(_a_) Now this complacency is, in the first place, to be devoid of any interest, i.e., _devoid of relation to our appetitive faculty_. If we have an interest, by way of curiosity for instance, or a sensuous interest on behalf of our sensuous want, a desire of possession and use, then the objects are not important to us for their own sake, but for the sake of our want. In that case, what exists has a value only with reference to such a want, and the relation is of such a kind that the object is on the one side, and on the other stands an attribution which is distinct from the object, but to which we relate it. If, for instance, I consume the object in order to nourish myself by it, this interest lies only in me, and remains foreign to the object itself. Now, what Kant asserts is, that the relation to the beautiful is not of this kind. The æsthetic judgment allows the external existence to subsist free and independent, giving licence to the object to have its end in itself. This is, as we saw above, an important consideration.[103] (_b_) The beautiful, in _the second place_, says Kant, is definable as that which, without a conception, _i.e._ without a category of the understanding, is perceived as the object of a _universal_ delight. To estimate the beautiful requires a cultivated mind; the natural man[104] has no judgment about the beautiful, seeing that this judgment claims universal validity. The universal is, indeed to begin with, _as such_ an abstraction; but that which in itself and on its own merits[105] is true, bears in itself the attribution and the claim to be valid even universally. In this sense the beautiful, too, ought to be _universally_ recognized, although the mere conceptions of the understanding are competent to no judgment thereupon. The good, that, for instance, which is right in particular actions, is subsumed under universal conceptions, and the act passes for good when it succeeds in corresponding to these conceptions. Beauty, on the other hand, according to the theory, should awaken a universal delight directly, without any such relation. This amounts to nothing else than that, in contemplating beauty, we are not conscious of the conception and of the subsumption under it, and do not permit to take place the severance of the individual object and of the universal conception which in all other cases is present in the judgment.