§ 15. The judgment of taste is entirely independent of the concept of perfection

Objective purposiveness is something we can cognize solely through the manifold's relation to some determinate end, and thus solely by way of a concept. This by itself already makes clear: that the beautiful—whose judging has as its basis a purposiveness that is merely formal, that is, a purposiveness devoid of any end—stands wholly apart from the representation of the good, since this latter presupposes a purposiveness that is objective, that is, the object's relation to some determinate end.

Objective purposiveness comes in two forms: the external kind, that is, usefulness, and the internal kind, that is, an object's perfection. That the satisfaction whereby we pronounce an object beautiful cannot be founded upon any representation of its usefulness is sufficiently evident from the two foregoing sections: for were it otherwise, the satisfaction would then not be an immediate one taken in the object, and it is immediacy of just this kind that forms the indispensable condition of any judgment about beauty. An internal objective purposiveness, however—that is, perfection—already lies nearer to the predicate of beauty, and for that reason renowned philosophers have even equated it with beauty, albeit under the proviso when it is confusedly conceived . For a critique of taste, it is a matter of the utmost importance to settle whether beauty too may genuinely be reduced to the concept of perfection.

To judge an objective purposiveness we invariably need the concept of an end, and—supposing this purposiveness is meant to be internal rather than external [usefulness]—the concept of an inner end that would hold the ground of the object's inner possibility. Since an end as such is precisely that whose concept may be taken for the very ground on which the object's own possibility rests: so too, if one is to picture an objective purposiveness in a given thing, there must come first the concept of what kind of thing it is intended to be; and the accord of the manifold within that thing with this concept (which lays down the rule for combining the manifold in it) makes up the qualitative perfection of a thing. Wholly different from this is quantitative perfection, namely the completeness that any thing possesses within its own kind—a bare concept of quantity (of allness), one in which what the thing is to be is already presupposed as settled beforehand, so that the only question is whether everything demanded for it is actually there in it. The formal aspect in the representation of a thing—that is, the agreement of the manifold into a unity (with what that unity is to be left undetermined)—discloses of itself no objective purposiveness whatsoever: for once abstraction is made from this unity taken as an end (what the thing is to be), there is left over nothing beyond the subjective purposiveness belonging to the representations in the mind of the one who beholds them, a purposiveness that does indeed betoken a certain purposiveness of the representational state within the subject, and within that state an ease it feels in taking up a given form into the imagination, yet that points to no perfection of any object, the object being thought here by means of no concept of an end. So, for instance, should I chance upon a patch of turf in the woods, ringed about by trees standing in a circle, and yet form for myself no end there—say, that the spot might be used for country dancing—then not the slightest concept of perfection is furnished by the bare form alone. But to form for oneself a formal objective purposiveness that has no end—that is, the naked form of a perfection (stripped of all matter and of any concept of that toward which the harmonizing is directed, even were this nothing more than the idea of a conformity to law in general)—is a downright contradiction.

Now the judgment of taste is an aesthetic judgment, that is, one resting upon subjective grounds, whose determining ground can be no concept at all, and therefore not the concept of a determinate end. Hence beauty, as a formal subjective purposiveness, in no way brings to mind any perfection of the object under the guise of an allegedly formal, yet for all that objective, purposiveness; and the difference between the concept of the beautiful and that of the good—as though the two were set apart merely by logical form, the former a confused and the latter a distinct concept of perfection while otherwise agreeing in content and origin—amounts to nothing: for on that supposition no specific difference would separate them, and a judgment of taste would count as a cognitive judgment just as fully as the judgment whereby a thing is pronounced good, much as the common man, when he calls deceit wrong, grounds his judgment on confused, and the philosopher his on distinct, yet both at bottom on one and the same principles of reason. Yet I have already remarked that an aesthetic judgment is one of a kind and delivers no cognition at all (not even a confused one) of the object: the latter coming about only through a logical judgment, whereas an aesthetic judgment instead refers the representation through which an object is given entirely to the subject and calls attention to no property of the object, but solely to the purposive form in the determination of the powers of representation that busy themselves with that object. It is for just this reason, too, that the judgment is termed aesthetic: because what determines it is no concept but rather the feeling (belonging to the inner sense) of that harmony in the play of the mental powers, so far as such harmony admits only of being felt. Were one, on the other hand, to give the name aesthetic to confused concepts and to the objective judgment that rests upon them, one would be positing an understanding that judges by way of the senses, or else a sense that pictured its objects through concepts—each of which is a contradiction in itself. The power that deals in concepts, be they confused or distinct, is the understanding; and although the judgment of taste, as an aesthetic judgment, does call upon the understanding too (as every judgment does), it draws on it not as the power to cognize an object, but as the power to determine the judgment together with its representation (apart from any concept) according to the bearing this has upon the subject and the subject's inner feeling—and this only so far as such a judgment is possible under a universal rule.

§ 16. The judgment of taste by which an object is declared beautiful under the condition of a determinate concept is not pure

Beauty is of two kinds: free beauty (pulchritudo vaga), and beauty that is merely dependent (pulchritudo adhaerens). The former does not presuppose any concept of what the object ought to be; the second presupposes such a concept, together with the object's perfection as measured against it. The varieties of the former are termed (self-subsisting) beauties belonging to this or that thing; the other sort, since it clings to a concept (conditioned beauty), is attributed to objects that stand under the concept of a special end.

Flowers are free beauties of nature. Hardly anyone besides a botanist knows what sort of thing a flower is meant to be; and even he, who discerns in it the plant's organ of fructification, takes no account of this natural end when he judges it by taste. Hence no perfection of any kind, no inner purposiveness to which the composition of the manifold might refer, is laid at the ground of this judgment. Birds of many kinds (the parrot, the hummingbird, the bird of paradise), together with numerous shellfish of the sea, are beauties on their own, ones that pertain to no object fixed by concepts as regards its end, but rather please freely and for themselves. In the same way the drawings à la grecque, the foliage used for framing or upon paper hangings, and the like, mean nothing on their own account: they exhibit nothing at all, present no object falling under a fixed concept, and count as free beauties. To the very same class one may likewise reckon what in music goes by the name of fantasias (without a theme), indeed the whole of music unaccompanied by any text.

When we appraise a free beauty (according to its mere form alone), the judgment of taste is pure. Here one presupposes no concept of some end that the manifold would have to serve in the given object, and which the object is accordingly supposed to present—an end through which the freedom of the imagination, playing as it were in its contemplation of the shape, would merely be curtailed.

The beauty of a human being, however (and within this kind that of a man, of a woman, or of a child), the beauty likewise of a horse or of a building (be it church, palace, arsenal, or garden-house), presupposes a concept of the end which lays down what the thing ought to be, and hence a concept of its perfection, so that it is nothing but adherent beauty. Just as, then, joining the agreeable (of sensation) to beauty—which strictly speaking has to do only with the form—stood in the way of the purity of the judgment of taste, so too joining the good (namely, the good that the manifold has for the thing itself, in view of its end) to beauty impairs that same purity.

One could apply to a building much that pleases immediately in intuition, if only it were not meant to be a church; one could adorn a figure with every kind of flourish and with light though regular strokes—as the New Zealanders do in their tattooing—provided only it were not a human being; and this human being could have far finer features and a more pleasing, gentler outline of facial structure, if only he were not meant to represent a man, or even a warlike one.

Now the satisfaction taken in the manifold within a thing with reference to the inner end that settles its possibility is a satisfaction resting upon a concept; the satisfaction in beauty, by contrast, is one that requires no concept, being bound up immediately with the representation whereby the object is given (rather than that whereby it is thought). If, then, in respect of the latter the judgment of taste is made dependent on, and thereby limited by, the end that lies in the former, taken as a judgment of reason, it ceases to be a free and pure judgment of taste.

Admittedly, through this linkage of the aesthetic satisfaction with the intellectual one, taste does gain something, in that it becomes fixed—and although it is not universal, still rules can be laid down for it as regards certain objects determined in a purposive manner. Yet these are then not rules of taste either, but only rules for harmonizing taste with reason, that is, the beautiful with the good, whereby the former is rendered serviceable as an instrument of the intention regarding the latter, so as to place that frame of mind which maintains itself and possesses subjective universal validity beneath the way of thinking that can be secured only through toilsome resolve yet holds objectively universal validity. Strictly, however, perfection is not enhanced by beauty, nor beauty by perfection; rather, since it is unavoidable that, when we compare the representation whereby a given object comes to us with the object (in view of what it ought to be) through a concept, we hold it together at once with the sensation in the subject, the entire faculty of the power of representation is enhanced whenever the two states of mind harmonize.

