heless distinguish in this fiction a conception communicated to us
from without, from another conception that we produce spontaneously in
ourselves.

Thus the mind loses a part of her freedom, inasmuch as she receives now
from without that which she produced before her own activity. The idea
of danger puts on an appearance of objective reality, and affection
becomes now a serious affair.

If we were only sensuous creatures, obeying no other instinct than that
of self-preservation, we should stop here, and we should remain in a
state of mere and pure affection. But there is something in us which
takes no part in the affections of sensuous nature, and whose activity is
not directed according to physical conditions. According, then, as this
independently acting principle (the disposition, the moral faculty) has
become to a degree developed in the soul, there is left more or less
space for passive nature, and there remains more or less of the
independent principle in the affection.

In the truly moral soul the terrible trial (of the imagination) passes
quickly and readily into the sublime. In proportion as imagination loses
its liberty, reason makes its own prevail, and the soul ceases not to
enlarge within when it thus finds outward limits. Driven from all the
intrenchments which would give physical protection to sensuous creatures,
we seek refuge in the stronghold of our moral liberty, and we arrive by
that means at an absolute and unlimited safety, at the very moment when
we seem to be deprived in the world of phenomena of a relative and
precarious rampart. But precisely because it was necessary to have
arrived at the physical oppression before having recourse to the
assistance of our moral nature, we can only buy this high sentiment of
our liberty through suffering. An ordinary soul confines itself entirely
to this suffering, and never comprehends in the sublime or the pathetic
anything beyond the terrible. An independent soul, on the contrary,
precisely seizes this occasion to rise to the feeling of his moral force,
in all that is most magnificent in this force, and from every terrible
object knows how to draw out the sublime.

The moral man (the father) [see Aeneid, ii. 213-215] is here attacked
before the physical man, and that has a grand effect. All the affections
become more aesthetic when we receive them second-hand; there is no
stronger sympathy than that we feel for sympathy.

The moment [see Aeneid, ii. 2