Note 21 — Part III

Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1838), Vol. XII, "Ueber naive und sentimentale Dichtung," p. 168, 169: "This kind of pleasure at the sight of Nature is not an æsthetic pleasure, but a moral one: for it is arrived at by means of an idea, and it is not felt immediately the act of contemplation has taken place, neither does it depend for its existence upon beauty of form." And, p. 189, after pointing out that the Greeks completely lacked this feeling for Nature, he says: "Whence comes this different sense? How is it that we who, in everything related to Nature, are inferior to the ancients, should pay such homage to her, should cling so heartily to her, and be able to embrace the inanimate world with such warmth of feeling? It is not our greater conformity to Nature, but, on the contrary, the opposition to her, which is inherent in our conditions and our customs, that impels us to find some satisfaction in the physical world for our awakening instinct for truth and primitive rudeness, which, like the moral tendency from which that instinct arises, lies incorruptible and indestructible in all human hearts and can find no satisfaction in the moral world."