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