f physical man carried far enough, for spiritual man has only
to develop himself according to the laws of liberty. The transition from
an aesthetic state to a logical and moral state (from the beautiful to
truth and duty) is then infinitely more easy than the transition from the
physical state to the aesthetic state (from life pure and blind to form).
This transition man can effectuate alone by his liberty, whilst he has
only to enter into possession of himself not to give it himself; but to
separate the elements of his nature, and not to enlarge it. Having
attained to the aesthetic disposition, man will give to his judgments and
to his actions a universal value as soon as he desires it. This passage
from brute nature to beauty, in which an entirely new faculty would
awaken in him, nature would render easier, and his will has no power over
a disposition which, we know, itself gives birth to the will. To bring
the aesthetic man to profound views, to elevated sentiments, he requires
nothing more than important occasions: to obtain the same thing from the
sensuous man, his nature must at first be changed. To make of the former
a hero, a sage, it is often only necessary to meet with a sublime
situation, which exercises upon the faculty of the will the more
immediate action; for the second, it must first be transplanted under
another sky.

One of the most important tasks of culture, then, is to submit man to
form, even in a purely physical life, and to render it aesthetic as far
as the domain of the beautiful can be extended, for it is alone in the
aesthetic state, and not in the physical state, that the moral state can
be developed. If in each particular case man ought to possess the power
to make his judgment and his will the judgment of the entire species; if
he ought to find in each limited existence the transition to an infinite
existence; if, lastly, he ought from every dependent situation to take
his flight to rise to autonomy and to liberty, it must be observed that
at no moment he is only individual and solely obeys the laws of nature.
To be apt and ready to raise himself from the narrow circle of the ends
of nature, to rational ends, in the sphere of the former he must already
have exercised himself in the second; he must already have realized his
physical destiny with a certain liberty that belongs only to spiritual
nature, that is to say according to the laws of the beautiful.

And that he can effect without thwa