eason 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