A judgment of taste concerning an object that has a determinate inner end would be pure only in the case where the one judging either possessed no concept of that end or set it aside in his judging. But in that case this person, although he would be pronouncing a correct judgment of taste in appraising the object as a free beauty, would still be reproached by the other—who takes the beauty in it to be merely a dependent quality (attending to the object's end)—and charged with a false taste, even though each judges rightly after his own fashion: the one by what lies before his senses, the other by what he holds in thought. Through this differentiation many a quarrel among the arbiters of taste concerning beauty can be resolved, by pointing out to them that the one adheres to free beauty while the other adheres to dependent beauty, the former delivering a pure and the second an applied judgment of taste.

§ 17. On the ideal of beauty

No objective rule of taste can exist that would fix through concepts what counts as beautiful. For any judgment arising from this source is aesthetic; that is to say, what determines it is the subject's feeling and not some concept of an object. To hunt for a principle of taste that would deliver, through determinate concepts, the universal criterion of the beautiful is labor spent in vain, since the thing sought is at once impossible and self-contradictory in itself. The universal communicability of the sensation (of satisfaction or dissatisfaction)—and indeed a communicability that comes about without any concept—together with the unanimity, so far as it may be reached, of every age and people with respect to this feeling when certain objects are represented: this is the empirical criterion, feeble though it be and hardly enough to warrant a conjecture, of the descent of a taste thus attested by examples from that deeply concealed basis, shared by all humankind, of unanimity in their appraisal of the forms whereby objects are given to them.

This is why we treat certain products of taste as exemplary: not in the sense that taste might be picked up by copying what others do. For taste has to be a power proper to oneself; and someone who copies a model does display dexterity to the extent that he succeeds, but he displays taste only to the extent that he is able to appraise that model on his own.⁶ What follows from this, though, is that the supreme model—the archetype of taste—amounts to a mere idea, one that each person has to generate within himself, and by reference to which he is to appraise whatever is an object of taste, whatever serves as an instance of judging by taste, and indeed the very taste of anyone at all. Idea, strictly speaking, denotes a concept of reason, whereas ideal denotes the representation of a single being taken as commensurate with an idea. For this reason that archetype of taste—resting, to be sure, upon the indeterminate idea reason holds of a maximum, yet admitting of representation not by way of concepts but solely in a particular presentation—is more aptly termed the ideal of the beautiful, something we endeavor to produce in ourselves even while we do not actually possess it. It can, however, be nothing more than an ideal of the imagination, and this precisely because its ground lies not in concepts but in presentation; and the power of presentation is nothing other than the imagination. — By what route, then, do we reach an ideal of beauty of this sort? A priori or empirically? And equally: which sort of the beautiful admits of an ideal at all?

To begin with, it is worth observing that the beauty for which one would seek an ideal cannot be a vague one, but must be a beauty rendered fixed through a concept of objective purposiveness, and hence one that pertains not to the object of an entirely pure judgment of taste but to that of a judgment of taste which is in part intellectualized . That is to say: in whatever type of grounds of judging an ideal is supposed to occur, there must lie at its foundation some idea of reason governed by determinate concepts, an idea that settles a priori the end on which the object's inner possibility depends. One cannot so much as conceive an ideal of beautiful flowers, of a handsome piece of furniture, or of a beautiful vista. But no ideal can be represented even of a beauty that hangs upon determinate ends—for instance, a beautiful dwelling-house, or a beautiful tree, or a beautiful garden, and the like; presumably because such ends are not pinned down and made determinate enough by their concept, so that the purposiveness turns out to be nearly as unconstrained as with vague beauty. The sole thing that carries the end of its own existence within itself is the human being—who is able to set his own ends by means of reason, or, in cases where he must take them from outer perception, is still able to bring them into connection with essential and universal ends and then to judge aesthetically how they harmonize with these: this human being, accordingly, is the one object in all the world capable of an ideal of beauty, precisely as humanity in his person, considered as an intelligence, is the one thing capable of the ideal of perfection.

Two ingredients, however, are required for this: first, the aesthetic normal idea, a singular intuition (belonging to the imagination) that supplies the measure by which he is judged as a thing that falls under a particular animal species; second, the idea of reason, which takes the ends of humanity—so far as these cannot be given a sensible representation—as the principle by which his shape is judged, a shape through which, as the effect of those ends in appearance, they are made manifest. For the shape of an animal belonging to a particular species the normal idea has to draw its elements from experience; but that highest purposiveness in how the shape is put together—the purposiveness that could serve as the general measure for aesthetically judging every single member of the species, the image that lay, so to speak, intentionally at the root of nature's craft, matched only by the species in its entirety and by no member taken in isolation—resides, all the same, solely in the idea of the one doing the judging, an idea that nonetheless, together with its proportions, can be presented fully in concreto, as an aesthetic idea, in an exemplary image. So as to render somewhat intelligible how all this comes about (for who can wrest from nature the entirety of her secret?), we shall try our hand at a psychological explanation.

It deserves notice that, by some means altogether beyond our comprehension, the imagination is able not merely to summon up, as occasion demands and even after a long lapse of time, the signs that stand for concepts; but also to reconstruct the image and shape of an object out of a number—past all telling—of objects of assorted sorts, or indeed of a single sort; and further, once the mind is bent on comparisons, in all likelihood really (though not with enough clarity to reach consciousness) to let one image settle, as it were, over another, and by the coincidence of many of the same sort to extract a middle figure that answers to all of them as a shared standard. Suppose a person has laid eyes on a thousand fully grown men. If he now sets out to judge the normal size that is to be estimated by comparison, then—so I would suggest—the imagination drops a large quantity of the images (perhaps that whole thousand) one upon the next; and, if I may here borrow the analogy of an optical projection, within that region where the greater part of them coincide, inside the outline where the spot glows with the most densely applied color, the average size becomes recognizable, standing, in height as much as in breadth, at an equal remove from the utmost boundaries of the tallest and the shortest builds; and this is the build of a beautiful man. (The very same result could be reached mechanically, were one to measure all thousand of them, add up their heights on their own and their widths (and depths) on their own, and then divide the total by a thousand. The imagination, however, accomplishes exactly this by way of a dynamic effect that springs from the repeated taking-in of such shapes upon the organ of the inner sense.) If in like fashion one now seeks the average head for this average man, and for that head the average nose, and so on, then this shape underlies the normal idea of the beautiful man in whatever country the comparison is undertaken; and thus, under these empirical conditions, a Negro must necessarily form a normal idea of bodily beauty different from a white person's, the Chinese one different from the European's. Things would proceed in just the same way with the model for a handsome horse or hound (of some particular breed). — This normal idea is not something abstracted from proportions gathered out of experience and treated as determinate rules, rather, it is only in light of it that rules for judging first come to be possible. It is that image for the whole species which hovers amid all the individual intuitions—diverse in manifold ways—of separate persons, the image nature placed beneath her offspring in this same species as their archetype, though one she appears to have realized completely in no single specimen. In no way is it the complete archetype of beauty for this species; it is merely the form that makes up the indispensable precondition of all beauty, and so no more than correctness in presenting the species. It amounts, as people termed Polyclitus's renowned Doryphorus, to the rule (for just this office Myron's cow could likewise serve within its own kind). On this very account it can also harbor nothing that is specifically characteristic, since otherwise it would fail to be a normal idea for the species. What its presentation pleases by is not beauty at all, but simply the fact that it runs afoul of none of the conditions on which alone something of this species is able to be beautiful. Such a presentation is no more than academically proper.⁷

Still to be set apart from the normal idea of the beautiful is its ideal, which—on the grounds already brought forward—one is entitled to look for only in the human figure. In that figure the ideal comes down to the outward showing of the moral, and lacking this the object would give no pleasure that is universal and, over and above that, positive (and not just the negative pleasure of a presentation that keeps to the rules). The perceptible showing of moral ideas that inwardly rule the human being can, to be sure, be drawn only from experience; but to render their bond with everything that our reason ties to the morally good under the idea of the supreme purposiveness—goodness of soul, or purity, or strength, or serenity, and the like—as if visibly, in a bodily manifestation (as the outward effect of the inner), calls for pure ideas of reason joined to a mighty power of imagination in whoever would so much as judge them, and still more in whoever would present them. That such an ideal of beauty is correct is borne out by the following: it lets no charm of sense insinuate itself into the satisfaction taken in its object, and yet it makes room for a great interest in that object; which then goes to show that appraisal by such a yardstick can never be purely aesthetic, and that appraisal by an ideal of beauty is not a bare judgment of taste.

Definition of the beautiful drawn from this third moment.

