ssive sensations. There is indeed a way back to sensation from the
highest abstraction; for thought teaches the inner sensation, and the
idea of logical or moral unity passes into a sensation of sensual accord.
But if we delight in knowledge we separate very accurately our own
conceptions from our sensations; we look upon the latter as something
accidental, which might have been omitted without the knowledge being
impaired thereby, without truth being less true. It would, however, be a
vain attempt to suppress this connection of the faculty of feeling with
the idea of beauty, consequently, we shall not succeed in representing to
ourselves one as the effect of the other, but we must look upon them both
together and reciprocally as cause and effect. In the pleasure which we
derive from knowledge we readily distinguish the passage from the active
to the passive state, and we clearly perceive that the first ends when
the second begins. On the contrary, from the pleasure which we take in
beauty, this transition from the active to the passive is not
perceivable, and reflection is so intimately blended with feeling that we
believe we feel the form immediately. Beauty is then an object to us, it
is true, because reflection is the condition of the feeling which we have
of it; but it is also a state of our personality (our Ego) because the
feeling is the condition of the idea we conceive of it: beauty is
therefore doubtless form, because we contemplate it, but it is equally
life because we feel it. In a word, it is at once our state and our act.
And precisely because it is at the same time both a state and an act, it
triumphantly proves to us that the passive does not exclude the active,
neither matter nor form, neither the finite nor the infinite; and that
consequently the physical dependence to which man is necessarily devoted
does not in any way destroy his moral liberty. This is the proof of
beauty, and I ought to add that this alone can prove it. In fact, as in
the possession of truth or of logical unity, feeling is not necessarily
one with the thought, but follows it accidentally; it is a fact which
only proves that a sensitive nature can succeed a rational nature, and
vice versa; not that they co-exist, that they exercise a reciprocal
action one over the other; and, lastly, that they ought to be united in
an absolute and necessary manner. From this exclusion of feeling as long
as there is thought, and of thought so long as th