rce seeking to
manifest itself. If this object makes us tremble, it is only because we
in thought suppose ourselves, or some one like us, engaged with this
force. And if trembling in this way, we experience the feeling of the
sublime, it is because our consciousness tells us that, if we are the
victims of this force, we should have nothing to fear, from the freedom
of our Ego, for the autonomy of the determinations of our will. In short
the description up to here is sublime, but quite a contemplative,
intuitive sublimity:--

Diffugimus visu exsangues, illi agmine certo
Laocoonta petunt . . .--Aeneid, ii. 212-213.

Here the force is presented to us as terrible also; and contemplative
sublimity passes into the pathetic. We see that force enter really into
strife with man's impotence. Whether it concerns Laocoon or ourselves is
only a question of degree. The instinct of sympathy excites and
frightens in us the instinct of preservation: there are the monsters,
they are darting--on ourselves; there is no more safety, flight is vain.

It is no more in our power to measure this force with ours, and to refer
it or not to our own existence. This happens without our co-operation,
and is given us by the object itself. Accordingly our fear has not, as
in the preceding moment, a purely subjective ground, residing in our
soul; it has an objective ground, residing in the object. For, even if
we recognize in this entire scene a simple fiction of the imagination, we
nevertheless distinguish in this fiction a conception communicated to us
from without, from another conception that we produce spontaneously in
ourselves.

Thus the mind loses a part of her freedom, inasmuch as she receives now
from without that which she produced before her own activity. The idea
of danger puts on an appearance of objective reality, and affection
becomes now a serious affair.

If we were only sensuous creatures, obeying no other instinct than that
of self-preservation, we should stop here, and we should remain in a
state of mere and pure affection. But there is something in us which
takes no part in the affections of sensuous nature, and whose activity is
not directed according to physical conditions. According, then, as this
independently acting principle (the disposition, the moral faculty) has
become to a degree developed in the soul, there is left more or less
space for passive nature, and there remains more or less of the
independent principl