ennobling of the character.

But, subject to the influence of a social constitution still barbarous,

how can character become ennobled? It would then be necessary to seek

for this end an instrument that the state does not furnish, and to open

sources that would have preserved themselves pure in the midst of

political corruption.

I have now reached the point to which all the considerations tended that

have engaged me up to the present time. This instrument is the art of

the beautiful; these sources are open to us in its immortal models.

Art, like science, is emancipated from all that is positive, and all that

is humanly conventional; both are completely independent of the arbitrary

will of man. The political legislator may place their empire under an

interdict, but he cannot reign there. He can proscribe the friend of

truth, but truth subsists; he can degrade the artist, but he cannot

change art. No doubt, nothing is more common than to see science and art

bend before the spirit of the age, and creative taste receive its law

from critical taste. When the character becomes stiff and hardens

itself, we see science severely keeping her limits, and art subject to

the harsh restraint of rules; when the character is relaxed and softened,

science endeavors to please and art to rejoice. For whole ages

philosophers as well as artists show themselves occupied in letting down

truth and beauty to the depths of vulgar humanity. They themselves are

swallowed up in it; but, thanks to their essential vigor and

indestructible life, the true and the beautiful make a victorious fight,

and issue triumphant from the abyss.

No doubt the artist is the child of his time, but unhappy for him if he

is its disciple or even its favorite! Let a beneficent deity carry off

in good time the suckling from the breast of its mother, let it nourish

him on the milk of a better age, and suffer him to grow up and arrive at

virility under the distant sky of Greece. When he has attained manhood,

let him come back, presenting a face strange to his own age; let him

come, not to delight it with his apparition, but rather to purify it,

terrible as the son of Agamemnon. He will, indeed, receive his matter

from the present time, but he will borrow the form from a nobler time and

even beyond all time, from the essential, absolute, immutable unity.

There, issuing from the pure ether of its heavenly nature, flows the

source of all beauty, which was never tainted by the 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. 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 his 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 realized. 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 favored 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 determinable--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 realize 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 special expression of the

same. Exactly because its "aesthetic disposition" does not exclusively

shelter any separate function of humanity, it is favorable to all without

distinction; nor does it favor 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 its 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 development, 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 matter 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

organization 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

scandalized 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 it leaves our

intellectual and moral value entirely problematical, it is, however, the

necessary condition without which we should never attain to an opinion or

a sentiment. In a word, there is no other way to make a reasonable being

out of a sensuous man than by making him first aesthetic.

But, you might object: Is this mediation absolutely indispensable? Could

not truth and duty, one or the other, in themselves and by themselves,

find access to the sensuous man? To this I reply: Not only is it

possible but it is absolutely necessary that they owe solely to

themselves their determining force, and nothing would be more

contradictory to our preceding affirmations than to appear to defend the

contrary opinion. It has been expressly proved that the beautiful

furnishes no result, either for the comprehension or for the will; that

it mingles with no operations, either of thought or of resolution; and

that it confers this double power without determining anything with

regard to the real exercise of this power. Here all foreign help

disappears, and the pure logical form, the idea, would speak immediately

to the intelligence, as the pure moral form, the law, immediately to the

will.

But that the pure form should be capable of it, and that there is in

general a pure form for sensuous man, is that, I maintain, which should

be rendered possible by the aesthetic disposition of the soul. Truth is

not a thing which can be received from without like reality or the

visible existence of objects. It is the thinking force, in his own

liberty and activity, which produces it, and it is just this liberty

proper to it, this liberty which we seek in vain in sensuous man. The

sensuous man is already determined physically, and thenceforth he has no

longer his free determinability; he must necessarily first enter into

possession of this lost determinability before he can exchange the

passive against an active determination. Therefore, in order to recover

it, he must either lose the passive determination that he had, or he

should enclose already in himself the active determination to which he

should pass. If he confined himself to lose passive determination, he

would at the same time lose with it the possibility of an active

determination, because thought needs a body, and form can only be

realized through matter. He must therefore contain already in himself

the active determination, that he may be at once both actively and

passively determined, that is to say, he becomes necessarily aesthetic.