first aesthetic.

But, you might object: Is this mediation absolutely indispensable? Could
not truth and duty, one or the other, in themselves and by themselves,
find access to the sensuous man? To this I reply: Not only is it
possible but it is absolutely necessary that they owe solely to
themselves their determining force, and nothing would be more
contradictory to our preceding affirmations than to appear to defend the
contrary opinion. It has been expressly proved that the beautiful
furnishes no result, either for the comprehension or for the will; that
it mingles with no operations, either of thought or of resolution; and
that it confers this double power without determining anything with
regard to the real exercise of this power. Here all foreign help
disappears, and the pure logical form, the idea, would speak immediately
to the intelligence, as the pure moral form, the law, immediately to the
will.

But that the pure form should be capable of it, and that there is in
general a pure form for sensuous man, is that, I maintain, which should
be rendered possible by the aesthetic disposition of the soul. Truth is
not a thing which can be received from without like reality or the
visible existence of objects. It is the thinking force, in his own
liberty and activity, which produces it, and it is just this liberty
proper to it, this liberty which we seek in vain in sensuous man. The
sensuous man is already determined physically, and thenceforth he has no
longer his free determinability; he must necessarily first enter into
possession of this lost determinability before he can exchange the
passive against an active determination. Therefore, in order to recover
it, he must either lose the passive determination that he had, or he
should enclose already in himself the active determination to which he
should pass. If he confined himself to lose passive determination, he
would at the same time lose with it the possibility of an active
determination, because thought needs a body, and form can only be
realized through matter. He must therefore contain already in himself
the active determination, that he may be at once both actively and
passively determined, that is to say, he becomes necessarily aesthetic.

Consequently, by the aesthetic disposition of the soul the proper
activity of reason is already revealed in the sphere of sensuousness, the
power of sense is already broken within its own boundaries, and the
ennobling o