Is there any way in which this is conceivable? We cannot
completely express to sense Niagara Falls or the Jungfrau,
for they are infinitely beyond the possibilities of imitation
Is there any way in which this is conceivable? We cannot
completely express to sense Niagara Falls or the Jungfrau,
for they are infinitely beyond the possibilities of imitation.
Yet the particular contour of the Jungfrau is never mistaken
in the smallest picture. In making a model of Niagara we
should have to reproduce the relation between body of water,
width of stream, and height of fall, and we might succeed in
getting the peculiar effect of voluminousness which marks
that wonder of Nature. The soaring of a lark is not like
the pointing upward of a slender Gothic spire, yet there is
a likeness in the attitudes with which we follow them. All
these cases have certain form-qualities in common, by virtue
of which they resemble each other. Now it is these very
form-qualities which Kant is using when he takes the aesthetic
judgment as representative of reason in the world of sense
because it shows the qualities of the ideas of reason,–that
is, unconditional totality or freedom. And we might, indeed,
hope to ‘express the Idea to sense’ if we could find for it
a form-quality, or subjectively, in the phrase of Kant, a
form of reflection.