It is nature herself which raises man from reality to appearance by endowing him with two senses which only lead him to the knowledge of the real through appearance.  In the eye and the ear the organs of the senses are already freed from the persecutions of nature, and the object with which we are immediately in contact through the animal senses is remoter from us.  What we see by the eye differs from what we feel; for the understanding to reach objects overleaps the light which separates us from them.  In truth, we are passive to an object; in sight and hearing the object is a form we create.  While still a savage, man only enjoys through touch merely aided by sight and sound.  He either does not rise to perception through sight, or does not rest there.  As soon as he begins to enjoy through sight, vision has an independent value, he is aesthetically free, and the instinct of play is developed.

The instinct of play likes appearance, and directly it is awakened it is followed by the formal imitative instinct which treats appearance as an independent thing.  Directly man has come to distinguish the appearance from the reality, the form from the body, he can separate, in fact he has already done so.  Thus the faculty of the art of imitation is given with the faculty of form in general.  The inclination that draws us to it reposes on another tendency I have not to notice here.  The exact period when the aesthetic instinct, or that of art, developes, depends entirely on the attraction that mere appearance has for men.

As every real existence proceeds from nature as a foreign power, whilst every appearance comes in the first place from man as a percipient subject, he only uses his absolute sight in separating semblance from essence, and arranging according to subjective law.  With an unbridled liberty he can unite what nature has severed, provided he can imagine his union, and he can separate what nature has united, provided this separation can take place in his intelligence.  Here nothing can be sacred to him but his own law:  the only condition imposed upon him is to respect the border which separates his own sphere from the existence of things or from the realm of nature.

This human right of ruling is exercised by man in the art of appearance; and his success in extending the empire of the beautiful, and guarding the frontiers of truth, will be in proportion with the strictness with which he separates form from substance:  for if he frees appearance from reality he must also do the converse.

But man possesses sovereign power only in the world of appearance, in the unstibstantial realm of imagination, only by abstaining from giving being to appearance in theory, and by giving it being in practice.  It follows that the poet transgresses his proper limits when he attributes being to his ideal, and when he gives this ideal aim as a determined existence.  For he can only reach this result by exceeding his right as a poet, that of encroaching by the ideal on the field of experience, and by pretending to determine real existence in virtue of a simple possibility, or else he renounces his right as poet by letting experience encroach on the sphere of the ideal, and by restricting possibility to the conditions of reality.