While beautiful nature looks as though it were art (as though it were calculated for our enjoyment), beautiful art should resemble nature, must not appear to be intentional though, no doubt, it is so, must show a careful but not an overnice adherence to rules (i.e., not one which fetters the powers of the artist).  This is the case when the artist bears the rule in himself, that is, when he is gifted.  Genius is the innate disposition (through) which (nature) gives rules to art; its characteristics are originality, exemplariness, and unreflectiveness.  It does not produce according to definite rules which can be learned, but it is a law in itself, it is original.  It creates instinctively without consciousness of the rule, and cannot describe how it produces its results.  It creates typical works which impel others to follow, not to imitate.  It is only in art that there are geniuses, i.e., spirits who produce that which absolutely cannot be learned, while the great men of science differ only in degree, not in kind, from their imitators and pupils, and that which they discover can be learned by rule.

This establishes the criteria by which genius may be recognized.  If we ask by what psychological factors it is produced the answer is as follows:  Genius presupposes a certain favorable relation between imagination and reason.  Genius is the faculty of aesthetic Ideas, but an aesthetic Idea is a representation of the imagination which animates the mind, which adds to a concept of the understanding much of ineffable thought, much that belongs to the concept but which cannot be comprehended in a definite concept.  With the aid of this idea Kant solves the antinomy of the aesthetic judgment.  The thesis is:  The judgment of taste is not based upon concepts; for otherwise it would admit of controversy (would be determinable by proofs).  The antithesis is:  It is based upon concepts; for otherwise we could not contend about it (endeavor to obtain assent).  The two principles are reconcilable, for “concept” is understood differently in the two cases.  That which the thesis rightly seeks to exclude from the judgment of beauty is the determinate concept of the understanding; that which the antithesis with equal justice pronounces indispensable is the indeterminate concept, the aesthetic Idea.

The freest play is afforded the imagination by poetry, the highest of all arts, which, with rhetoric ("insidious,” on account of its earnest intention to deceive), forms the group termed arts of speech.  To the class of formative arts belong architecture, sculpture, and painting as the art of design.  A third group, the art of the beautiful play of sensations, includes painting as the art of color, and music, which as a “fine” art is placed immediately after poetry, as an “agreeable” art at the very foot of the list, and as the play of tone in the vicinity of the entertaining play of fortune [games of chance] and the witty play of thought.  The explanation of the comic (the ludicrous is based, according to Kant, on a sudden transformation of strained expectation into nothing) lays great (indeed exaggerated) weight on the resulting physiological phenomena, the bodily shock which heightens vital feeling and favors health, and which accompanies the alternating tension and relaxation of the mind.