Thus, too, delight in the sublime in nature is only negative (whereas that in the beautiful is positive): that is to say, it is a feeling of imagination by its own act depriving itself of its freedom by receiving a final determination in accordance with a law other than that of its empirical employment.In this way it gains an extension and a might greater than that which it sacrifices.But the ground of this is concealed from it, and in its place it feels the sacrifice or deprivation, as well as its cause, to which it is subjected.The astonishment amounting almost to terror, the awe and thrill of devout feeling, that takes hold of one when gazing upon the prospect of mountains ascending to heaven, deep ravines and torrents raging there, deep shadowed solitudes that invite to brooding melancholy, and the like-all this, when we are assured of our own safety, is not actual fear.Rather is it an attempt to gain access to it through imagination, for the purpose of feeling the might of this faculty in combining the movement of the mind thereby aroused with its serenity, and of thus being superior to internal and, therefore, to external, nature, so far as the latter can have any bearing upon our feeling of well-being.For the imagination, in accordance with laws of association, makes our state of contentment dependent upon physical conditions.But acting in accordance with principles of the schematism of judgement (consequently so far as it is subordinated to freedom), it is at the same time an instrument of reason and its ideas.But in this capacity it is a might enabling us to assert our independence as against the influences of nature, to degrade what is great in respect of the latter to the level of what is little, and thus to locate the absolutely great only in the proper estate of the subject.This reflection of aesthetic judgement by which it raises itself to the point of adequacy with reason, though without any determinate concept of reason, is still a representation of the object as subjectively final, by virtue even of the objective inadequacy of the imagination in its greatest extension for meeting the demands of reason (as the faculty of ideas).
Here we have to attend generally to what has been already adverted to, that in the transcendental aesthetic of judgement there must be no question of anything but pure aesthetic judgements.Consequently examples are not to be selected from such beautiful, or sublime objects as presuppose the concept of an end.For then the finality would be either teleological, or based upon mere sensations of an object: (gratification or pain) and so, in the first case, not aesthetic, and, in the second, not merely formal.So, if we call the sight of the starry heaven sublime, we must not found our estimate of it upon any concepts of worlds inhabited by rational beings, with the bright spots, which we see filling the space above us, as their suns moving in orbits prescribed for them with the wisest regard to ends.But we must take it, just as it strikes the eye, as a broad and all-embracing canopy: and it is merely under such a representation that we may posit the sublimity which the pure aesthetic judgement attributes to this object.Similarly, as to the prospect of the ocean, we are not to regard it as we, with our minds stored with knowledge on a variety of matters (which, however, is not contained in the immediate intuition), are wont to represent it in thought, as, let us say, a spacious realm of aquatic creatures, or as the mighty reservoirs from which are drawn the vapours that fill the air with clouds of moisture for the good of the land, or yet as an element which no doubt divides continent from continent, but at the same time affords the means of the greatest commercial intercourse between them-for in this way we get nothing beyond teleological judgements.Instead of this we must be able to see sublimity in the ocean, regarding it, as the poets do, according to what the impression upon the eye reveals, as, let us say, in its calm a clear mirror of water bounded only by the heavens, or, be it disturbed, as threatening to overwhelm and engulf everything.The same is to be said of the sublime and beautiful in the human form.Here, for determining grounds of the judgement, we must not have recourse to concepts of ends subserved by all: all its and members, or allow their accordance with these ends to influence our aesthetic judgement (in such case no longer pure), although it is certainly also a also a necessary condition of aesthetic delight that they should not conflict.With these ends.Aesthetic finality is the conformity to law of judgement in its freedom.The delight in the object depends on the reference which we seek to give to the imagination, subject to the proviso that it is to entertain the mind in a free activity.If, on the other hand, something else-be it sensation or concept of the understanding-determines the judgement, it is then conformable to law, no doubt, but not an act of free judgement.
Hence to speak of intellectual beauty or sublimity is to use expressions which, in the first place, are not quite correct.For these are aesthetic modes of representation which would be entirely foreign to us were we merely pure intelligences (or if we even put ourselves in thought in the position of such).Secondly, although both, as objects of an intellectual (moral) delight, are compatible with aesthetic delight to the extent of not resting upon any interest, still, on the: Other hand, there is a difficulty in the way of their alliance with such delight, since their function is to produce an interest, and, on the assumption that the presentation has to accord with delight in the aesthetic estimate, this interest could only be effected by means of an interest of sense combined with it in the presentation.But in this way the intellectual finality would be violated and rendered impure.
