"
In the other arts, he found that the design was the essential. "Not what
pleases in sensation, but what is approved for its form, is the
foundation of taste."
In his pursuit of the phantom of a beauty, which is neither that of art
nor of sensual pleasure, exempt alike from expression and from
enjoyment, he became enveloped in inextricable contradictions. Little
disposed as he was to let himself be carried away by the imagination, he
expressed his contempt for philosopher-poets like Herder, and kept
saying and unsaying, affirming and then immediately criticizing his own
affirmations as to this mysterious beauty. The truth is that _this
mystery is simply his own individual uncertainty before a problem which
he could not solve_, owing to his having no clear idea of an activity of
sentiment. Such an activity represented for him a logical contradiction.
Such expressions as "necessary universal pleasure," "finality without
the idea of end," are verbal proofs of his uncertainty.
How was he to emerge from this uncertainty, this contradiction? He fell
back upon the concept of a base of subjective finality as the base of
the judgment of taste, that is of the subjective finality of nature by
the judgment. But nothing can be known or disclosed to the object by
means of this concept, which is indeterminate in itself and not adapted
for knowledge.
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