e, but the understanding, that would become the judge of beauty,
which would imply contradiction. Man, therefore, cannot put forward the
dignity of his moral destiny, nor give prominence to his superiority as
intelligence, to increase the price of his beauty. Man, here, is but a
being thrown like others into space--a phenomenon amongst other
phenomena. In the world of sense no account is made of the rank he holds
in the world of ideas; and if he desires in that to hold the first place,
he can only owe it to that in him which belongs to the physical order.

But his physical nature is determined, we know, by the idea of his
humanity; from which it follows that his architectonic beauty is so also
mediately. If, then he is distinguished by superior beauty from all
other creatures of the sensuous world, it is incontestable that he owes
this advantage to his destiny as man, because it is in it that the reason
is of the differences which in general separate him from the rest of the
sensuous world. But the beauty of the human form is not due to its being
the expression of this superior destiny, for if it were so, this form
would necessarily cease to be beautiful, from the moment it began to
express a less high destiny, and the contrary to this form would be
beautiful as soon as it could be admitted that it expresses this higher
destination. However, suppose that at the sight of a fine human face we
could completely forget that which it expresses, and put in its place,
without chancing anything of its outside, the savage instincts of the
tiger, the judgment of the eyesight would remain absolutely the same, and
the tiger would be for it the chef-d'oeuvre of the Creator.

The destiny of man as intelligence contributes, then, to the beauty of
his structure only so far as the form that represents this destiny, the
expression that makes it felt, satisfies at the same time the conditions
which are prescribed in the world of sense to the manifestations of the
beautiful; which signifies that beauty ought always to remain a pure
effect of physical nature, and that the rational conception which had
determined the technical utility of the human structure cannot confer
beauty, but simply be compatible with beauty.

It could be objected, it is true, that in general all which is manifested
by a sensuous representation is produced by the forces of nature, and
that consequently this character cannot be exclusively an indication of
the beautifu