The Harvard Classics. The explanation of this proposition leads us most readily to our end. The condition of the state of man before destination or direction is given him by the impressions of the senses is an unlimited capacity of being determined. Now it is necessary that his sensuous nature should be modified, and that in the indefinite series of possible determinations one alone should become real. One perception must spring up in it.
Reality exists now, but the infinite has disappeared.
But mere exclusion would never beget a reality, nor would a mere sensuous impression ever give birth to a perception, if there were not something from which it was excluded, if by an absolute act of the mind the negation were not referred to something positive, and if opposition did not issue out of non-position. This act of the mind is styled judging or thinking, and the result is named thought. The same is the case with time. Thought is the immediate act of this absolute power, which, I admit, can only be manifested in connection with sensuous impressions, but which in this manifestation depends so little on the sensuous that it reveals itself specially in an opposition to it. It does not only because the beautiful can become a means of leading man from matter to form, from feeling to laws, from a limited existence to an absolute existence.