Beauty is a thing's form of purposiveness, insofar as that form is registered upon the object without the representation of an end.⁸

Fourth Moment of the judgment of taste, according to the modality of the satisfaction in the object

§ 18. What the modality of a judgment of taste is

Of any representation whatever I can say at least this much: that it is possible for it, as cognition, to carry a pleasure along with it. Concerning what I term agreeable, I assert that it actually does arouse pleasure within me. The beautiful, however, we conceive as standing in a necessary connection with satisfaction. This necessity, however, is of a peculiar kind: not a theoretical objective necessity, under which it would be cognized a priori that this satisfaction will be felt by everyone in the object that I call beautiful; nor a practical one, where this satisfaction, by way of concepts of a pure will of reason that serves freely acting beings as a rule, follows from an objective law as its necessary result and means nothing other than that one absolutely ought (without any further aim) to act in a certain way. Rather, the necessity that is thought in an aesthetic judgment can be termed only exemplary — that is, a necessity of the assent of everyone to a judgment regarded as an instance of a universal rule that cannot be stated. Because an aesthetic judgment is neither objective nor a judgment of cognition, this necessity admits of no derivation from determinate concepts, and so it is not apodictic. Far less can it be inferred from the generality of experience (that is, from some complete accord among people's judgments regarding the beauty of a given object). For, quite apart from the fact that experience could hardly muster instances enough to serve here, no concept of the necessity of such judgments is capable of resting on empirical judgments.

§ 19. The subjective necessity that we ascribe to the judgment of taste is conditioned

Assent is what the judgment of taste asks of everyone; and anyone who pronounces something beautiful wills that everyone should grant the object in question their approval and likewise pronounce it beautiful. Hence the ought in the aesthetic judgment is, even in view of all the data required for the judging, still pronounced only conditionally. One woos every other person's assent because one holds a ground for it shared by all; and on that assent one might well reckon, were one but always certain that the case were rightly subsumed beneath that ground, taken as the rule of approval.

§ 20. The condition of the necessity that a judgment of taste asserts is the idea of a common sense

Had judgments of taste (as judgments of cognition do) a determinate objective principle, then anyone who pronounced them by following the latter would claim unconditional necessity for his judgment. If, on the other hand, they rested on no principle whatever, as is the case with the taste belonging simply to sensation, the very thought of any necessity in them would never so much as arise. A subjective principle they must accordingly possess — one that settles by feeling alone, and not by any concept, and yet universally valid, whatever pleases or displeases. But a principle of this kind admits of being taken only for a common sense, one essentially distinct from that common understanding which now and then also goes by the name of common sense (sensus communis): for this latter judges never through feeling, but invariably through concepts, even if usually through such as amount to no more than obscurely represented principles.

It is therefore solely upon the assumption that a common sense exists (whereby we intend no outward sense, but rather what results when our cognitive powers are set in free interplay), solely upon the assumption, I say, of such a common sense that a judgment of taste can be pronounced.

§ 21. Whether one can, with good ground, presuppose a common sense

Cognitions and judgments, along with the conviction attending them, have to be capable of universal communication; for were it otherwise, no correspondence with the object would belong to them: one and all, they would amount to nothing but a subjective interplay of the representational powers, exactly as skepticism demands. Yet if cognitions are to be communicable, then the condition of the mind must likewise be capable of universal communication — that is, the attunement of the cognitive powers to a cognition as such, and indeed just that proportion which befits a representation (through which an object is given to us) so that a cognition may be produced from it: for in the absence of this, which is the subjective condition of coming to know, the cognition could never issue forth as its effect. And this in fact does happen every time, when a given object, by means of the senses, sets the imagination into activity for the composing of the manifold, and this in turn sets the understanding into activity for the unity of that manifold in concepts. But this attunement of the cognitive powers has a different proportion according to the diversity of the objects that are given. Yet there must nonetheless be one in which this inner relation for the enlivening (of the one power by the other) is the most conducive for both powers of the mind with a view to cognition (of given objects) in general; and this attunement cannot be determined otherwise than through feeling (not according to concepts). Now, seeing that this attunement must of itself be universally communicable, and consequently the feeling of it too (given some representation), whereas the universal communicability of a feeling for its part presupposes a common sense: the latter may then with good reason be assumed — not, indeed, by grounding oneself on observations drawn from psychology, but as the necessary condition under which our cognition attains universal communicability, a presupposition required by every logic and by every non-skeptical principle of cognitions.

§ 22. The necessity of the universal agreement that a judgment of taste entails is a subjective necessity which, where a common sense is presupposed, is represented as objective

Whenever we pronounce a thing to be beautiful, we grant to no one the right to be of a different mind; yet without thereby grounding our judgment upon concepts, but solely upon our feeling: which we accordingly take as our basis not as a private feeling but as one held in common. Now, to this end, this common sense cannot be founded upon experience; for it seeks to authorize judgments that contain an ought: it does not say that each person will agree with our judgment, but rather that each ought to fall into accord with it. Common sense, therefore—the sense from whose judgment I here offer my judgment of taste by way of example, and on whose account I ascribe exemplary validity to that judgment—is a mere ideal norm; presupposing it, one could with right make a judgment that agreed with it, and the satisfaction in an object expressed in that judgment, into a rule for everyone: since the principle, subjective though it is, would nevertheless, taken for subjectively universal (an idea necessary to everyone), be entitled, so far as concerns unanimity among different judging subjects, to demand universal assent in the manner of an objective principle; provided one were only certain of having subsumed under it correctly.

We really do presuppose this indeterminate norm of a common sense: the proof lies in our presumption to pass judgments of taste. Whether a common sense of this kind actually exists as a constitutive principle rendering experience possible, or whether a yet higher principle of reason turns it for us into a merely regulative one, whose task would be first of all to bring forth a common sense in us for higher purposes; whether taste is accordingly an original and natural faculty, or only the idea of an artificial one that has still to be acquired, so that a judgment of taste, with its claim to a universal assent, would in fact be only a demand made by reason to bring forth such unanimity in the way of sensing, and the ought—the objective necessity, namely, of everyone's feeling flowing together with each person's particular feeling—would mean no more than the possibility of reaching accord in this respect, and the judgment of taste would supply merely one example of how this principle is applied: all this we neither wish nor are yet able to investigate here; for the present we have only to resolve into its elements the faculty of taste, and at last to unite these in the idea of a common sense.

The beautiful, explained by inference from the fourth moment.

Beautiful is that which, without a concept, is cognized to be the object of a necessary satisfaction.

General observation on the first section of the Analytic

Gathering together the upshot of the dissections above, one finds that everything reduces to the concept of taste: to wit, that taste amounts to a power of judging an object with reference to the free lawfulness of the imagination. Now if, in the judgment of taste, the imagination must be regarded in its freedom, then it is assumed, first of all, to be not reproductive, as when it stands under the laws of association, but rather productive and self-active (as the author of chosen forms of possible intuitions); and even though, in taking up a given object of sense, it is tied to a determinate form of that object and to this extent enjoys no free play (as it does in poetic invention), one can still readily grasp how the object might hand it just such a form as holds a composition of the manifold of the kind that the imagination, if left to its own freedom, would sketch in agreement with the lawfulness of the understanding as such. Yet for the imagination to be free and at the same time lawful of its own accord, i.e. to carry an autonomy about with it, is contradictory. It is the understanding, and it alone, that supplies the law. Should the imagination, however, be constrained to operate by some determinate law, then what it produces is, in point of form, fixed by concepts as to how it should turn out; but then the satisfaction, as was shown above, is not satisfaction in the beautiful but in the good (in perfection, or at best in merely formal perfection), and the judgment ceases to be one of taste. Hence a lawfulness without any law, together with a merely subjective agreement of the imagination with the understanding that lacks an objective one — the objective sort obtaining where the representation is tied to a determinate concept of an object — is the only thing that can hold together with the free lawfulness of the understanding (which has likewise been styled purposiveness without an end) and with what is distinctive in a judgment of taste.

Geometrically regular figures — a circular figure, a square, a cube, and the like — are, to be sure, routinely adduced by critics of taste as the plainest and least questionable instances of beauty; and yet the very ground on which they count as regular is that one can picture them in no other way than as bare presentations of a determinate concept which lays down the rule for that figure (the rule apart from which it would not be possible at all). One of these two judgments must therefore be in error: either that of the critics, who confer beauty on the figures in question, or our own, which takes purposiveness without a concept to be indispensable to beauty.

Hardly anyone will find a person of taste to be required in order to take greater satisfaction in a circular figure than in a scrawled contour, or greater in a four-sided figure with equal sides and equal corners than in one that is skewed, of unequal sides, and as it were stunted; for this demands nothing beyond ordinary understanding and no taste of any kind. Wherever some aim is discerned — say, to estimate the size of a public square, or to make graspable the proportion of the parts among themselves and to the whole in some subdivision — there regular figures, and indeed those of the simplest sort, become necessary; and the satisfaction does not settle directly upon the sight of the figure but upon its serviceability for aims of every possible kind. A room whose walls meet at oblique angles, a garden laid out in such a fashion, indeed any breach of symmetry — whether in the figure of animals (say, being one-eyed), or of edifices, or of beds of flowers — gives displeasure, because it runs counter to purpose, not merely in practice, with a view to some determinate use of these things, but also for judging them with respect to aims of every possible kind; and this is precisely what does not hold in the judgment of taste, which, so long as it is pure, links satisfaction or displeasure immediately to the sheer contemplation of the object, with no regard to use or to any end whatever.

