on the matter.

Popular instruction is compatible with this freedom. By the term popular
speakers or popular writers I imply all those who do not direct their
remarks exclusively to the learned. Now, as these persons do not address
any carefully trained body of hearers or readers, but take them as they
find them, they must only assume the existence of the general conditions
of thought, only the universal impulses that call attention, but no
special gift of thinking, no acquaintance with distinct conceptions, nor
any interest in special subjects. These lecturers and authors must not
be too particular as to whether their audience or readers assign by their
imagination a proper meaning to their abstractions, or whether they will
furnish a proper subject-matter for the universal conceptions to which
the scientific discourse is limited. In order to pursue a safer, easier
course, these persons will present along with their ideas the perceptions
and separate cases to which they relate, and they leave it to the
understanding of the reader to form a proper conception impromptu.
Accordingly, the faculty of imagination is much more mixed up with a
popular discourse, but only to reproduce, to renew previously received
representations, and not to produce, to express its own self-creating
power. Those special cases or perceptions are much too certainly
calculated for the object on hand, and much too closely applied to the
use that is to be made of them, to allow the imagination ever to forget
that it only acts in the service of the understanding. It is true that a
discourse of this popular kind holds somewhat closer to life and the
world of sense, but it does not become lost in it. The mode of
presenting the subject is still didactic; for in order to be beautiful it
is still wanting in the two most distinguished features of beauty,
sensuousness of expression and freedom of movement.

The mode of presenting a theme may be called free when the understanding,
while determining the connection of ideas, does so with so little
prominence that the imagination appears to act quite capriciously in the
matter, and to follow only the accident of time. The presentation of a
subject becomes sensuous when it conceals the general in the particular,
and when the fancy gives the living image (the whole representation),
where attention is merely concerned with the conception (the part
representation). Accordingly, sensuous presentation is, viewed in o