This is the pure product of a process of abstraction from everything material and accidental,a pure object free from every subjective barrier,a pure state of self-activity without any admixture of passive sensations.There is indeed a way back to sensation from the highest abstraction;for thought teaches the inner sensation,and the idea of logical and moral unity passes into a sensation of sensual accord.But if we delight in knowledge we separate very accurately our own conceptions from our sensations;we look upon the latter as something accidental,which might have been omitted without the knowledge being impaired thereby,without truth being less true.It would,however,be a vain attempt to suppress this connection of the faculty of feeling with the idea of beauty,consequently,we shall not succeed in representing to ourselves one as the effect of the other,but we must look upon them both together and reciprocally as cause and effect.In the pleasure which we derive from knowledge we readily distinguish the passage from the active to the passive state,and we clearly perceive that the first ends when the second begins.On the contrary,from the pleasure which we take in beauty,this transition from the active to the passive is not perceivable,and reflection is so intimately blended with feeling that we believe we feel the form immediately.Beauty is then an object to us,it is true,because reflection is the condition of the feeling which we have of it;but it is also a state of our personality (our Ego),because the feeling is the condition of the idea we conceive of it:beauty is therefore doubtless form,because we contemplate it,but it is equally life because we feel it.In a word,it is at once our state and our act.And precisely because it is at the same time both a state and an act,it triumphantly proves to us that the passive does not exclude the active,neither matter nor form,neither the finite nor the infinite;and that consequently the physical dependence to which man is necessarily devoted does not in any way destroy his moral liberty.This is the proof of beauty,and I ought to add that this alone can prove it.In fact,as in the possession of truth or of logical unity,feeling is not necessarily one with the thought,but follows it accidentally;it is a fact which only proves that a sensitive nature can succeed a rational nature,and vice versa;not that they co-exist,that they exercise a reciprocal action one over the other,and lastly that they ought to be united in an absolute and necessary manner.From this exclusion of feeling as long as there is thought,and of thought so long as there is feeling,we should on the contrary conclude that the two natures are incompatible,so that in order to demonstrate the pure reason is to be realised in humanity,the best proof given by the analysis is that this realisation is demanded.But,as in the realisation of beauty or of aesthetic unity,there is a real union,mutual substitution of matter and of form,of passive and of active,by this alone in proved the compatibility of the two natures,the possible realisation of the infinite in the finite,and consequently also the possibility of the most sublime humanity.
Henceforth we need no longer be embarrassed to find a transition from dependent feeling to moral liberty,because beauty reveals to us the fact that they can perfectly co-exist,and that to show himself a spirit,man need not escape from matter.But if on one side he is free,even in his relation with a visible world,as the fact of beauty teaches,and if on the other side freedom is something absolute and supersensuous,as its idea necessarily implies,the question is no longer how man succeeds in raising himself from the finite to the absolute,and opposing himself in his thought and will to sensuality,as this has already been produced in the fact of beauty.In a word,we have no longer to ask how he passes from virtue to truth,which is already included in the former,but how he opens a way for himself from vulgar reality to aesthetic reality,and from the ordinary feelings of life to the perception of the beautiful.
