(_b_) It is moreover through this indeterminacy of the beauty of Nature, originating in its inward principle of animation that (_α_) both in virtue of the conception of life and the intuition of its true notion no less than of the habitual types conformable to its adequate presentment, we are able to distinguish between animals which are beautiful and those which are ugly. Animals incapable of vitality, such as the sloth, which creeps about with difficulty, and whose entire mode of life is suggestive of incapacity for motion or activity, offend our aesthetic sense for this very reason[238]. Activity and mobility are precisely the qualities which assert the higher ideality of life. For the same reason we condemn forms of amphibious life, certain species of fishes, crocodiles, toads, and many kinds of insects; an additional reason will influence our similar attitude to hybrid species, where confusion of form marks the passage from one determinate type to another; the ornithorhyncus is an example[239], an animal which with its mixture of bird and four-footed beast may indeed astonish us, but at the same time is repulsive to our sense of beauty. Such feelings of repulsion can no doubt be traced entirely to our habitual prepossessions which have moulded for the imagination a fixed type of animal species consonant to experience. But even so there is already actively present the intuitive surmise that the configuration of a bird, for example, is related in its parts by a necessary principle of unity, and cannot as such graft upon itself forms which belong to other species without being thereby transformed into a hybrid variety. Such abnormal deviations from type appear to us both strange and contradictory. Neither the one sided narrowness of organization, which is so defective and mean in its manifestation, that it exercises no activity over the straitened conditions of its environment, nor confusions and passages of type, which, albeit they are not so enclosed within themselves, are unable to hold fast the distinctive features of their type, belong strictly to the sphere of natural beauty. (_β_) There is another sense in which we attribute beauty to Nature, namely, when we have the collective picture of a landscape before us rather than observe the living form of a simple object. Here we have no organic articulation of parts such as is derived from their notion and is presented to us as such ideal unity in spontaneous life. We have instead a rich variety of objects both organic and inorganic, which are united together on one or more planes of vision in their distinctive features, contour of mountains, winding outlines of rivers, groups of trees, huts, dwellings, palaces, and cities of mankind, ships, roadways, heaven and sea, valley and rock-cleft. We find, in addition to this variety and proceeding therefrom, a delightful or imposing harmony which appeals to our sense and interests us.