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