Its determining reason is perhaps situated in "the
suprasensible substratum of humanity." Thus beauty becomes a symbol of
morality. "The subjective principle alone, that is, the indeterminate
idea of the suprasensible in us, can be indicated as the sole key to
reveal this faculty, which remains unknown to us in its origin. Nothing
but this principle can make that hidden faculty comprehensible."
Kant had a tendency to mysticism, which this statement does not serve to
conceal, but it was a mysticism without enthusiasm, a mysticism almost
against the grain. His failure to penetrate thoroughly the nature of the
aesthetic activity led him to see double and even triple, on several
occasions. Art being unknown to him in its essential nature, he invents
the functions of _space_ and _time_ and terms this _transcendental
aesthetic_; he develops the theory of the imaginative beautifying of the
intellectual concept by genius; he is finally forced to admit a
mysterious power of feeling, intermediate between the theoretic and the
practical activity. This power is cognoscitive and non-cognoscitive,
moral and indifferent to morality, agreeable and yet detached from the
pleasure of the senses. His successors hastened to make use of this
mysterious power, for they were glad to be able to find some sort of
justification for their bold speculations in the severe philosopher of
Koenigsberg.
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