limit, to seek all-embracing, absolute unities,--to conceive
an unconditioned totality. Thus the reason presents us with
the ideas--beyond all possibility of knowledge--of the Soul,
the World, and God. In the words of Kant, the Ideas of Reason
lead the understanding to the consideration of Nature according
to a principle of completeness, although it can never attain
to this. Can there be a bridge across this abyss between sense
and reason? then asks Kant; which bridge he believes himself
to have found in the aesthetic faculty. For on inquiring what
is involved in the judgment, "This is beautiful," he discovers
that such a judgment is "universal" and "necessary," inasmuch
as it implies that every normal spectator must acknowledge its
validity, that it is "disinterested" because it rests on the
"appearance of the object without demanding its actual
existence," and that it is "immediate" or "free," as it
acknowledges the object as beautiful without definite purpose,
as of adaptation to use. But how does this judgment constitute
the desired bond between sense and reason? Simply in that,
though applied to an object of the senses, it has yet all the
marks of the Idea of Reason,--it is universal, necessary, free,
unconditioned; it is judged as if it were perfect, and so
fulfills those demands of reason which elsewhere in the world
of sense are unsatisfied.

The two important factors, then, of Kant's aesthetics are its
reconciliation of sense and reason in beauty, and its reference
of the "purposiveness" of beauty to the cognitive faculty.

Schiller has been given the credit of transcending Kant's
"subjective" aesthetic through his emphasis on the significance