That regularity which conducts us toward an object's concept is, to be sure, the condition we cannot dispense with (conditio sine qua non) if the object is to be gathered into a single representation and the manifold within its form is to be fixed. This fixing is an end in regard to cognition, and, related to cognition, it is at all times conjoined with satisfaction (the sort that attends the achievement of any aim, even a merely problematic one). In that case, however, what we have is merely our endorsement of the solution that meets a task, not a free and indeterminately purposive occupation of the mental powers with what we name beautiful, wherein the understanding waits upon the imagination rather than the imagination upon the understanding.

In a thing that owes its possibility solely to a purpose — a building, or even an animal — the regularity residing in symmetry has to express that unity of intuition which attends the concept of the end, and forms a part of cognition. But where the sole aim is to keep up a free play of the representational powers (though always on the proviso that the understanding take no offense in the process) — in pleasure gardens, in the ornamenting of rooms, in tasteful utensils of every sort, and suchlike — regularity, wherever it gives notice of itself as compulsion, is shunned as far as can be; and this is why the English taste in gardens, and the baroque taste in furnishings, drive the imagination's freedom well toward the brink of the grotesque, and, in this divorce from every compulsion of rule, establish the very case in which taste can exhibit its utmost perfection in the designs of the imagination.

Everything stiffly regular (whatever comes near to mathematical regularity) carries within it what is repugnant to taste: that it grants no protracted occupation to its contemplation, but rather, so far as it does not expressly have cognition, or some determinate practical end, for its aim, breeds tedium. What the imagination can play with unbidden and purposively, by contrast, strikes us as forever new, and one never tires of beholding it. Marsden, in his account of Sumatra, offers the observation that nature's free beauties there surround the onlooker on every side and for that reason have little that still attracts him: a pepper garden, on the other hand, where the stakes round which this plant climbs form avenues in parallel rows between them, held great charm for him when he chanced on it deep within a forest; and from this he infers that a wild beauty, ruleless in appearance, gratifies only the person who, sated with the regular kind, welcomes it by way of variety. Yet he need only have tried the experiment of lingering a whole day at his pepper garden to realize that, once regularity has set the understanding into the disposition toward order that it requires on all sides, the object entertains him no further but instead lays a wearisome compulsion on the imagination; whereas the nature there, lavish in its variety to the pitch of exuberance and bound by no compulsion of contrived rules, could furnish his taste with nourishment that never fails. — Even birdsong, which we are unable to bring under any rule of music, seems to hold more freedom, and on that account more for taste, than even a human song performed in strict conformity with every rule of the musical art: for one wearies far more quickly of the latter once it is repeated frequently and at length. But here we are presumably trading our fellow-feeling in the gaiety of a small, much-loved little creature for the beauty of its song, which, once a human being reproduces it with full exactness (as now and then occurs with the warbling of the nightingale), seems to our ear altogether devoid of taste.

Beautiful objects, further, are to be kept distinct from beautiful prospects onto objects (which, owing to their remoteness, can often no longer be made out with any clarity). With the latter, taste seems to fasten not so much on what the imagination apprehends in this field, but rather on what it is thereby prompted to invent, i.e. on the very reveries in which the mind occupies itself, all the while being kept continually astir by the manifold on which the eye lights; much as in the sight of the ever-changing shapes of a hearth-fire or of a purling stream, neither of which counts as a beauty, though each holds an allure for the imagination in that it keeps its free play going.

Second Book. Analytic of the sublime

§ 23. Transition from the faculty for judging the beautiful to that for judging the sublime

The beautiful agrees with the sublime in this, that both please for their own sake. A further point of agreement is that each of them presupposes no judgment of sense, and likewise none that determines logically, but rather a judgment of reflection: the satisfaction, accordingly, hangs neither upon a sensation, in the manner of the agreeable, nor upon any determinate concept, in the manner of the satisfaction in the good, and yet it is still brought into relation with concepts, however indeterminate these may be; thus it attaches to the bare presentation, or to the faculty for it, and by this attachment the faculty of presentation, that is, the imagination, comes to be viewed, in the presence of a given intuition, as harmonizing with the understanding's or reason's faculty of concepts, and as promoting the latter. Hence both kinds of judgment are singular judgments that nevertheless announce themselves as universally valid with respect to every subject, even though their claim reaches only as far as the feeling of pleasure, and to no cognition of the object.

Yet there are also notable differences between the two that strike the eye. Natural beauty has to do with the form of the object, a form consisting in its limitation; the sublime, on the other hand, may be met with even in an object without form, so far as unboundedness is represented either in it or through its prompting, and a totality of that unboundedness is yet added in thought: whence the beautiful appears to be taken for the presentation of an understanding's concept that is indeterminate, while the sublime is taken for that of such a concept of reason. Accordingly the satisfaction is in the one case connected with the representation of quality, but in the other with that of quantity. In its very kind, moreover, this latter satisfaction stands quite far apart from the former: for the one (the beautiful) carries with it, straightaway, a feeling that life is furthered, and thus goes together with charms and with an imagination at play; the other, however (the feeling of the sublime), is a pleasure springing up only in a roundabout way, in that it comes about through the feeling of a momentary checking of the vital forces followed at once by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger, so that, as a stirring of the mind, it seems to be no play but rather earnestness in how the imagination is engaged. For this reason, too, it cannot be reconciled with charms, and, inasmuch as the object does not merely attract the mind but by turns repels it over and over, the satisfaction in the sublime holds within it not positive pleasure so much as admiration or respect, and thus earns the name of a negative pleasure.

The weightiest and inmost difference, however, that sets the sublime apart from the beautiful is presumably this: that if, as is proper, we take into consideration here at the outset only the sublime as it appears in objects of nature (the sublime of art being always held within the conditions of its agreement with nature), then the beauty of nature (the self-subsistent sort) carries within its own form a purposiveness, by which the object seems, as it were, marked out in advance to suit our power of judgment, and hence amounts on its own to an object of satisfaction; whereas whatever stirs in us, with no need of subtle reasoning, the feeling of the sublime through mere apprehension may well look, in respect of its form, ill-adapted in purpose to our power of judgment, unsuited to our faculty of presentation, and violent, so to speak, toward the imagination, and yet is judged only the more sublime on that account.

From this, however, one sees at once that we express ourselves incorrectly on the whole when we call some object of nature sublime, even though we may with full correctness term very many of them beautiful; for how can that which is apprehended in itself as contrary to purpose be designated by an expression of approval? Nothing more can be asserted than that the object is fit for presenting a sublimity such as may be found within the mind; for the properly sublime can be housed in no sensible form whatever, and pertains solely to ideas of reason: these, though no presentation befitting them is possible, are stirred up and summoned into the mind by this very unfittingness, which does admit of being presented in sensible fashion. So the broad ocean, whipped into rage by storms, cannot be termed sublime. The look of it is ghastly; and the mind must beforehand have been stocked with ideas of many sorts if such an intuition is to tune it toward a feeling that is sublime in its own right, since the mind is thereby spurred to forsake sensibility and to busy itself with ideas harboring a higher purposiveness.

Self-subsistent natural beauty reveals to us a technique of nature that presents it as a system governed by laws whose principle we do not encounter anywhere in our whole faculty of understanding, namely the principle of a purposiveness relative to the use of the power of judgment with respect to appearances, so that these must be judged as belonging not merely to nature under its aimless mechanism, but also to an analogy with art. It thus does not really extend our cognition of natural objects, to be sure, yet it does extend our concept of nature, namely from that of a mere mechanism to the concept of the very same nature as art: which invites deep investigations into the possibility of a form of this kind. Yet in whatever we tend to call sublime within nature there lies so entirely nothing that would point toward particular objective principles and toward natural forms conforming to them, that nature instead, amid its chaos or amid its wildest and most unruly disorder and devastation, so long as magnitude and might come into view, is what most arouses the ideas of the sublime. We gather from this that the concept of the sublime in nature falls far short, both in importance and in the wealth of its consequences, of the concept of the beautiful in nature; and that it points to nothing purposive within nature itself, but solely within the possible use of the intuitions we have of it, in order to render felt in us a purposiveness altogether independent of nature. As for the beautiful in nature, we have to look for a ground beyond ourselves, whereas for the sublime we look merely inside ourselves and in the way of thinking that brings sublimity into the representation of the former; this is a highly needful preliminary observation, one that severs the ideas of the sublime entirely from any purposiveness ascribed to nature, and reduces the theory of the sublime to a mere appendix to the aesthetic appraisal of the purposiveness of nature, seeing that by this no particular form is represented in nature, while what gets developed is merely a purposive employment which the imagination makes of its own representation.

