ed.

The plastic nature of man has in it an infinity of resources to retrieve
the negligencies and repair the faults that she may have committed. To
this end it is sufficient that the mind, the moral agent, sustain it, or
even withhold from troubling it in the labor of rebuilding.

Since the movements become fixed (gestures pass to a state of lineament),
are themselves capable of grace, it would perhaps appear to be rational
to comprehend equally under this idea of beauty some apparent or
imitative movements (the flamboyant lines for example, undulations). It
is this which Mendelssohn upholds. But then the idea of grace would be
confounded with the ideal of beauty in general, for all beauty is
definitively but a property of true or apparent movement (objective or
subjective), as I hope to demonstrate in an analysis of beauty. With
regard to grace, the only movements which can offer any are those which
respond at the same time to a sentiment.

The person (it is known what I mean by the expression) prescribes the
movements of the body, either through the will, when he desires to
realize in the world of sense an effect of which he has proposed the
idea, and in that case the movements are said to be voluntary or
intentional; or, on the other hand, they take place without its will
taking any part in it--in virtue of a fatal law of the organism--but on
the occasion of a sentiment, in the latter case, I say that the movements
are sympathetic. The sympathetic movement, though it may be involuntary
and provoked by a sentiment, ought not to be confounded with those purely
instinctive movements that proceed from physical sensibility. Physical
instinct is not a free agent, and that which it executes is not an act of
the person; I understand then here exclusively, by sympathetic movements,
those which accompany a sentiment, a disposition of the moral order.

The question that now presents itself is this: Of these two kinds of
movement, having their principle in the person, which is capable of
grace?

That which we are rigorously forced to distinguish in philosophic
analysis is not always separated also in the real. Thus it is rare that
we meet intentional movements without sympathetic movements, because the
will determines the intentional movements only after being decided itself
by the moral sentiments which are the principle of the sympathetic
movements. When a person speaks, we see his looks, his lineaments, his
hands, often