f attention is given to
the single result, and not to the whole faculty, and if we regard only
the absence or want of every special determination. We must therefore do
justice to those who pronounce the beautiful, and the disposition in
which it places the mind, as entirely indifferent and unprofitable, in
relation to knowledge and feeling. They are perfectly right; for it is
certain that beauty gives no separate, single result, either for the
understanding or for the will; it does not carry out a single
intellectual or moral object; it discovers no truth, does not help us to
fulfil a single duty, and, in one word, is equally unfit to found the
character or to clear the head. Accordingly, the personal worth of a
man, or his dignity, as far as this can only depend on himself, remains
entirely undetermined by aesthetic culture, and nothing further is
attained than that, on the part of nature, it is made profitable for him
to make of himself what he will; that the freedom to be what he ought to
be is restored perfectly to him.

But by this something infinite is attained. But as soon as we remember
that freedom is taken from man by the one-sided compulsion of nature in
feeling, and by the exclusive legislation of the reason in thinking, we
must consider the capacity restored to him by the aesthetical
disposition, as the highest of all gifts, as the gift of humanity. I
admit that he possesses this capacity for humanity, before every definite
determination in which he may be placed. But, as a matter of fact, he
loses it with every determined condition into which he may come; and if
he is to pass over to an opposite condition, humanity must be in every
case restored to him by the aesthetic life.

It is therefore not only a poetical license, but also philosophically
correct, when beauty is named our second creator. Nor is this
inconsistent with the fact that she only makes it possible for us to
attain and realize humanity, leaving this to our free will. For in this
she acts in common with our original creator, nature, which has imparted
to us nothing further than this capacity for humanity, but leaves the use
of it to our own determination of will.

LETTER XXII.

Accordingly, if the aesthetic disposition of the mind must be looked upon
in one respect as nothing--that is, when we confine our view to separate
and determined operations--it must be looked upon in another respect as a
state of the highest reality, in as