§ 24. On the division of an investigation of the feeling of the sublime

As concerns how the moments of the aesthetic judging of objects fall to be divided in their bearing on the feeling of the sublime, the analytic is able to run its course according to the same principle as was followed in the dissection of judgments of taste. For the satisfaction in the sublime, precisely like that in the beautiful, is a verdict of the aesthetic reflecting power of judgment, and as such it must exhibit itself as universally valid as regards quantity, as devoid of interest as regards quality, as subjective purposiveness as regards relation, and, as regards modality, must present the latter as necessary. Herein, then, the method will not diverge from that of the previous section: unless indeed one were to count it for something that we began, in the former case, where the aesthetic judgment had to do with the form of the object, by examining quality; but that here, in the case of the formlessness that can pertain to what we name sublime, we will make our beginning with quantity, the first among the moments of the aesthetic judgment on the sublime: the ground for this, however, is to be gathered from the preceding §.

But the analysis of the sublime requires a division which that of the beautiful can do without, namely one into the mathematically-sublime and into the dynamically-sublime.

For inasmuch as the feeling of the sublime has for its character a movement of the mind joined to the judging of the object, while taste for the beautiful presupposes and maintains the mind in calm contemplation; and inasmuch as this movement is nonetheless meant to be judged as subjectively purposive (the sublime, after all, pleases): it is by the imagination brought into relation either with the faculty of cognition or with the faculty of desire, though in either relation the purposiveness of the given representation is to be judged merely with regard to these faculties (without end or interest): whereupon the object receives the first as a mathematical and the second as a dynamical attunement of the imagination, and is therefore represented as sublime in the said twofold fashion.

A. On the mathematically sublime

§ 25. Nominal definition of the sublime

That which is absolutely great is what we call sublime. Yet being great and being a magnitude are entirely distinct concepts (magnitudo and quantitas). Likewise, to simply (simpliciter) say that something is great is quite another matter than saying that it is absolutely great (absolute, non comparative magnum). This last is what is great beyond all comparison. — But what is the expression really getting at when it says that a thing is great, or small, or middling? What gets designated by it is no pure concept of the understanding; even less an intuition of the senses; and equally little a concept of reason, for it brings along with it no principle of cognition at all. It has to be, then, a concept proper to the power of judgment, or one derived from such a concept, and must set beneath it, as its ground, a subjective purposiveness belonging to the representation with respect to the power of judgment. That a thing amounts to a magnitude (quantum) can be discerned from the object on its own, apart from any comparison with others: namely, whenever a plurality of what is homogeneous together makes up a single unit. How great it is, however, always requires something else, which is likewise a magnitude, to serve as its measure. Since, however, in appraising magnitude what matters is not only the plurality (number) but likewise the greatness of the unit (the measure), while the greatness of that unit once more calls for some further thing to serve as a measure by which it might be compared: we come to see that every determination of magnitude in appearances can yield no absolute concept of a magnitude at all, but on each occasion only a concept of comparison.

Now if I say simply that something is great, it appears that I have no comparison in mind at all, at least none with any objective measure, since by this it is in no way settled how large the object may be. Yet even though the scale of comparison is only subjective, the judgment none the less lays claim to universal agreement; the judgments "the man is beautiful" and "he is tall" do not confine themselves merely to the subject who judges, but, like theoretical judgments, require the agreement of everyone.

But because a judgment through which a thing is designated outright as great does not merely intend to say that the object has a magnitude, but ascribes this magnitude to it at the same time by preference over many others of like kind — without, though, specifying that preference in any determinate way — there is indeed laid at its foundation a standard that one assumes may be accepted as one and the same for every person, a standard useful for no logical (mathematically determined) estimation of magnitude, but serviceable solely for an aesthetic one, being a measure that rests as its ground merely subjectively upon the judgment reflecting about magnitude. For the rest it may be empirical — such as the middling size of the human beings known to us, of animals of a certain kind, of trees, houses, mountains, and the like; or else a measure given a priori, one that, on account of the shortcomings of the subject doing the judging, is held to subjective conditions for its exhibition in concreto: thus, in practical affairs, the greatness of some particular virtue, or of the public freedom and justice within a country; or, in theoretical affairs, how great the correctness or incorrectness of an observation or measurement that has been made may be, and the like.

What is noteworthy here is this: that although we take no interest at all in the object — that is, its existence leaves us indifferent — the sheer magnitude of it, even where it is looked upon as formless, is still able to bring with it a satisfaction communicable to all, and thereby holds within it the consciousness of a subjective purposiveness in how we put our cognitive faculties to use; yet this is not a satisfaction taken in the object, as happens with the beautiful (given that the thing may lack form), a case in which the reflecting power of judgment discovers itself purposively disposed toward cognition as such, but rather a satisfaction taken in the imagination's own enlargement of itself.

Whenever we (under the qualification mentioned above) declare of an object outright that it is great, what we pass is no mathematically determining judgment, but a mere judgment of reflection upon the representation of that object, a representation subjectively purposive for a certain use of our powers of cognition in the appraisal of magnitude; and we thereupon always join to the representation a kind of respect, just as, with what we plainly name small, a kind of contempt. For the rest, the judging of things as great or small applies to everything whatsoever, even to all the qualities they possess; which is why we speak even of beauty as great or small: the reason for this being that whatever we may, following the prescription of the power of judgment, present in intuition (and thus represent aesthetically) is, without exception, appearance, and consequently a quantum as well.

But when we name a thing not merely great, but great in an unqualified, absolute way, in every regard (past all comparison) — that is, sublime — one quickly grasps this: that for it we allow no fitting standard to be looked for anywhere outside the thing, but only inside it. It is a magnitude equal to nothing beyond its own self. It follows from this, then, that the sublime is to be looked for not among the things of nature but only within our ideas; yet in which of these it may lie must be reserved for the deduction.

The explanation given above may also be put thus: Sublime is that in comparison with which everything else is small. Here it is readily seen: that nothing can be given in nature, however great we may judge it to be, which, viewed in a different relation, could not be diminished to the point of the infinitely small; and, conversely, nothing so small that, set beside yet smaller standards, it could not, for our imagination, be magnified up to the size of a world. Telescopes have placed in our hands abundant matter for making the former remark, microscopes for the latter. Nothing, then, capable of being an object of the senses is, regarded on this footing, to be called sublime. But for just this reason — that our imagination harbors an endeavor to press onward into the infinite, whereas our reason puts forward a demand for absolute totality as for a genuinely real idea — that very unfitness of our capacity for appraising the magnitude of the things of the world of sense becomes, with regard to this idea, the awakening of the feeling of a supersensible capacity within us; and it is the use which the power of judgment naturally makes of certain objects on behalf of the latter (feeling), and not the object of sense, that is absolutely great, while against it every other use is small. Hence it is the mental attunement produced by a certain representation occupying the reflecting power of judgment, and not the object, that deserves to be called sublime.

We may accordingly append to the foregoing formulas for the explanation of the sublime this further one: Sublime is that of which the very ability to think it proves a power of the mind exceeding every measure of sense.

§ 26. On the estimation of the magnitude of natural things required for the idea of the sublime

Estimating magnitude through numerical concepts (or, in algebra, through their signs) proceeds mathematically, whereas estimating it in bare intuition — by what the eye can gauge — proceeds aesthetically. Now it is true that we arrive at determinate concepts of how large a thing is only by means of numbers (or, failing that, by approximations formed from numerical series that run on to infinity), and the unit of these is the measure; to that degree, every logical estimating of magnitude is mathematical. Yet since we are obliged all the same to take the magnitude of the measure as already known, then, were this too to be estimated only through numbers — whose unit would in turn have to be some further measure, and hence estimated mathematically — we should never reach a first, foundational measure, and therefore never gain any determinate concept of a given magnitude. So the magnitude of the foundational measure has to be estimated in one way only: by grasping it directly in an intuition and putting it to use, via the imagination, for presenting numerical concepts — which is to say that in the last analysis every appraisal of the magnitude of natural objects is aesthetic (determined, that is, subjectively and not objectively).

Now while the mathematical estimating of magnitude admits of no greatest (numbers being potent without limit), the aesthetic estimating of magnitude does admit of a greatest; and my claim about it is this: that once it is judged as an absolute measure, than which the subject doing the judging can hold none greater to be subjectively possible, it brings the idea of the sublime along with it and awakens that stirring of feeling which no mathematical appraisal of magnitudes by numbers is able to produce (save so far as that aesthetic foundational measure is kept alive and active in the imagination throughout): for the mathematical kind exhibits only relative magnitude, arrived at by comparison with others of like sort, whereas the aesthetic kind exhibits magnitude outright, as far as the mind is able to take it up in a single intuition.

Taking a quantum up into the imagination in intuition, so that it may serve as a measure or as a unit for estimating magnitude by numbers, calls for two operations of this power: apprehension (apprehensio) and comprehension (comprehensio aesthetica). Apprehension poses no problem, since it can run on to infinity; comprehension, however, grows harder the further apprehension pushes ahead, and quickly attains its ceiling — the aesthetically largest foundational measure for estimating magnitude. For once apprehension has gone far enough that the earliest-apprehended part-representations of sense-intuition are already beginning to die away in the imagination as it moves on to apprehend still more, then it is losing on the one side just what it gathers on the other, and comprehension meets with a greatest past which it cannot advance.

