le of the coarse elements, he must first destroy the aesthetic
organization of a work to find enjoyment in it, and carefully disinter
the details which genius has caused to vanish, with infinite art, in the
harmony of the whole. The interest he takes in the work is either solely
moral or exclusively physical; the only thing wanting to it is to be
exactly what it ought to be--aesthetical. The readers of this class
enjoy a serious and pathetic poem as they do a sermon: a simple and
playful work, as an inebriating draught; and if on the one hand they have
so little taste as to demand edification from a tragedy or from an epos,
even such as the "Messias," on the other hand they will be infallibly
scandalized by a piece after the fashion of Anacreon and Catullus.

LETTER XXIII.

I take up the thread of my researches, which I broke off only to apply
the principles I laid down to practical art and the appreciation of its
works.

The transition from the passivity of sensuousness to the activity of
thought and of will can be effected only by the intermediary state of
aesthetic liberty; and though in itself this state decides nothing
respecting our opinions and our sentiments, and therefore it leaves our
intellectual and moral value entirely problematical, it is, however, the
necessary condition without which we should never attain to an opinion or
a sentiment. In a word, there is no other way to make a reasonable being
out of a sensuous man than by making him 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 th