in all this, due regard must be paid to a certain ideal which art must
keep in view, even though complete success ever eludes its happiest
efforts. Only by exciting the pupil's imagination to conformity with a
given concept, by pointing out how the expression falls short of the
idea to which, as aesthetic, the concept itself fails to attain, and
by means of severe criticism, is it possible to prevent his promptly
looking upon the examples set before him as the prototypes of
excellence, and as models for him to imitate, without submission to
any higher standard or to his own critical judgement. This would
result in genius being stifled, and, with it, also the freedom of
the imagination in its very conformity to law-a freedom without
which a fine art is not possible, nor even as much as a correct
taste of one's own for estimating it.

  The propaedeutic to all fine art, so far as the highest degree of
its perfection is what is in view, appears to lie, not in precepts,
but in the culture of the mental powers produced by a sound
preparatory education in what are called the humaniora-so called,
presumably, because humanity signifies, on the one hand, the universal
feeling of sympathy, and, on the other, the faculty of being able to
communicate universally one's inmost self-properties constituting in
conjunction the befitting social spirit of mankind, in
contradistinction to the narrow life of the lower animals. There was
an age and there were nations in which the active impulse towards a
social life regulated by laws-what converts a people into a
permanent community-grappled with the huge difficulties presented by
the trying problem of bringing freedom (and therefore equality also)
into union with constraining force (more that of respect and dutiful
submission than of fear). And such must have been the age, and such
the nation, that first discovered the art of reciprocal
communication of ideas between the more cultured and ruder sections of
the community, and how to bridge the difference between the
amplitude and refinement of the former and the natural simplicity
and originality of the latter-in this way hitting upon that mean
between higher culture and the modest worth of nature, that forms
for taste also, as a sense common to all mankind, that true standard
which no universal rules can supply.

  Hardly will a later age dispense with those models. For nature
will ever recede farther into the background, so that eventually, with
no permanent example retained from the past, a future age would scarce
be in a position to form a concept of the happy union, in one and
the same people, of the law-directed constraint belonging to the
highest culture, with the force and truth of a free nature sensible of
its proper worth.

  However, taste is, in the ultimate analysis, a critical faculty that
judges of the rendering of moral ideas in terms of sense (through
the intervention of a certain analogy in our reflection on both);
and it is this rendering also, and the increased sensibility,
founded upon it, for the feeling which these ideas evoke (termed moral
sense), that are the origin of that pleasure which taste declares
valid for mankind in general and not merely for the private feeling of
each individual. This makes it clear that the true propaedeutic for
laying the foundations of taste is the development of moral ideas
and the culture of the moral feeling. For only when sensibility is
brought into harmony with moral feeling can genuine taste assume a
definite unchangeable form.

.