This lets us account for something Savary notes in his reports from Egypt: that to feel the full stirring that the pyramids' magnitude produces, one must neither draw very near to them nor stand too far off. For in the latter case the apprehended parts (the stones stacked one on another) are pictured only dimly, and their representation works no effect upon the subject's aesthetic judgment. In the former case, though, the eye requires a stretch of time to carry the apprehension through from the base up to the summit; and here the earlier parts keep partly dying away before the imagination has taken in the later ones, so that comprehension never comes out complete. — The very same account can equally serve to explain the consternation, or sort of embarrassment, that (so the story goes) takes hold of a visitor stepping for the first time into the church of Saint Peter in Rome. For at work here is a feeling that one's imagination falls short of the idea of a whole when it comes to presenting it — a point at which the imagination hits its ceiling and, straining to push past it, collapses back into itself, yet is thereby set into a moving kind of satisfaction.

I shall for now bring forward nothing about why this satisfaction comes about — a satisfaction linked to a representation from which one would look for it least of all, namely one that makes us aware of the unsuitability, and thus the subjective unpurposiveness, of the representation for the power of judgment as it estimates magnitude; I note only that, if the aesthetic judgment is to be pure (with no teleological one, as a judgment of reason, intermixed) and is to furnish an example fully fitted to a critique of the aesthetic power of judgment, then one has to point to the sublime not in works of art (say, buildings, columns, and the like), where a human end fixes the form as well as the size, nor in things of nature whose very concept carries a determinate end within it (say, animals whose natural function is known), but in nature untamed (and even there only so far as it holds in itself no charm, and no stirring born of real danger), purely so far as it comprises magnitude. For in a representation of this kind nature holds nothing that could count as monstrous (nor as splendid or as ghastly); the magnitude taken up may have swelled as far as you please, provided only that the imagination can still gather it into a whole. Monstrous is what we call an object when by its sheer magnitude it undoes the very end that makes up its concept. Colossal, by contrast, is the name for the bare presentation of a concept that is well-nigh too vast for any presentation at all (verging on the relatively monstrous): for the aim of presenting a concept is here made harder by the fact that the object's intuition all but exceeds our power of apprehension. — A pure judgment upon the sublime, however, must take no end of the object whatever as its determining ground, if it is meant to be aesthetic and unmixed with any judgment of understanding or of reason.

Since anything meant to please the merely reflecting power of judgment apart from interest must carry within its representation a subjective purposiveness — one universally valid as such — and yet here, unlike with the beautiful, the judging rests on no purposiveness of the object's form, the question presents itself: just what is this subjective purposiveness? and how does it come to be laid down as a norm, such that in the bare estimating of magnitude — indeed the sort pushed clear to the point where our power of imagination proves unequal to presenting the concept of a magnitude — it can supply a ground for universally valid satisfaction?

In the assembling that the representation of magnitude demands, the imagination presses on to infinity all on its own, with nothing to check it; but the understanding steers it by way of numerical concepts, for which the imagination has to hand over the schema: and while this procedure, insofar as it belongs to the logical estimating of magnitude, does carry something objectively purposive under the concept of an end (as any measuring does), it carries nothing that would be purposive and pleasing for the aesthetic power of judgment. Nor is there anything in this deliberate purposiveness that would compel one to drive the magnitude of the measure — and with it the comprehension of a manifold into one intuition — up to the very limit of the imagination's power and as far as its presentations can ever stretch. For in the understanding's estimating of magnitudes (arithmetic) one comes just as far whether the comprehension of units is carried to the number 10 (in the decadic scheme) or only to 4 (in the tetradic); the further production of magnitude, whether in assembling or, where the quantum is given in intuition, in apprehending, gets done merely progressively (not comprehensively) on some adopted principle of progression. In this mathematical estimating of magnitude the understanding is just as well served and satisfied whether the imagination selects for its unit a magnitude graspable at a glance — say a foot or a rod — or selects a German mile, or even an earth's diameter, of which apprehension is indeed feasible but not comprehension into a single intuition of the imagination (not by the comprehensio aesthetica, though quite well by the comprehensio logica into a numerical concept). In either case the logical estimating of magnitude runs on to infinity unimpeded.

But now the mind gives ear within itself to reason's voice, which for every given magnitude — even those that, though never able to be apprehended in full, are still (in sensory representation) judged as given in full — insists on totality, hence calls for comprehension into one intuition and for the presentation of all the members of a numerical series that grows step by step, and which exempts not even the infinite (space and time already elapsed) from this demand, making it unavoidable instead to think that infinite (in the judgment of ordinary reason) as wholly (in respect of its totality) given.

The infinite, though, is large in an unqualified way (not just by comparison). Set beside it, everything else (of that same class of magnitudes) turns out small. But the chief point — that we are able to think it even so much as a whole — bespeaks a power of the mind that outreaches every scale the senses provide. For that would demand a comprehension yielding a scale, as unit, that stood to the infinite in some determinate ratio statable in numbers: and that is impossible. Yet to be able so much as to think the given infinite, and to do so free of contradiction, demands within the human mind a power supersensible in its own right. For only by way of this power, and of its idea of a noumenon — a noumenon that grants no intuition of itself and yet is set down as the substrate beneath our intuition of the world as sheer appearance — does the infinite of the sensible world come, in the pure intellectual estimating of magnitude, to be drawn wholly beneath a single concept, although it can never be thought out fully in the mathematical kind by numerical concepts. Indeed, the sheer capacity to conceive the infinite of supersensible intuition as given (within its intelligible substrate) outreaches every scale that sensibility affords and is, past all comparison, greater even than the capacity for mathematical estimating; not, admittedly, in a theoretical regard on behalf of our cognitive power, but still as an expansion of the mind, which feels itself equal to overstepping the bounds of sensibility in another regard — the practical one.

Nature, then, is sublime in those appearances of hers whose intuition brings with it the idea of her infinity. And this last can come about in no other way than through the failure of even our imagination's utmost effort at estimating an object's magnitude to prove adequate. Yet for mathematical estimating of magnitude the imagination is a match for any object, able to furnish an adequate measure for it, since the understanding's numerical concepts can, by progression, render any measure adequate to any given magnitude. It must be, then, the aesthetic estimating of magnitude in which one feels the effort at comprehension outrun the imagination's capacity to gather the progressive apprehension into one whole of intuition, and in which one at the same time perceives the inadequacy of this capacity — boundless as it is in its advance — for laying hold of a foundational measure fit, with the least outlay of understanding, for estimating magnitude, and for putting it to that use. Now nature's own unchanging foundational measure is her absolute whole, which for her as appearance amounts to infinity gathered together. Since this foundational measure is, however, a concept in conflict with itself — for an absolute totality of a progression that has no end is impossible — whatever magnitude in a natural object exhausts, to no purpose, the imagination's entire power of comprehension must lead the concept of nature onward to a supersensible substrate (which grounds both nature and, along with it, our own capacity to think), a substrate whose greatness outstrips every measure the senses supply, and which for that reason lets one judge as sublime not the object so much as the mind's own disposition while appraising it.

And so, just as the aesthetic power of judgment, in appraising the beautiful, refers the imagination in its free play to the understanding, so as to accord with the latter's concepts as such (leaving them undetermined): so, in appraising a thing as sublime, it refers that same faculty to reason, so as to accord subjectively with reason's ideas (no matter which), that is, to call up a cast of mind that answers to, and sits well with, the one that the sway of determinate ideas (practical ones) over feeling would induce.

One gathers from this as well that true sublimity must be looked for solely within the mind of the person judging, rather than in the natural object whose appraisal occasions this attunement of his. For who would ever call sublime the misshapen mountain masses heaped in wild disorder upon one another, together with their ice-pyramids, or the gloomy, storming sea, and so forth? But the mind feels itself uplifted in its own appraising when, letting itself go in contemplation of such things — heedless of their form — to the imagination and to a reason that, though bound up with it quite without any determinate end, merely enlarges it, it nonetheless finds the imagination's entire might unequal to that reason's ideas.

Instances of the mathematically sublime in nature, met with in bare intuition, are supplied by every case where what is set before the imagination is not so much a bigger numerical concept as a large unit to serve as measure (so as to shorten the numerical series). A tree we gauge by a man's height will at any rate afford a scale for a mountain; and should that mountain run to about a mile in height, it can serve as the unit for the number expressing the earth's diameter, so as to make the latter intuitable — the earth's diameter for the planetary system familiar to us, that system for the system of the Milky Way; and the boundless throng of such Milky-Way systems, going by the name of nebulae, which presumably make up yet another such system among themselves, leaves us no bound to look for here. Now, in appraising aesthetically a whole so immense, the sublime resides not so much in the numerical magnitude as in this: that with each advance we arrive at units greater still; and to this the systematic partitioning of the world's structure lends its aid, presenting to us everything great in nature as once more small, and, more properly, presenting our imagination in the whole of its boundlessness — and nature together with it — as vanishing away before the ideas of reason, whenever it is called upon to supply a presentation adequate to them.

