llow the principle
of moral freedom, the intelligence, to make itself known in it.

If it is so, the poets and the artists are poor adepts in their art when
they seek to reach the pathetic only by the sensuous force of affection
and by representing suffering in the most vivid manner. They forget that
suffering in itself can never be the last end of imitation, nor the
immediate source of the pleasure we experience in tragedy. The pathetic
only has aesthetic value in as far as it is sublime. Now, effects that
only allow us to infer a purely sensuous cause, and that are founded only
on the affection experienced by the faculty of sense, are never sublime,
whatever energy they may display, for everything sublime proceeds
exclusively from the reason.

I imply by passion the affections of pleasure as well as the painful
affections, and to represent passion only, without coupling with it the
expression of the super-sensuous faculty which resists it, is to fall
into what is properly called vulgarity; and the opposite is called
nobility. Vulgarity and nobility are two ideas which, wherever they are
applied, have more or less relation with the super-sensuous share a man
takes in a work. There is nothing noble but what has its source in the
reason; all that issues from sensuousness alone is vulgar or common. We
say of a man that he acts in a vulgar manner when he is satisfied with
obeying the suggestions of his sensuous instinct; that he acts suitably
when he only obeys his instinct in conformity with the laws; that he acts
nobly when he obeys reason only, without having regard to his instincts.
We say of a physiognomy that it is common when it does not show any trace
of the spiritual man, the intelligence; we say it has expression when it
is the mind which has determined its features: and that it is noble when
a pure spirit has determined them. If an architectural work is in
question we qualify it as common if it aims at nothing but a physical
end; we name it noble if, independently of all physical aim, we find in
it at the same time the expression of a conception.

Accordingly, I repeat it, correct taste disallows all painting of the
affections, however energetic, which rests satisfied with expressing
physical suffering and the physical resistance opposed to it by the
subject, without making visible at the same time the superior principle
of the nature of man, the presence of a super-sensuous faculty. It does
this in virtue of