But although critics can and ought to pursue their reasonings so that
our judgements of taste may be corrected and extended, it is not with
a view to set forth the determining ground of this kind of aesthetical
judgements in a universally applicable formula, which is impossible;
but rather to investigate the cognitive faculties and their exercise in
these judgements, and to explain by examples the reciprocal subjective
purposiveness, the form of which, as has been shown above, in a given
representation, constitutes the beauty of the object. Therefore the
Critique of Taste is only subjective as regards the representation
through which an Object is given to us; viz. it is the art or science
of reducing to rules the reciprocal relation between the Understanding
and the Imagination in the given representation (without reference
to any preceding sensation or concept). That is, it is the art or
science of reducing to rules their accordance or discordance, and of
determining them with regard to their conditions. It is an _art_, if
it only shows this by examples; it is a _science_ if it derives the
possibility of such judgements from the nature of these faculties,
as cognitive faculties in general. We have here, in Transcendental
Criticism, only to do with the latter. It should develop and justify
the subjective principle of taste, as an _a priori_ principle of
the Judgement. This Critique, as an art, merely seeks to apply, in
the judging of objects, the physiological (here psychological), and
therefore empirical rules, according to which taste actually proceeds
(without taking any account of their possibility); and it criticises
the products of beautiful art just as, regarded as a science, it
criticises the faculty by which they are judged.
§ 35. _The principle of Taste is the subjective principle of Judgement
in general_