Both, as explanations of aesthetical universally valid judging, are referred to subjective grounds; in the one case to grounds of sensibility, in favour of the contemplative Understanding; in the other case _in opposition to_ sensibility, but on behalf of the purposes of practical Reason. Both, however, united in the same subject, are purposive in reference to the moral feeling. The Beautiful prepares us to love disinterestedly something, even nature itself; the Sublime prepares us to esteem something highly even in opposition to our own (sensible) interest. We may describe the Sublime thus: it is an object (of nature) _the representation of which determines the mind to think the unattainability of nature regarded as a presentation of Ideas_. Literally taken and logically considered, Ideas cannot be presented. But if we extend our empirical representative faculty (mathematically or dynamically) to the intuition of nature, Reason inevitably intervenes, as the faculty expressing the independence of absolute totality,[53] and generates the effort of the mind, vain though it be, to make the representation of the senses adequate to this. This effort,--and the feeling of the unattainability of the Idea by means of the Imagination,--is itself a presentation of the subjective purposiveness of our mind in the employment of the Imagination for its supersensible destination; and forces us, subjectively, to _think_ nature itself in its totality as a presentation of something supersensible, without being able _objectively_ to arrive at this presentation. For we soon see that nature in space and time entirely lacks the unconditioned, and, consequently, that absolute magnitude, which yet is desired by the most ordinary Reason. It is by this that we are reminded that we only have to do with nature as phenomenon, and that it must be regarded as the mere presentation of a nature in itself (of which Reason has the Idea). But this Idea of the supersensible, which we can no further determine,--so that we cannot _know_ but only _think_ nature as its presentation,--is awakened in us by means of an object, whose aesthetical appreciation strains the Imagination to its utmost bounds, whether of extension (mathematical) or of its might over the mind (dynamical). And this judgement is based upon a feeling of the mind’s destination, which entirely surpasses the realm of the former (_i.e._ upon the moral feeling), in respect of which the representation of the object is judged as subjectively purposive.