ts
me; it delights me precisely because it testifies to a power of will
capable of resisting even the most potent of instincts, that of
self-preservation. Was it a moral feeling, or only a more powerful
sensuous attraction, that silenced the instinct of self-preservation in
this enthusiast. It matters little, when I appreciate the act from an
aesthetic point of view. I then drop the individual, I take away the
relation of his will to the law that ought to govern him; I think of
human will in general, considered as a common faculty of the race, and I
regard it in connection with all the forces of nature. We have seen that
in a moral point of view, the preservation of our being seemed to us a
duty, and therefore we were offended at seeing Proteus violate this duty.
In an aesthetic point of view the self-preservation only appears as an
interest, and therefore the sacrifice of this interest pleases us. Thus
the operation that we perform in the judgments of the second kind is
precisely the inverse of that which we perform in those of the first. In
the former we oppose the individual, a sensuous and limited being, and
his personal will, which can be effected pathologically, to the absolute
law of the will in general, and of unconditional duty which binds every
spiritual being; in the second case, on the contrary, we oppose the
faculty of willing, absolute volition, and the spiritual force as an
infinite thing, to the solicitations of nature and the impediments of
sense. This is the reason why the aesthetical judgment leaves us free,
and delights and enraptures us. It is because the mere conception of
this faculty of willing in an absolute manner, the mere idea of this
moral aptitude, gives us in itself a consciousness of a manifest
advantage over the sensuous. It is because the mere possibility of
emancipating ourselves from the impediments of nature is in itself a
satisfaction that flatters our thirst for freedom. This is the reason
why moral judgment, on the contrary, makes us experience a feeling of
constraint that humbles us. It is because in connection with each
voluntary act we appreciate in this manner, we feel, as regards the
absolute law that ought to rule the will in general, in a position of
inferiority more or less decided, and because the constraint of the will
thus limited to a single determination, which duty requires of it at all
costs, contradicts the instinct of freedom which is the property of
imagination. I