ong of the bird; there is undeniably freedom in these
movements, though it is not emancipation from want in general, but from a
determinate external necessity.

The animal works, when a privation is the motor of its activity, and it
plays when the plenitude of force is this motor, when an exuberant life
is excited to action. Even in inanimate nature a luxury of strength and
a latitude of determination are shown, which in this material sense might
be styled play. The tree produces numberless germs that are abortive
without developing, and it sends forth more roots, branches, and leaves,
organs of nutrition, than are used for the preservation of the species.
Whatever this tree restores to the elements of its exuberant life,
without using it or enjoying it, may be expended by life in free and
joyful movements. It is thus that nature offers in her material sphere a
sort of prelude to the limitless, and that even there she suppresses
partially the chains from which she will be completely emancipated in the
realm of form. The constraint of superabundance or physical play answers
as a transition from the constraint of necessity, or of physical
seriousness, to aesthetical play; and before shaking off, in the supreme
freedom of the beautiful, the yoke of any special aim, nature already
approaches, at least remotely, this independence, by the free movement
which is itself its own end and means.

The imagination, like the bodily organs, has in man its free movement and
its material play, a play in which, without any reference to form, it
simply takes pleasure in its arbitrary power and in the absence of all
hinderance. These plays of fancy, inasmuch as form is not mixed up with
them, and because a free succession of images makes all their charm,
though confined to man, belong exclusively to animal life, and only prove
one thing--that he is delivered from all external sensuous constraint
without our being entitled to infer that there is in it an independent
plastic force.

From this play of free association of ideas, which is still quite
material in nature and is explained by simple natural laws, the
imagination, by making the attempt of creating a free form, passes at
length at a jump to the aesthetic play: I say at one leap, for quite a
new force enters into action here; for here, for the first time, the
legislative mind is mixed with the acts of a blind instinct, subjects the
arbitrary march of the imagination to its eternal a