§ 27. On the quality of the satisfaction in judging the sublime

Respect is the feeling that our capacity is inadequate for attaining an idea that is a law for us. The idea of combining any appearance whatever that might be given to us into the intuition of one whole is, however, an idea enjoined upon us by a law of reason, which acknowledges no determinate measure, valid for everyone and invariable, save the absolute whole. Yet our imagination, even when it strains to the utmost in carrying out the combining it is required to make — that of a given object into a whole of intuition, and thus toward the presentation of reason's idea — reveals its bounds and inadequacy, yet at the same time reveals its vocation to bring about accordance with that idea taken as a law. In nature, accordingly, the feeling of the sublime is respect for our own vocation, which we accord to an object of nature by way of a certain subreption (a confusing of things, whereby respect for the object stands in for the respect owed to the idea of humanity within us as subjects), the object making intuitable to us, as it were, the superiority that the rational vocation of our cognitive powers holds over the greatest capacity of sensibility.

So the feeling of the sublime is, on the one hand, a displeasure arising because the imagination, in its aesthetic estimation of magnitude, proves unequal to the estimation made through reason, and, on the other, a pleasure awakened alongside it out of the very concordance between this same judgment — the judgment of the greatest sensible power's inadequacy — and ideas of reason, insofar as the endeavor toward those ideas is, after all, a law for us. For it is a law for us (a law of reason), and part of our vocation, to reckon as small, in comparison with ideas of reason, everything that nature holds as an object of the senses that counts for us as great; and whatever stirs in us the feeling of this supersensible vocation is in harmony with that law. Now the imagination's greatest striving, in presenting the unity required for estimating magnitude, is a relation to something absolutely great, and therefore also a relation to the law of reason that bids us adopt this alone as the highest measure of magnitudes. Thus the inward perception that every sensible yardstick falls short of reason's estimation of magnitude is an accordance with reason's own laws, and a displeasure that stirs in us the feeling of our supersensible vocation, in keeping with which it is purposive — and hence a pleasure — to regard every sensible yardstick as inadequate to the ideas of reason.

In representing the sublime in nature the mind feels itself moved: whereas in the aesthetic judgment upon nature's beauty it rests in tranquil contemplation. Such movement, especially at its beginning, admits of comparison with a tremor — in other words, with a rapidly shifting repulsion and attraction exerted by the selfsame object. What exceeds the imagination's reach (the limit up to which it is driven in taking in the intuition) is, as it were, an abyss in which it is afraid of losing itself; and yet, for reason's idea of the supersensible, to bring forth such a striving of the imagination is not something excessive but rather something lawful: so that, by the very same measure in which it had repelled mere sensibility, it now draws one in once more. The judgment itself, however, remains here always merely aesthetic, because, without grounding itself on any determinate concept of the object, it represents the subjective interplay of the mental powers themselves (imagination and reason) as harmonious precisely through their contrast. For just as, in judging the beautiful, imagination and understanding through their concord bring forth a subjective purposiveness of the mental powers, so here imagination and reason bring it forth through their discord: namely, a feeling that we possess pure, self-standing reason, that is, a faculty of estimating magnitude whose excellence can be made intuitable by nothing save the inadequacy of that very power which, in presenting magnitudes (of sensible objects), is itself without bounds.

The measuring of a space (as apprehension) is at the same time a describing of it, and hence an objective motion within imagining, a progression; by contrast, the drawing-together of the multiplicity into unity — a unity not of thought but of intuition, namely of what has been successively apprehended, gathered into a single moment — is a regression, which annuls once again the temporal condition within the progression of the imagination and renders simultaneity intuitable. This regression, then (given that temporal succession is a condition of inner sense and of any intuition), amounts to a subjective motion of the imagination whereby the latter does violence to inner sense — violence bound to grow the more noticeable the greater the quantum that the imagination compresses into one intuition. The striving, then, to take up into one intuition a measure for magnitudes whose apprehension demands a perceptible span of time is a way of representing that, viewed subjectively, runs counter to purpose, yet objectively is requisite for estimating magnitude and so is purposive: whereby, all the same, this very violence inflicted on the subject by the imagination is deemed purposive for the entire vocation of the mind.

As for the quality of the feeling of the sublime, it consists in this: that it is a feeling of displeasure regarding the aesthetic faculty for judging an object, a displeasure that within that very judging is nonetheless represented as purposive; and this is possible because the subject's own incapacity uncovers the consciousness of an unlimited capacity belonging to that same subject, and the mind can pass aesthetic judgment on the latter only through the medium of the former.

In logical estimation of magnitude, it was recognized as objective that one can never, through the progression of measuring the things of the world of sense in time and space, arrive at absolute totality — objective, that is to say, an impossibility of thinking the infinite as given, rather than merely subjective, namely an inability to grasp it: for there no regard at all is paid to the degree of combining into an intuition as a measure, and everything hinges instead on a concept of number. In an aesthetic estimation of magnitude, by contrast, the numerical concept must drop away or be transformed, and only the imagination's comprehension into the unity of the measure (thus with avoidance of the concepts belonging to a law for the successive production of concepts of magnitude) is purposive for it. — Now when a magnitude comes close to the utmost of our power to combine it into one intuition, while the imagination is nonetheless called upon, through numerical magnitudes (in respect of which we know our power to be unbounded), toward an aesthetic combining into some larger unity, then we feel ourselves inwardly, as aesthetic beings, hemmed in by limits; and yet the displeasure — regarded in the light of the imagination's necessary expansion toward adequacy with that which, within our power of reason, knows no bounds, that is, with the idea of the absolute whole, and hence in the light of the unpurposiveness of the imagination's power — is all the same represented as purposive, after all, for ideas of reason and their arousal. Yet by this very means the aesthetic judgment itself becomes subjectively purposive for reason, as the wellspring of ideas — that is, for an intellectual combining in relation to which all aesthetic combining is small; and the object is received as sublime with a pleasure that becomes possible only through the mediation of a displeasure.

B. On the Dynamically Sublime of Nature

§ 28. On nature as a might

Might is a capacity that surpasses great obstacles. This same thing is called a dominion when it also surpasses the resistance of something that itself possesses might. Nature, regarded in aesthetic judgment as a might over us that yet wields no dominion, is dynamically sublime.

If nature is to be judged by us as dynamically sublime, then it must be presented as inspiring fear (though the reverse does not hold, that every object inspiring fear is deemed sublime in our aesthetic judgment). For within aesthetic appraisal (which proceeds without a concept), superiority over obstacles can be gauged solely by the magnitude of the resistance. Now what we strive to withstand is an evil, and, should we find our powers unequal to it, it becomes an object of fear. Hence nature, for the aesthetic power of judgment, can pass as a might — and thus as dynamically sublime — only to the extent that it is looked upon as an object of fear.

One can, however, regard an object as fearful without being afraid of it, namely when we judge it in such a way that we merely think the case in which we might wish to offer it resistance, and that then all resistance would be utterly in vain. So the virtuous person fears God without being afraid of him, since he does not think of wishing to resist him and his commandments as any case worrisome on his part. But for every such case that he thinks not impossible in itself, he recognizes it as fearful.

Whoever is afraid can pass no judgment at all on the sublimity of nature, just as little as one taken up by inclination and appetite can judge of the beautiful. The former takes flight from the sight of any object that strikes dread into him; nor can any satisfaction be found in a terror meant in earnest. Hence the agreeableness arising from the cessation of a hardship is gladness. This, however, on account of deliverance from a danger, is a gladness accompanied by the resolve never to expose oneself to it again; indeed, one has no wish even to recall that sensation fondly, far from seeking out the occasion for it oneself.

Bold, overhanging crags that all but menace us, thunderclouds heaping themselves up in the heavens and rolling onward amid lightning and thunder, volcanoes in the whole of their destroying force, hurricanes that leave devastation behind them, the boundless ocean thrown into an uproar, the lofty cascade of a mighty river, and things of this kind — set against their might, these shrink our power of resistance to an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them grows all the more compelling the more frightful it is, so long as we ourselves stand secure; and we readily name such objects sublime, since they lift the soul's fortitude above its ordinary measure and let us uncover within us a power to resist of a wholly different order, one that emboldens us to pit ourselves against the apparent all-power of nature.

