inclination, or with his full and entire cognizance. In the former case it is _simplicity_ as a _surprise_, and the impression resulting from it is one of gayety; in the second case, it is simplicity of _feeling_, and we are moved. With regard to simplicity as a surprise, the person must be _morally_ capable of denying nature. In simplicity of feeling the person may be morally incapable of this, but we must not think him physically incapable, in order that it may make upon us the impression of the simple. This is the reason why the acts and words of children only produce the impression of simplicity upon us when we forget that they are physically incapable of artifice, and in general only when we are exclusively impressed by the contrast between their natural character and what is artificial in us. Simplicity is a _childlike ingenuousness_ which is encountered when it is not _expected_; and it is for this very reason that, taking the word in its strictest sense, simplicity could not be attributed to childhood properly speaking. But in both cases, in simplicity as a surprise and simplicity as a feeling, nature must always have the upper hand, and art succumb to her. Until we have established this distinction we can only form an incomplete idea of simplicity. The affections are also something natural, and the rules of decency are artificial; yet the triumph of the affections over decency is anything but simple. But when affection triumphs over artifice, over false decency, over dissimulation, we shall have no difficulty in applying the word simple to this. Nature must therefore triumph over art, not by its blind and brutal force as a _dynamical power_, but in virtue of its form as a _moral magnitude_; in a word, not as a want, but as an _internal necessity_. It must not be _insufficiency_, but the inopportune character of the latter that gives nature her victory; for insufficiency is only a want and a defect, and nothing that results from a want or defect could produce esteem. No doubt in the simplicity resulting from surprise, it is always the predominance of affection and a want of reflection that causes us to appear natural. But this want and this predominance do not by any means suffice to constitute simplicity; they merely give occasion to nature to _obey without let or hinderance_ her _moral constitution_, that is, the _law of harmony_.