The instinct of play likes appearance,and directly it is awakened it is followed by the formal imitative instinct which treats appearance as an independent thing.Directly man has come to distinguish the appearance from the reality,the form from the body,he can separate,in fact he has already done so.Thus the faculty of the art of imitation is given with the faculty of form in general.The inclination that draws us to it reposes on another tendency I have not to notice here.The exact period when the aesthetic instinct,or that of art,developes,depends entirely on the attraction that mere appearance has for men.
As every real existence proceeds from nature as a foreign power,whilst every appearance comes in the first place from man as a percipient subject,he only uses his absolute sight in separating semblance from essence,and arranging according to subjective law.With an unbridled liberty he can unite what nature has severed,provided he can imagine his union,and he can separate what nature has united,provided this separation can take place in his intelligence.Here nothing can be sacred to him but his own law:the only condition imposed upon him is to respect the border which separates his own sphere from the existence of things or from the realm of nature.
This human right of ruling is exercised by man in the art of appearance;and his success in extending the empire of the beautiful,and guarding the frontiers of truth,will be in proportion with the strictness with which he separates form from substance:for if he frees appearance from reality he must also do the converse.
But man possesses sovereign power only in the world of appearance,in the unsubstantial realm of imagination,only by abstaining from giving being to appearance in theory,and by giving it being in practice.It follows that the poet transgresses his proper limits when he attributes being to his ideal,and when he gives this ideal aim as a determined existence.
For he can only reach this result by exceeding his right as a poet,that of encroaching by the ideal on the field of experience,and by pretending to determine real existence in virtue of a simple possibility,or else he renounces his right as poet by letting experience encroach on the sphere of the ideal,and by restricting possibility to the conditions of reality.
It is only by being frank or disclaiming all reality,and by being independent or doing without reality,that the appearance is aesthetical.Directly it apes reality or needs reality for effect it is nothing more than a vile instrument for material ends,and can prove nothing for the freedom of the mind.Moreover,the object in which we find beauty need not be unreal if our judgment disregards this reality;for if it regards this the judgment is no longer aesthetical.A beautiful woman if living would no doubt please us as much and rather more than an equally beautiful woman seen in painting;but what makes the former please men is not her being an independent appearance;she no longer pleases the pure aesthetic feeling.In the painting,life must only attract as an appearance,and reality as an idea.But it is certain that to feel in a living object only the pure appearance,requires a greatly higher aesthetic culture than to do without life in the appearance.
