that is, to cause to
cease entirely that relation which is so fatal to him. It is, in short,
to annihilate as an idea the violence he is obliged to suffer in fact.
The education that fits man for this is called moral education.

The man fashioned by moral education, and he only, is entirely free. He
is either superior to nature as a power, or he is in harmony with her.
None of the actions that she brings to bear upon him is violence, for
before reaching him it has become an act of his own will, and dynamic
nature could never touch him, because he spontaneously keeps away from
all to which she can reach. But to attain to this state of mind, which
morality designates as resignation to necessary things, and religion
styles absolute submission to the counsels of Providence, to reach this
by an effort of his free will and with reflection, a certain clearness is
required in thought, and a certain energy in the will, superior to what
man commonly possesses in active life. Happily for him, man finds here
not only in his rational nature a moral aptitude that can be developed by
the understanding, but also in his reasonable and sensible nature--that
is, in his human nature--an aesthetic tendency which seems to have been
placed there expressly: a faculty awakens of itself in the presence of
certain sensuous objects, and which, after our feelings are purified, can
be cultivated to such a point as to become a powerful ideal development.
This aptitude, I grant, is idealistic in its principle and in its
essence, but one which even the realist allows to be seen clearly enough
in his conduct, though he does not acknowledge this in theory. I am now
about to discuss this faculty.

I admit that the sense of the beautiful, when it is developed by culture,
suffices of itself even to make us, in a certain sense, independent of
nature as far as it is a force. A mind that has ennobled itself
sufficiently to be more sensible of the form than of the matter of
things, contains in itself a plenitude of existence that nothing could
make it lose, especially as it does not trouble itself about the
possession of the things in question, and finds a very liberal pleasure
in the mere contemplation of the phenomenon. As this mind has no want to
appropriate the objects in the midst of which it lives, it has no fear of
being deprived of them. But it is nevertheless necessary that these
phenomena should have a body, through which they manifest themselves;
an