For just as, faced with the immeasurability of nature and the insufficiency of our own capacity, we found our own limitation when we sought a measure suited to the aesthetic estimation of its domain's magnitude, yet at the same time found, in our power of reason, a second, non-sensible standard that keeps that very infinitude beneath it as one unit, before which the whole of nature is small, and so found in our mind a superiority over nature itself even in its immeasurability: so likewise the irresistibility of its might, though it makes us, viewed as beings of nature, acknowledge our physical powerlessness, at the same time uncovers in us a capacity to judge ourselves independent of it, together with a superiority over nature upon which rests a self-preservation of a wholly different sort than the one that can be challenged and imperiled by the nature beyond us; and in all this the humanity in our person is left undegraded, even though the human being would be bound to succumb to that dominion. In this manner nature, in our aesthetic judgment, is deemed sublime not on the ground that it excites fear, but because it calls forth in us a power of our own (which is no part of nature), so that we treat as trifling the things we are anxious about (goods, health, and life), and thereby treat its might (to which, as regards these matters, we are certainly subject) as being nonetheless, for us and our personhood, no such dominion as would require us to bow beneath it whenever our supreme principles and their upholding or surrender were at stake. Nature, then, is styled sublime in this place solely because it elevates the imagination toward exhibiting those very cases in which the mind is able to make felt to itself the sublimity proper to its own vocation, a sublimity even above nature.

This self-esteem loses nothing by the fact that we must see ourselves in safety in order to feel this exhilarating satisfaction, and hence that, because the danger is not in earnest, the sublimity of our spiritual power might also (as it may seem) be just as little in earnest. For the satisfaction at issue here bears only upon the vocation of our capacity that comes to light in such a case, inasmuch as the disposition toward it resides in our nature; whereas the developing and exercising of it are left to us and laid upon us as our charge. And there is truth in this, however conscious the human being may be of his present actual impotence when he extends his reflection this far.

This principle does indeed look too far-fetched and over-refined, and thus too exorbitant for an aesthetic judgment; and yet the study of the human being demonstrates the reverse, and reveals that it can lie at the base of the most commonplace assessments, however little one is always aware of it. For what, after all, is that which even to the savage counts as an object of the greatest admiration? A human being who is not startled, who is not afraid, and so does not give way before danger, yet at the same time sets to work vigorously with full deliberation. Even in the most highly civilized state this exceptional regard for the warrior endures; save that one demands besides that he should, together with it, exhibit every peaceful virtue — mildness, compassion, and even a becoming solicitude for his own person — and this precisely because it is here that the indomitability of his mind in the face of danger comes to be recognized. Hence one may dispute as much as one likes, in comparing the statesman with the general, over the superiority of the respect that the one deserves over the other; the aesthetic judgment decides for the latter. War itself, provided it is waged with order and a hallowed respect for the rights of citizens, carries something sublime within it, and renders the cast of mind of a people that wages it in such a fashion all the more sublime the greater the perils to which it stood exposed and beneath which it managed to bear itself bravely; whereas a protracted peace is wont to give the upper hand to the mere trading spirit, and with it low self-seeking, cowardice, and effeminacy, and to degrade a people's cast of mind.

It appears to militate against this analysis of the concept of the sublime, so far as the sublime is attributed to might, that we are wont to picture God — in the thunderstorm, in the tempest, in the earthquake, and the like — as presenting himself at once in wrath and in his sublimity, whereas the fancy of any ascendancy of our mind over these effects, and, so it appears, even over the designs of such a might, would be at one and the same time folly and sacrilege. In this case the frame of mind suited to the appearance of such an object seems to be, not any feeling of the sublimity belonging to our own nature, but rather submissiveness, despondency, and a sense of complete powerlessness — a disposition that is, moreover, ordinarily associated with the idea of that object whenever a natural event of this kind occurs. In religion generally, prostration, adoration with bowed head, with contrite, anxious gestures and voices, seems to be the only fitting conduct in the presence of the deity, which most peoples have therefore adopted and still observe. This disposition of mind, however, is in itself and of necessity very far from being tied to the idea of a religion's sublimity and of its object. That human being who is genuinely afraid, because he discovers within himself a ground for it — aware, that is, that through his blameworthy cast of mind he transgresses against a might whose will cannot be withstood and is at once just — stands in no way in that settledness of mind requisite for admiring the divine greatness, a thing that calls for a temper disposed to tranquil contemplation and for a wholly unconstrained judgment. It is solely then, once he becomes conscious of his own upright disposition pleasing to God, that those workings of might come to stir the idea of this being's sublimity in him — to the degree that he acknowledges within himself a loftiness of disposition answering to that being's will, and is by this means lifted above any fear of such workings of nature, which he does not take to be eruptions of its wrath. Humility, too — taken as an unsparing appraisal of one's own shortcomings, which, where the consciousness of good dispositions is present, might otherwise be readily glossed over as the frailty of human nature — is a sublime cast of mind: to subject oneself, of one's own accord, to the pain of self-reproach so as by degrees to root out the cause of it. In this way alone does religion inwardly distinguish itself from superstition, the latter of which grounds in the mind not reverence for the sublime, but fear and dread before the overpowering being to whose will the terrified human being sees himself subjected without, however, holding it in high esteem — from which of course nothing but ingratiation and flattery can spring, in place of a religion of good conduct of life.

Sublimity, accordingly, resides in no object of nature, but is contained in our mind alone, to the extent that we can grow conscious of standing superior to the nature within us, and by that very means to the nature outside us as well (insofar as it flows in upon us). Everything that arouses this feeling in us — to which belongs the might of nature that calls forth our powers — is then called (though improperly) sublime; and only under the presupposition of this idea within us, and in relation to it, can we ascend to the idea of the sublimity belonging to that being which works within us a heartfelt respect not merely through its might, as displayed in nature, but still more through the capacity, laid within us, to judge that might without fear and to think of our vocation as sublime above it.

§ 29. On the modality of the judgment on the sublime of nature

There are countless objects of beautiful nature regarding which we may straightaway require of everyone an agreement of judgment with our own and, without going much astray, may also expect it; but with our judgment about the sublime in nature we cannot so easily count on gaining acceptance from others. For to be capable of rendering a judgment upon this excellence in natural objects, there seems to be needed a culture far greater in degree — one belonging not solely to the aesthetic power of judgment but likewise to the cognitive faculties on which it rests.

For the mind to be tuned to the feeling of the sublime, it must be receptive to ideas; for what is forbidding to sensibility — though at the same time alluring — consists precisely in nature's incommensurability with those ideas, and thus arises only on the presupposition of them together with an exertion of the imagination that handles nature as a schema for them: since this is a force that reason wields upon sensibility, merely so as to expand it in keeping with reason's proper territory (the practical) and to make it gaze out upon the infinite, which to sensibility yawns as an abyss. In fact, to anyone still crude, what we — schooled beforehand by culture — term sublime will, absent any cultivation of moral ideas, appear nothing more than forbidding. In the evidences of nature's dominion in its devastation, and in the great scale of its might, against which his own vanishes into nothing, he will see nothing but hardship, danger, and distress that would beset the person banished to such a place. Thus the good, and otherwise sensible, Savoyard peasant (as Mr. de Saussure recounts) unhesitatingly called all lovers of the glaciers fools. And who knows whether he would have been so entirely wrong, if that observer had taken on the dangers to which he exposed himself here merely, as most travelers are wont to do, out of a hobbyist's enthusiasm, or in order one day to be able to give affecting descriptions of them? But as it stood, his intention was the instruction of humankind; and the soul-uplifting sensation was one that the excellent man both had himself and instilled, as something over and above their purchase, in the readers of his travels.

But although the judging of nature's sublimity calls for culture (to a greater degree than the judging of the beautiful), it is nevertheless not for that reason something that culture originally brought forth, nor a mere convention established within society; its ground lies instead in human nature itself — specifically in what, along with sound understanding, may be expected and demanded of each person alike, that is, in the disposition toward a feeling for (practical) ideas, in a word, toward what is moral.

On this, now, is grounded the necessity of others' judgment about the sublime agreeing with our own — a necessity that we include within our own judgment at the same time. For just as we reproach with a want of taste anyone who stays indifferent when appraising a natural object we find beautiful, so of whoever remains unmoved before something our judgment pronounces sublime we declare that he possesses no feeling. Yet both we demand of every human being, and we likewise assume them present in him once he possesses some culture — with this one distinction: the first we require flatly of anyone at all, since in this the power of judgment ties the imagination purely to the understanding, taken as the faculty of concepts; the second, however, since therein the power of judgment relates the imagination to reason as the faculty of ideas, we require only on a subjective presupposition (one we nonetheless deem ourselves justified in expecting of anyone), namely the presupposition of moral feeling within the human being, and in this way we attach necessity to this aesthetic judgment too.

It is in this modality of aesthetic judgments — that is, in the necessity they presume to claim — that the critique of the power of judgment finds one of its chief moments. For it is just this that brings to light an a priori principle at work in them, raising them up out of empirical psychology — where they would otherwise stay buried, amid the feelings of enjoyment and pain (marked off merely by the vacuous label of a finer feeling) — in order to set them, and through them the power of judgment, within the class of those grounded upon principles a priori, and, as such, to carry them across into transcendental philosophy.