Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/429

 THE SUBLIME. 40? judgment of beauty is the determinate concept of the under- standing; that which the antithesis with equal justice pro- nounces indispensable is the indeterminate concept, the aesthetic Idea. The freest play is afforded the imagination by poetry, the highest of all arts, which, with rhetoric (" insidious," on account of its earnest intention to deceive), forms the group termed arts of speech. To the class of formative arts belong architecture, sculpture, and painting as the art of design. A third group, the art of the beautiful play of sensations, includes painting as the art of color, and music, which as a " fine " art is placed immediately after poetry, as an " agreeable " art at the very foot of the list, and as the play of tone in the vicinity of the entertaining play of fortune [games of chance] and the witty play of thought. The explanation of the comic (the ludicrous is based, according to Kant, on a sudden transformation of strained expectation into nothing) lays great (indeed exaggerated) weight on the resulting physiological phenom- ena, the bodily shock which heightens vital feeling and favors health, and which accompanies the alternating tension and relaxation of the mind. Besides free and adherent beauty, there is still a third kind of aesthetic effect, the Sublime. The beautiful pleases by its bounded form. But also the boundless and formless can exert aesthetic effect : that which is great beyond all comparison we judge sublime. Now this magnitude is either extensive in space and time or intensive greatness of force or power ; accordingly there are two forms of the sublime. That phenomenon which mocks the power of comprehension possessed by the human imagination or sur- passes every measure of our intuition, as the ocean and the starry heavens, is mathematically sublime. That which overcomes all conceivable resistance, as the terrible forces of nature, conflagrations, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, thunderstorms, is dynamically sublime or mighty. The former is relative to the cognitive, the latter to the appe- titive faculty. The beautiful brings the imagination and the understanding into accord ; by the sublime the fancy is brought into a certain favorable relation, not directly