only arrive at reality by limitation, at the
positive, at a real position, by negation or exclusion; to determination,
by the suppression of our free determinableness.

But mere exclusion would never beget a reality, nor would a mere sensuous
impression ever give birth to a perception, if there were not something
from which it was excluded, if by an absolute act of the mind the
negation were not referred to something positive, and if opposition did
not issue out of non-position. This act of the mind is styled judging or
thinking, and the result is named thought.

Before we determine a place in space, there is no space for us; but
without absolute space we could never determine a place. The same is the
case with time. Before we have an instant, there is no time to us: but
without infinite time--eternity--we should never have a representation of
the instant. Thus, therefore, we can only arrive at the whole by the
part, to the unlimited through limitation; but reciprocally we only
arrive at the part through the whole, at limitation through the
unlimited.

It follows from this, that when it is affirmed of beauty that it mediates
for man, the transition from feeling to thought, this must not be
understood to mean that beauty can fill up the gap that separates feeling
from thought, the passive from the active. This gap is infinite; and,
without the interposition of a new and independent faculty, it is
impossible for the general to issue from the individual, the necessary
from the contingent. Thought is the immediate act of this absolute
power, which, I admit, can only be manifested in connection with sensuous
impressions, but which in this manifestation depends so little on the
sensuous that it reveals itself specially in an opposition to it. The
spontaneity or autonomy with which it acts excludes every foreign
influence; and it is not in as far as it helps thought--which comprehends
a manifest contradiction but only in as far as it procures for the
intellectual faculties the freedom to manifest themselves in conformity
with their proper laws. It does it only because the beautiful can become
a means of leading man from matter to form, from feeling to laws, from a
limited existence to an absolute existence.

But this assumes that the freedom of the intellectual faculties can be
balked, which appears contradictory to the conception of an autonomous
power. For a power which only receives the matter of its activity from
witho