ch, in this way, in conformity with the nature of the
beautiful, restores the state of limitation to an absolute state, and
makes of man a whole, complete in himself.

Thus the beautiful by no means belies in reality the idea which we have
made of it in speculation; only its action is much less free in it than
in the field of theory, where we were able to apply it to the pure
conception of humanity. In man, as experience shows him to us, the
beautiful finds a matter, already damaged and resisting, which robs him
in ideal perfection of what it communicates to him of its individual mode
of being. Accordingly in reality the beautiful will always appear a
peculiar and limited species, and not as the pure genus; in excited minds
in a state of tension it will lose its freedom and variety; in relaxed
minds, it will lose its vivifying force; but we, who have become familiar
with the true character of this contradictory phenomenon, cannot be led
astray by it. We shall not follow the great crowd of critics, in
determining their conception by separate experiences, and to make them
answerable for the deficiencies which man shows under their influence.
We know rather that it is man who transfers the imperfections of his
individuality over to them, who stands perpetually in the way of their
perfection by his subjective limitation, and lowers their absolute ideal
to two limited forms of phenomena.

It was advanced that soft beauty is for an unstrung mind, and the
energetic beauty for the tightly strung mind. But I apply the term
unstrung to a man when he is rather under the pressure of feelings than
under the pressure of conceptions. Every exclusive sway of one of his
two fundamental impulses is for man a state of compulsion and violence,
and freedom only exists in the co-operation of his two natures.
Accordingly, the man governed preponderately by feelings, or sensuously
unstrung, is emancipated and set free by matter. The soft and graceful
beauty, to satisfy this twofold problem, must therefore show herself
under two aspects--in two distinct forms. First, as a form in repose,
she will tone down savage life, and pave the way from feeling to thought.
She will, secondly, as a living image, equip the abstract form with
sensuous power, and lead back the conception to intuition and law to
feeling. The former service she does to the man of nature, the second to
the man of art. But because she does not in both cases hold complete
sway over