d 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. In the former case we soared from the real to the possible,
and from the individual to the species; in the latter, on the contrary,
we descend from the possible to the real, and we shut up the species in
the narrow limits of the individual. We cannot therefore be surprised if
the aesthetical judgment enlarges the heart, while the moral judgment
constrains and straitens it.

It results, therefore, from all that which precedes, that the moral
judgment and the aesthetic, far from mutually corroborating each other,
impede and hinder each other, because they impress on the soul two
directions entirely opposite. In fact, this observance of rule which
reason requires of us as moral judge is incompatible with the
independence which the imagination calls for as aesthetic judge. It
follows that an object will have so much the less aesthetic value the
more it has the character of a moral object, and if the poet were obliged
notwithstanding that to choose it, he would do we