y was the first to recognize that beauty in art is one of
the means by which the contradictions can be removed between mind
considered in its abstract and absolute existence and nature constituting
the world of sense, bringing back these two factors to unity.

Kant was the first who felt the want of this union and expressed it, but
without determining its conditions or expressing it scientifically. He
was impeded in his efforts to effect this union by the opposition between
the subjective and the objective, by his placing practical reason above
theoretical reason, and he set up the opposition found in the moral
sphere as the highest principle of morality. Reduced to this difficulty,
all that Kant could do was to express the union under the form of the
subjective ideas of reason, or as postulates to be deduced from the
practical reason, without their essential character being known, and
representing their realization as nothing more than a simple you ought,
or imperative "Du sollst."

In his teleological judgment applied to living beings, Kant comes, on the
contrary, to consider the living organism in such wise that, the general
including the particular, and determining it as an end, consequently the
idea also determines the external, the compound of the organs, not by an
act springing from without but issuing from within. In this way the end
and the means, the interior and exterior, the general and particular, are
confounded in unity. But this judgment only expresses a subjective act
of reflection, and does not throw any light on the object in itself.
Kant has the same view of the aesthetic judgment. According to him the
judgment does not proceed either from reason, as the faculty of general
ideas, or from sensuous perception, but from the free play of the reason
and of the imagination. In this analysis of the cognitive faculty, the
object only exists relatively to the subject and to the feeling of
pleasure or the enjoyment that it experiences.

The characteristics of the beautiful are, according to Kant:--

1. The pleasure it procures is free from interest.

2. Beauty appears to us as an object of general enjoyment, without
awakening in us the consciousness of an abstract idea and of a category
of reason to which we might refer our judgment.

3. Beauty ought to embrace in itself the relation of conformity to its
end, but in such a way that this conformity may be grasped without the
idea of the end being offered to