It was advanced that soft beauty is for an unstrung mind, and the energetic beauty for the tightly strung mind.  But I apply the term unstrung to a man when he is rather under the pressure of feelings than under the pressure of conceptions.  Every exclusive sway of one of his two fundamental impulses is for man a state of compulsion and violence, and freedom only exists in the co-operation of his two natures.  Accordingly, the man governed preponderately by feelings, or sensuously unstrung, is emancipated and set free by matter.  The soft and graceful beauty, to satisfy this twofold problem, must therefore show herself under two aspects—­in two distinct forms.  First as a form in repose, she will tone down savage life, and pave the way from feeling to thought.  She will, secondly, as a living image equip the abstract form with sensuous power, and lead back the conception to intuition and law to feeling.  The former service she does to the man of nature, the second to the man of art.  But because she does not in both cases hold complete sway over her matter, but depends on that which is furnished either by formless nature or unnatural art, she will in both cases bear traces of her origin, and lose herself in one place in material life and in another in mere abstract form.

To be able to arrive at a conception how beauty can become a means to remove this twofold relaxation, we must explore its source in the human mind.  Accordingly, make up your mind to dwell a little longer in the region of speculation, in order then to leave it for ever, and to advance with securer footing on the ground of experience.

LETTER XVIII.

By beauty the sensuous man is led to form and to thought; by beauty the spiritual man is brought back to matter and restored to the world of sense.  From this statement it would appear to follow that between matter and form, between passivity and activity, there must be a middle state, and that beauty plants us in this state.  It actually happens that the greater part of mankind really form this conception of beauty as soon as they begin to reflect on its operations, and all experience I seems to point to this conclusion.  But, on the other hand, nothing is more unwarrantable and contradictory than such a conception, because the aversion of matter and form, the passive and the active, feeling and thought, is eternal and I cannot be mediated in any way.  How can we remove this contradiction?  Beauty weds the two opposed conditions of feeling and thinking, and yet there is absolutely no medium between them.  The former is immediately certain through experience, the other through the reason.

This is the point to which the whole question of beauty leads, and if we succeed in settling this point in a satisfactory way, we have at length found the clue that will conduct us through the whole labyrinth of aesthetics.