contrary, to consider the living organism in such wise that, the general
including the particular, and determining it as an end, consequently the
idea also determines the external, the compound of the organs, not by an
act springing from without but issuing from within. In this way the end
and the means, the interior and exterior, the general and particular, are
confounded in unity. But this judgment only expresses a subjective act
of reflection, and does not throw any light on the object in itself.
Kant has the same view of the aesthetic judgment. According to him the
judgment does not proceed either from reason, as the faculty of general
ideas, or from sensuous perception, but from the free play of the reason
and of the imagination. In this analysis of the cognitive faculty, the
object only exists relatively to the subject and to the feeling of
pleasure or the enjoyment that it experiences.

The characteristics of the beautiful are, according to Kant:--

1. The pleasure it procures is free from interest.

2. Beauty appears to us as an object of general enjoyment, without
awakening in us the consciousness of an abstract idea and of a category
of reason to which we might refer our judgment.

3. Beauty ought to embrace in itself the relation of conformity to its
end, but in such a way that this conformity may be grasped without the
idea of the end being offered to our mind.

4. Though it be not accompanied by an abstract idea, beauty ought to be
acknowledged as the object of a necessary enjoyment.

A special feature of all this system is the indissoluble unity of what is