Aesthetical and philosophical essays : $b introducing the dissertation on the "connection between the animal and spiritual man"Schiller, Friedrich
Philosophy
Aesthetical and philosophical essays : $b introducing the dissertation on the "connection between the animal and spiritual man"
Schiller, Friedrich
Aesthetics; Philosophy
When the instinct of nature is excited, it is accompanied just as the
heart in its moral emotions is, by certain movements of the body, which
sometimes go before the will, sometimes, even as movements purely
sympathetic, escape altogether its empire. In fact, as neither
sensation, nor the desire, nor aversion, are subject to the free
arbitration of man, man has no right over the physical movements which
immediately depend on it. But the instinct does not confine itself to
simple desire; it presses, it advances, it endeavors to realize its
object; and if it does not meet in the autonomy of the mind an energetic
resistance, it will even anticipate it, it will itself take the
initiative of those sorts of acts over which the will alone has the
right to pronounce. For the instinct of conservation tends without
ceasing to usurp the legislative powers in the domain of the will, and
its efforts go to exercise over man a domination as absolute as over the
beast. There are, then, two sorts of distinct movements, which, in
themselves and by their origin, in each affective phenomenon, arise in
man by the instinct of conservation: those firstly which immediately
proceed from sensation, and which, consequently, are quite involuntary;
then those which in principle could and would be voluntary, but from
which the blind instinct of nature takes all freedom. The first refer to
the affection itself, and are united necessarily with it; the others
respond rather to the cause and to the object of the affections, and are
thus accidental and susceptible of modification, and cannot be mistaken
for infallible signs of the affective phenomena. But as both one and the
other, when once the object is determined, are equally necessary to the
instinct of nature, so they assist, both one and the other, the
expression of affective phenomena; a necessary competition, in order
that the expression should be complete and form a harmonious whole.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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