"The natural impulses," says Schlegel, "where they appear exalted to passion, are to be regarded as nothing else but the motions of a will, that has been overpowered by the false illusions of imagination. The middle position of the impulses betwixt the will and the imagination, as well as the abused co-operation of those two faculties in any passion or sensual gratification, become habitual, is apparent particularly in those inclinations which man has in common with the brute, and where the viciousness lies only in their excess or violence."[22] "Aspiration after infinity is natural to man, and belongs essentially to his being. Whatever is defective or disorderly in his impulses, consists only in their unbounded gratification--in the perversion of that aspiration after infinity towards perishable, sensual, material, and often most unworthy, objects; for that aspiration, natural as it is to man, where it is pure and genuine, can be gratified by no sensual indulgence and no earthly possession."[23] In the brute, the gratification of the natural appetites is regular, uniform, subject to no vicissitudes or excesses, and entails no injury on his nature, because undisturbed and unvitiated by the false illusions of imagination. Lastly, with regard to the outward senses, there are, philosophically speaking, but three, sight, hearing, and touch--for under the last, taste and smell are included; and it is remarkable how these severally correspond to the three parts of human consciousness. The sight is pre-eminently the sense of the mind--hearing the sense of the soul--while the touch is peculiarly the sense of the body; the sense given to the body for its special protection and preservation. The loss of the first two senses the body can survive--but it perishes with the utter extinction of the last. Those expressions in common parlance, a good artist-like eye--a fine musical ear--prove the close connexion which mankind has always felt to exist between the outer senses and the higher faculties of man. "Had the soul," says the author, "not been originally darkened and troubled--had it remained in a clear, luminous repose in its God--then the human consciousness would have been of a far more simple nature than at present; for it would have consisted only of _understanding_, _soul_, and _will_. Reason and imagination, which are now in such frequent collision with the will and understanding, as well as with each other, would then have been absorbed in those higher faculties. Even the conscience would not then have been a special act, or special function of the judgment--but a tender feeling--a gentle, almost unconscious pulsation of the soul. The senses and the memory, those ministrant faculties which, in the present dissonance of the human consciousness, form so many distinct powers of the soul, would, in its state of harmony, have been mere bodily organs."[24] So much for the author's psychology--let us now proceed to the ontological part of the work.