Finally, and this is the last rock of empiricism, is there in us only the idea of an imperfect and finite beauty, and while we are admiring the real beauties that nature furnishes, are we not elevating ourselves to the idea of a superior beauty, which Plato, with great excellence of expression, calls the Idea of the beautiful, which, after him, all men of delicate taste, all true artists call the Ideal? If we establish decrees in the beauty of things, is it not because we compare them, often without noticing it, with this ideal, which is to us the measure and rule of all our judgments in regard to particular beauties? How could this idea of absolute beauty enveloped in all our judgments on the beautiful,--how could this ideal beauty, which it is impossible for us not to conceive, be revealed to us by sensation, by a faculty variable and relative like the objects that it perceives? The philosophy which deduces all our ideas from the senses falls to the ground, then, before the idea of the beautiful. It remains to see whether this idea can be better explained by means of sentiment, which is different from sensation, which so nearly resembles reason that good judges have often taken it for reason, and have made it the principle of the idea of the beautiful as well as that of the good. It is already a progress, without doubt, to go from sensation to sentiment, and Hutcheson and Smith[100] are in our eyes very different philosophers from Condillac and Helvetius;[101] but we believe that we have sufficiently established[102] that, in confounding sentiment with reason, we deprive it of its foundation and rule, that sentiment, particular and variable in its nature, different to different men, and in each man continually changing, cannot be sufficient for itself. Nevertheless, if sentiment is not a principle, it is a true and important fact, and, after having distinguished it well from reason, we ourselves proceed to elevate it far above sensation, and elucidate the important part it plays in the perception of beauty.