Kant has raised a very interesting distinction between the idea of the sublime and the beautiful; and indeed all that he discusses in the first part of his critique of the Judgment from the twentieth section to the end—in spite of its considerable prolixity and its reduction of every form of determination to a fundamentally subjective principle, whether it be the content of feeling, imagination, or reason—still possesses a real interest. We may in fact recognize this very reduction on the ground of its general principle of relation to be just[68]; in other words, to borrow Kant's own expressions, if the matter of our consideration is primarily the Sublime in Nature, it is not in any fact of Nature, but only in the content of our emotional life that such a Sublime is to be discovered, and, further, only in so far as we are conscious of a Nature peculiar to ourselves which involves the added assumption of one that lies outside of us. The statement of Kant is to be taken in this sense where he says: "The true sublime cannot be enclosed in any sensuous form; it is only referable to the ideas of reason, which, albeit no truly adequate representation can be given them, are excited and awakened to life within the human soul by just this very incompatibility of the permissibly sensuous representation with its object[69]." The sublime is, in short, generally the attempt to express the infinite, without being able to find an object in the realm of phenomenal existence such as is clearly fitted for its representation. The infinite, for the very reason that it is posited independently as invisible and formless significance in contrast to the complex manifold of objective fact, and is conceived under the mode of inwardness, so long as it remains infinite remains indefinable in speech and sublimely unaffected by every expression of the finite categories.
The earliest content, then, which the significance secures at this stage consists in this, that in contrast to the totality of the phenomenal it is the essentially substantive One, which itself being pure Thought is only present to thought in its purity. Consequently it is no longer possible to inform this substance under the mode of externality, and to that extent all real symbolical character disappears. If, however, an attempt is made to envisage this essential unity for sense-perception, such is only possible under a mode of relation according to which, while retaining its substantive character, it is further apprehended as the creative force of everything external, in which it therefore discovers a means of revelation and appearance, and with which it is accordingly joined in a positive relation. At the same time it is an essential feature in the expressed content of this relation that this substance is asserted above all particular phenomena as such, no less than above their united manifold; from which it then follows as a still more consequential result that the positive relation is deposed for one that is negative; and the negative consists in this that a purification of the substance is thus effected from the phenomenal taken as any particular thing, that is, in other words, that which is also not appropriate to it and which vanishes within it.
This mode of giving form, which is annihilated by the very thing which it would set forth, so that it comes about that the exposition of content affirms itself as that which renders the exposition null and void is in fact the Sublime. We have therefore not, as we found to be the view of Kant, to refer the Sublime exclusively to the subjective content of the soul, and the ideas of reason which belong to it, but rather form our conception of it as having its fundamental source in the significance represented, in other words the one absolute substance. We must, then, further deduce our classification of the art-type of the Sublime from this twofold relation of the substantive unity regarded as significance to the phenomenal world.
The characteristic which is held in common by both aspects of this relation, whether we view it positively or negatively, consists in this that the substance is posited above the particular appearance, in which it is assumed to have found a representation, although it can only be declared thereby under the form of a relation to the phenomenal in its general terms, for the reason that as substance and ultimate essence it is itself essentially without form and out of the reach of concrete external existence. We may describe pantheistic art as the first or affirmative mode of conception at this stage, a type of conception which we come across partly in India, and also to some extent in the liberal atmosphere and mysticism of the more modern poets of Persian Mohammedanism, and finally in the still profounder intensity of thought and emotion which characterizes it when it reappears in western Christianity.
Generally, defined substance is cognized at this stage as immanent in all its created accidents, which for this reason are not as yet deposed to a mere relation of service, viewed simply, that is, as an ornament of glory to the Absolute, but are affirmatively conserved by virtue of the indwelling substance; and this is so albeit it is the One and the Divine alone which is set forth and exalted in all particularity. By this means the poet, who contemplates and reveres this unity in all things, and sinks his own individuality, no less than every other object in this contemplation, is able to maintain a positive relation to the substance, with which he associates all other objects.
The second or negative celebration of the Power and Glory of the one God is that genuine type of Sublimity which we find in Hebrew poetry. In this the positive immanence of the Absolute in the created phenomena is done away with, and in place thereof we have the one substance independently affirmed as sovereign Lord of the world, who subsists over against the universe of His creations, which are posited under a relation to this Supreme Being of essential and evanescent powerlessness. If under such a view any representation is attempted of the Power and Wisdom of this Unity under the form of the finite objects of Nature and human destinies, we find nothing here that resembles the Hindoo's distortion of such objects by the unlimited accretion to their measure. The Sublimity of God is rather brought home to our senses by means of a representation whose entire object is to show us that all that exists in definite guise, with all its splendour, embellishment and glory, is a loyal accident in His service, a show that vanishes before the Divine essence and consistency.
A. THE PANTHEISM OF ART
Anyone who makes use of the word pantheism nowadays exposes himself thereby to the grossest misunderstanding. For, to take but one aspect of the difficulty, this word "all" signifies generally in our modern acceptation of the term "all, and everything in its wholly empirical particularity." We have at once recalled to us, for example, this particular box with all its attributes, its specific colour, size, form and weight, or that particular house, book, animal, table, stool, oven, streak of cloud and so on, to the end of the list. When we consequently find the charge advanced by not a few of our modern theologians against philosophy, that it makes a God of everything in general, it is quite obvious that this "everything" is taken in the sense we have just adverted to, and this it is which is thus bodily thrust upon her shoulders. In one word the complaint which attaches to it is absolutely unwarranted. Such a conception of pantheism only exists in the heads of stupidity, and is not discoverable in any form of religion whatever, not even in those of the Iroquois and Esquimaux, to say nothing of any philosophy. The "Everything" in what has been termed pantheism is therefore neither this nor that particular thing, but rather "Everything" in the sense of the "All," that is the One substantive essence, which no doubt is immanent in particular things, but is cognized in abstraction from their singularity and its empirical reality, so that it is not the particular as such, but the universal animating essence or soul, or to adopt a more popular way of speaking, it is the true and the excellent, both equally a real presence in this particular thing, which are here affirmed and indicated.