By beauty the sensuous man is led to form and to thought; by beauty
the spiritual man is brought back to matter and restored to the
world of sense. From this statement it would appear to follow that
between matter and form, between passivity and activity, there must
be a middle state, and that beauty plants us in this state. It
actually happens that the greater part of mankind really form this
conception of beauty as soon as they begin to reflect on its
operations, and all experience I seems to point to this conclusion.
But, on the other hand, nothing is more unwarrantable and
contradictory than such a conception, because the aversion of matter
and form, the passive and the active, feeling and thought, is
eternal and I cannot be mediated in any way. How can we remove this
contradiction? Beauty weds the two opposed conditions of feeling and
thinking, and yet there is absolutely no medium between them. The
former is immediately certain through experience, the other through
the reason.
This is the point to which the whole question of beauty leads, and
if we succeed in settling this point in a satisfactory way, we have
at length found the clue that will conduct us through the whole
labyrinth of aesthetics.
But this requires two very different operations, which must
necessarily support each other in this inquiry. Beauty it is said,
weds two conditions with one another which are opposite to each
other, and can never be one. We must start from this opposition; we
must grasp and recognise them in their entire purity and strictness,
so that both conditions are separated in the most definite matter;
otherwise we mix, but we do not unite them. Secondly, it is usual to
say, beauty unites those two opposed conditions, and therefore
removes the opposition. But because both conditions remain eternally
opposed to one another, they cannot be united in any other way than
by being suppressed. Our second business is therefore to make this
connection perfect, to carry them out with such purity and
perfection that both conditions disappear entirely in a third one,
and no trace of separation remains in the whole; otherwise we
segregate, but do not unite. All the disputes that have ever
prevailed and still prevail in the philosophical world respecting
the conception of beauty have no other origin than their commencing
without a sufficiently strict distinction, or that it is not carried
out fully to a pure union. Those philosophers who blindly follow
their feeling in reflecting on this topic can obtain no other
conception of beauty, because they distinguish nothing separate in
the totality of the sensuous impression. Other philosophers, who
take the understanding as their exclusive guide, can never obtain a
conception of beauty, because they never see anything else in the
whole than the parts, and spirit and matter remain eternally
separate, even in their most perfect unity. The first fear to
suppress beauty dynamically, that is, as a working power, if they
must separate what is united in the feeling. The others fear to
suppress beauty logically, that is, as a conception, when they have
to hold together what in the understanding is separate. The former
wish to think of beauty as it works; the latter wish it to work as
it is thought. Both therefore must miss the truth; the former
because they try to follow infinite nature with their limited
thinking power; the others, because they wish to limit unlimited
nature according to their laws of thought The first fear to rob
beauty of its freedom by a too strict dissection, the others fear to
destroy the distinctness of the conception by a too violent union.
But the former do not reflect that the freedom in which they very
properly place the essence of beauty is not lawlessness, but harmony
of laws; not caprice, but the highest internal necessity. The others
do not remember that distinctness, which they with equal right
demand from beauty, does not consist in the exclusion of certain
realities, but the absolute including of all; that is not therefore
limitation, but infinitude. We shall avoid the quicksands on which
both have made shipwreck if we begin from the two elements in which
beauty divides itself before the understanding, but then afterwards
rise to a pure aesthetic unity by which it works on feeling, and in
which both those conditions completely disappear.