in any other way than by being suppressed. Our second
business is therefore to make this connection perfect, to carry them out
with such purity and perfection that both conditions disappear entirely
in a third one, and no trace of separation remains in the whole;
otherwise we segregate, but do not unite. All the disputes that have
ever prevailed and still prevail in the philosophical world respecting
the conception of beauty have no other origin than their commencing
without a sufficiently strict distinction, or that it is not carried out
fully to a pure union. Those philosophers who blindly follow their
feeling in reflecting on this topic can obtain no other conception of
beauty, because they distinguish nothing separate in the totality of the
sensuous impression. Other philosophers, who take the understanding as
their exclusive guide, can never obtain a conception of beauty, because
they never see anything else in the whole than the parts; and spirit and
matter remain eternally separate, even in their most perfect unity. The
first fear to suppress beauty dynamically, that is, as a working power,
if they must separate what is united in the feeling. The others fear to
suppress beauty logically, that is, as a conception, when they have to
hold together what in the understanding is separate. The former wish to
think of beauty as it works; the latter wish it to work as it is thought.
Both therefore must miss the truth; the former, because they try to
follow infinite nature with their limited thinking power; the others,
because they wish to limit unlimited nature according to their laws of
thought. The first fear to rob beauty of its freedom by a too strict
dissection, the others fear to destroy the distinctness of the conception
by a too violent union. But the former do not reflect that the freedom
in which they very properly place the essence of beauty is not
lawlessness, but harmony of laws; not caprice, but the highest internal
necessity. The others do not remember that distinctness, which they with
equal right demand from beauty, does not consist in the exclusion of
certain realities, but the absolute including of all; that is not
therefore limitation but infinitude. We shall avoid the quicksands on
which both have made shipwreck if we begin from the two elements in which
beauty divides itself before the understanding, but then afterwards rise
to a pure aesthetic unity by which it works on feeling, and in which both
thos