This last distinction is important for the tragic art; it consequently deserves to be examined more closely. Man is already a sublime object, but only in the æsthetic sense, when the _state_ in which he is gives us an idea of his human destination, even though we might not find this destination realized in his _person_. He only becomes sublime to us in a moral point of view, when he acts, moreover, as a person, in a manner conformable with this destination; if our respect bears not only on his moral faculty, but on the use he makes of this faculty; if dignity, in his case, is due, not only to his moral aptitude, but to the real morality of his conduct. It is quite a different thing to direct our judgment and attention to the moral faculty generally, and to the possibility of a will absolutely free, and to be directing it to the use of this faculty, and to the reality of this absolute freedom of willing. It is, I repeat, quite a different thing; and this difference is connected not only with the objects to which we may have to direct our judgment, but to the very criterion of our judgment. The same object can displease us if we appreciate it in a moral point of view, and be very attractive to us in the æsthetical point of view. But even if the moral judgment and the æsthetical judgment were both satisfied, this object would produce this effect on one and the other in quite a different way. It is not morally satisfactory because it has an æsthetical value, nor has it an æsthetical value because it satisfies us morally. Let us take, as example, Leonidas and his devotion at Thermopylæ. Judged from the moral point of view, this action represents to me the moral law carried out notwithstanding all the repugnance of instinct. Judged from the æsthetic point of view, it gives me the idea of the moral faculty, independent of every constraint of instinct. The act of Leonidas _satisfies_ the moral sense, the reason; it enraptures the æsthetical sense, the imagination. Whence comes this difference in the feelings in connection with the same object? I account for it thus:—