If we seek the result of the preceding analysis we find that everything
runs up into this concept of Taste, that it is a faculty for judging
an object in reference to the Imagination’s _free conformity to law_.
Now if in the judgement of taste the Imagination must be considered in
its freedom, it is in the first place not regarded as reproductive,
as it is subject to the laws of association, but as productive and
spontaneous (as the author of arbitrary forms of possible intuition).
And although in the apprehension of a given object of sense it is
tied to a definite form of this Object, and so far has no free play
(such as that of poetry) yet it may readily be conceived that the
object can furnish it with such a form containing a collection of
the manifold, as the Imagination itself, if it were left free, would
project in accordance with the _conformity to law of the Understanding_
in general. But that the _imaginative power_ should be _free_ and yet
_of itself conformed to law_, _i.e._ bringing autonomy with it, is a
contradiction. The Understanding alone gives the law. If, however,
the Imagination is compelled to proceed according to a definite law,
its product in respect of form is determined by concepts as to what
it ought to be. But then, as is above shown, the satisfaction is not
that in the Beautiful, but in the Good (in perfection, at any rate
in mere formal perfection); and the judgement is not a judgement of
taste. Hence it is a conformity to law without a law; and a subjective
agreement of the Imagination and Understanding,--without such an
objective agreement as there is when the representation is referred
to a definite concept of an object,--can subsist along with the
free conformity to law of the Understanding (which is also called
purposiveness without purpose) and with the peculiar feature of a
judgement of taste.
Now geometrically regular figures, such as a circle, a square, a
cube, etc., are commonly adduced by critics of taste as the simplest
and most indisputable examples of beauty; and yet they are called
regular, because we can only represent them by regarding them as mere
presentations of a definite concept which prescribes the rule for the
figure (according to which alone it is possible). One of these two must
be wrong, either that judgement of the critic which ascribes beauty to
the said figures, or ours, which regards purposiveness apart from a
concept as requisite for beauty.