presses 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 our mind.

4. Though it be not accompanied by an abstract idea, beauty ought to be
acknowledged as the object of a necessary enjoyment.

A special feature of all this system is the indissoluble unity of what is
supposed to be separated in consciousness. This distinction disappears
in the beautiful, because in it the general and the particular, the end
and the means, the idea and the object, mentally penetrate each other
completely. The particular in itself, whether it be opposed to itself or
to what is general, is something accidental. But here what may be
considered as an accidental form is so intimately connected with the
general that it is confounded and identified with it. By this means the
beautiful in art presents thought to us as incarnate. On the other hand,
matter, nature, the sensuous as themselves possessing measure, end, and
harmony, are raised to the dignity of spirit and share in its general
character. Thought not only abandons its hostility against nature, but
smiles in her. Sensation and enjoyment are justified and sanctified, so
that nature and liberty, sense and ideas, find their justification and
their sanctification in this union. Nevertheless this reconciliation,
though seemingly perfect, is stricken with the character of
subjectiveness. It cannot constitute the absolutely true and real.

Such is an outline of the principal results of Kant's criticism, and
Hegel passes high praise on the profoundly philosophic mind of Schiller,
who dema