The name is absent

The Breviary of Aesthetic 77
all possess in the comprehension and intelligence of art is
without foundation,—all the more, if we observe that these
very people who deny the possibility of reproductions in
abstract theory—or, as they call it, the absoluteness of taste
—are yet most tenacious in maintaining their own judgments
of taste, and very clearly realise the difference there is be-
tween the affirmation that wine pleases or displeases me be-
cause it agrees or disagrees with my physiological organism,
and the affirmation that a poem is beautiful, and another a
pastiche: the second order of judgments (as Kant shows in
a classical analysis) carries with it the Uiicoercible preten-
sion to universal validity; souls become passionate about it;
and in days of chivalry there were even those who main-
tained the beauty of the “Gerusalemme,” sword in hand,
whereas no one that we know has ever been killed maintain-
ing, sword in hand, that wine was pleasant or unpleasant.
To object that works artistically base have yet pleased many
or someone, and if not others, their author, is not valid, be-
cause their having pleased is not set in doubt (since nothing
can be born in the soul without the consent of the soul, and
consequently without a correlative pleasure); but it is
doubted whether that pleasure were aesthetic, and were
founded upon a judgment of taste and beauty. And passing
from extrinsic scepticism to intrinsic consideration, it should
be said that the objection of the conceivability of the æsthetie
reproduction is founded upon a reality conceived in its turn
as a shock of atoms, or as abstractly monadistic, composed
of monads without communication among themselves and
harmonised only from without. But that is not reality: reality
is spiritual unity, and in spiritual unity nothing is lost, every-
thing is an eternal possession. Not only the reproduction of
art, but, in general, the memory of any fact (which is indeed

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