When I consider how closely our feeling for the beautiful and the great is connected with the noblest part of our being, it is impossible for me to regard this feeling as a mere subjective play of the emotional faculty, capable of none but empirical rules. It seems to me that beauty too, as well as truth and right, must rest upon eternal foundations, and that the original laws of the reason must also be the laws of taste. It is true that the circumstance of our feeling beauty and not cognizing it seems to cut off all hope of our finding a universal law for it, because every judgment emanating from this source is a judgment of experience. As a rule people accept an explanation of beauty only because it harmonizes in particular cases with the verdict of feeling; whereas, if there were really such a thing as the cognition of beauty from principles, we should trust the verdict of feeling because it coincides with our explanation of the beautiful. Instead of testing and correcting our feelings by means of principles, we test aesthetic principles by our feelings. So then Schiller attacked his problem in the aforementioned letters to Körner and was soon able to announce his solution: Beauty is nothing else than freedom-in-the-appearance (_Freiheit in der Erscheinung_). To make clear the steps by which he arrived at that formula and the wealth of meaning that it contained for him would require a fuller analysis of his argument than there is space for in this chapter. Suffice it to say that he now fully accepts the dogma of Kant that beauty cannot depend upon a mental concept,--the feeling of pleasure is the prior fact. At the same time he has an unshakable conviction that beauty must somehow fall under the laws of reason. He gets rid of the _crux_ by taking the aesthetic faculty away from the jurisdiction of Kant's rather mysterious 'judgment', and turning it over to the 'practical reason'. His argument is that the practical reason demands freedom, just as the 'pure' or theoretic reason demands rationality. Freedom is the form which the practical reason instinctively applies upon presentation of an object. It is satisfied when, and only when, the object is free, autonomous, self-determined. He then propounds his theory that beauty is simply an analogon of moral freedom. On the presentation of an object the practical reason (_i.e._, the will) may banish for the time being all concepts of the pure reason, may assume complete control and ask no other question than whether the object is free, self-determined, autonomous. If, then, the object appears to be free, to follow no law but its own, the practical reason is satisfied; the effect is pleasurable and we call it beauty. Schiller is careful to point out that it is all a question of appearance: the object is not really free,--since freedom abides only in the supersensual world,--but the practical reason imputes or lends freedom to it.