ife. Happily for him, man finds here
not only in his rational nature a moral aptitude that can be developed by
the understanding, but also in his reasonable and sensible nature--that
is, in his human nature--an aesthetic tendency which seems to have been
placed there expressly: a faculty awakens of itself in the presence of
certain sensuous objects, and which, after our feelings are purified, can
be cultivated to such a point as to become a powerful ideal development.
This aptitude, I grant, is idealistic in its principle and in its
essence, but one which even the realist allows to be seen clearly enough
in his conduct, though he does not acknowledge this in theory. I am now
about to discuss this faculty.

I admit that the sense of the beautiful, when it is developed by culture,
suffices of itself even to make us, in a certain sense, independent of
nature as far as it is a force. A mind that has ennobled itself
sufficiently to be more sensible of the form than of the matter of
things, contains in itself a plenitude of existence that nothing could
make it lose, especially as it does not trouble itself about the
possession of the things in question, and finds a very liberal pleasure
in the mere contemplation of the phenomenon. As this mind has no want to
appropriate the objects in the midst of which it lives, it has no fear of
being deprived of them. But it is nevertheless necessary that these
phenomena should have a body, through which they manifest themselves;
and, consequently, as long as we feel the want even only of finding a
beautiful appearance or a beautiful phenomenon, this want implies that of
the existence of certain objects; and it follows that our satisfaction
still depends on nature, considered as a force, because it is nature who
disposes of all existence in a sovereign manner. It is a different
thing, in fact, to feel in yourself the want of objects endowed with
beauty and goodness, or simply to require that the objects which surround
us are good and beautiful. This last desire is compatible with the most
perfect freedom of the soul; but it is not so with the other. We are
entitled to require that the object before us should be beautiful and
good, but we can only wish that the beautiful and the good should be
realized objectively before us. Now the disposition of mind is, par
excellence, called grand and sublime, in which no attention is given to
the question of knowing if the beautiful, the good, and the p