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In both cases, however, we find that the feeling of the Sublime awakens in us a feeling of the supersensible destination of man. "The very capacity of conceiving the sublime," he tells us,xxii "indicates a mental faculty that far surpasses every standard of sense." And to explain the necessity belonging to our judgements about the sublime, Kant points out that as we find ourselves compelled to postulate a sensus communis to account for the agreement of men in their appreciation of beautiful objects, so the principle underlying their consent in judging of the sublime is "the presupposition of the moral feeling in man." The feeling of the sublimity of our own moral destination is the necessary prerequisite for forming such judgements. The connexion between Beauty and Goodness involved to a Greek in the double sense of the word is developed by Kant with keen insight. To feel interest in the beauty of Nature he regards as a mark of a moral disposition, though he will not admit that the same inference may be drawn as to the character of the art connoisseur ( 42). But it is specially with reference to the connexion between the capacity for appreciating the Sublime, and the moral feeling, that the originality of Kant's treatment becomes apparent.

The objects of nature, he continues, which we call sublime, inspire us with a feeling of pain rather than of pleasure; as Lucretius has it—

But this "horror" must not inspire actual fear. As no extraneous charm must mingle with the satisfaction felt in a beautiful object, if the judgementxxiii about beauty is to remain pure; so in the case of the sublime we must not be afraid of the object which yet in certain aspects is fearful.

This conception of the feelings of sublimity excited by the loneliness of an Alpine peak or the grandeur of an earthquake is now a familiar one; but it was not so in Kant's day. Switzerland had not then become the recreation-ground of Europe; and though natural beauty was a familiar topic with poets and painters it was not generally recognised that taste has also to do with the sublime. De Saussure's Travels, Haller's poem Die Alpen, and this work of Kant's mark the beginning of a new epoch in our ways of looking at the sublime and terrible aspects of Nature. And it is not a little remarkable that the man who could write thus feelingly about the emotions inspired by grand and savage scenery, had never seen a mountain in his life. The power and the insight of his observations here are in marked contrast to the poverty of some of his remarks about the characteristics of beauty. For instance, he puts forward the curious doctrine that colour in a picture is only an extraneous charm, and does not really add to the beauty of the form delineated, nay rather distracts the mind from it. His criticisms on this point, if sound, would make Flaxman a truer artist than Titian or Paolo Veronese. But indeed his discussion of Painting or Music is not very appreciative; he was, to the end, a creature of pure Reason.

Upon the analysis he gives of the Arts, littlexxiv need be said here. Fine Art is regarded as the Art of Genius, "that innate mental disposition through which Nature gives the rule to Art" ( 46). Art differs from Science in the absence of definite concepts in the mind of the artist. It thus happens that the great artist can rarely communicate his methods; indeed he cannot explain them even to himself. Poeta nascitur, non fit; and the same is true in every form of fine art. Genius is, in short, the faculty of presenting aesthetical Ideas; an aesthetical Idea being an intuition of the Imagination, to which no concept is adequate. And it is by the excitation of such ineffable Ideas that a great work of art affects us. As Bacon tells us, "that is the best part of Beauty which a picture cannot express; no, nor the first sight of the eye." This characteristic of the artistic genius has been noted by all who have thought upon art; more is present in its productions than can be perfectly expressed in language. As Pliny said of Timanthus the painter of Iphigenia, "In omnibus ejus operibus intelligitur plus super quam pingitur." But this genius requires to be kept in check by taste; quite in the spirit of the of the best Greek art, Kant remarks that if in a work of art some feature must be sacrificed, it is better to lose something of genius than to violate the canons of taste. It is in this self-mastery that "the sanity of true genius" expresses itself.

The main question with which the Critique of Judgement is concerned is, of course, the question asxxv to the purposiveness, the Zweckmssigkeit, exhibited by nature. That nature appears to be full of purpose is mere matter of fact. It displays purposiveness in respect of our faculties of cognition, in those of its phenomena which we designate beautiful. And also in its organic products we observe methods of operation which we can only explain by describing them as processes in which means are used to accomplish certain ends, as processes that are purposive. In our observation of natural phenomena, as Kuno Fischer puts it, we judge their forms aesthetically, and their life teleologically.

As regards the first kind of Zweckmssigkeit, that which is ohne Zweck—the purposiveness of a beautiful object which does not seem to be directed to any external end—there are two ways in which we may account for it. We may either say that it was actually designed to be beautiful by the Supreme Force behind Nature, or we may say that purposiveness is not really resident in nature, but that our perception of it is due to the subjective needs of our judging faculty. We have to contemplate beautiful objects as if they were purposive, but they may not be so in reality. And this latter idealistic doctrine is what Kant falls back upon. He appeals in support of it, to the phenomena of crystallisation (pp. 243 sqq.), in which many very beautiful forms seem to be produced by merely mechanical processes. The beauty of a rock crystal is apparently produced without any forethought on the part of nature, andxxvi he urges that we are not justified in asserting dogmatically that any laws distinct from those of mechanism are needed to account for beauty in other cases. Mechanism can do so much; may it not do all? And he brings forward as a consideration which ought to settle the question, the fact that in judging of beauty "we invariably seek its gauge in ourselves a priori"; we do not learn from nature, but from ourselves, what we are to find beautiful. Mr. Kennedy in his Donnellan Lectures has here pointed out several weak spots in Kant's armour. In the first place, the fact that we seek the gauge of beauty in our own mind "may be shown from his own definition to be a necessary result of the very nature of beauty."2 For Kant tells us that the aesthetical judgement about beauty always involves "a reference of the representation to the subject"; and this applies equally to judgements about the beautiful in Art and the beautiful in Nature. But no one could maintain that from this definition it follows that we are not compelled to postulate design in the mind of the artist who paints a beautiful picture. And thus as the fact that "we always seek the gauge of beauty" in ourselves does not do away with the belief in a designing mind when we are contemplating works of art, it cannot be said to exclude the belief in a Master Hand which moulded the forms of Nature. As Cicero has it, nature is "non artificiosa solum, sed plane artifex." But the cogency of this reasoning, for the details of whichxxvii I must refer the reader to Mr. Kennedy's pages, becomes more apparent when we reflect on that second form of purposiveness, viz. adaptation to definite ends, with which we meet in the phenomena of organic life.