Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/163

 discovers certain facts which show us how existence by virtue of its own laws and even our ethical ideals become matters of our knowledge. There are two such facts: the one is of an aesthetic nature, the other biological (Kritik der Urtheilskraft, 1790).

In the phenomena which we call beautiful and sublime the object inspires in us a sense of disinterested satisfaction. In the case of the beautiful this rests on the fact that our intuitional faculty or our understanding is induced to harmonious cooperation, in that the parts of a phenomenon are readily and naturally combined into a single unit. Kant places special emphasis on the pure immediacy and involuntariness of the impression of beauty,—what he calls free beauty (e. g. the beauty of a flower, of an arabesque, of a musical fantasy). He does not regard the "secondary" beauty presupposed in the concept of an object (e. g. the beauty of man as such) as real beauty.—In contemplating the sublime our faculty of comprehension is overwhelmed and the sense of self subdued in the consciousness of being confronted by the immensity, the immeasurable in content and energy; but even in this very vanquishment, the consciousness of an energy superior to all sensible limitations arises in our consciousness: the consciousness of ideas and of the moral law as transcending all experience. The really sublime, according to Kant, is not the object, but the sentiment to which it gives rise.

Just as we behold the activity of Being in harmony with our spiritual dispositions in the beautiful and the sublime, even so the genius acts his part as involuntarily as a process of nature, and nevertheless produces works which have the value of patterns or types. Genius is a talent by means of which nature furnishes rules of art,—it is typical originality.