INTRODUCTION

is completely dull, deaf, and blind. A poverty of the heart is always a poverty of the spirit. Inability to admire is inability to love. And inability to love is the greatest inability to judge. Feeling is one, but it has two feelers to touch the secrets of the world: the feeler of the heart and the feeler of the intellect. Duality in this unity leads to great self-deceptions. The feeler of the heart makes us acquainted with the multitude of phenomena first. That other one seeks to organize them, to bring them into a system. Experience shows that a scholar does not like it when things are cleared and cleaned up; he finds his way better in the apparent disorder piled up around him than when a stranger's hand has organized everything. It is the same with the feeler of the heart in relation to the feeler of the intellect. The good reasons of the heart find their way much faster and more surely than the good reasons of the intellect, even though they appear disorderly and piled up. A reconciliation between both faculties, an intimate cooperation, is only made possible by the completely incorruptible joy of beauty. Just as the smile of a good person lifts all contradictions, so beauty connects and holds together what threatens to flutter apart. The pleasure of aesthetic sensation is the logic of events, the eternal melody of restless development. Only that which is dead can be pinned down. Everything alive that we attempt to box into categories and line up, to fix once and for all, continuously springs from these prisons. It slips through the keyhole, it radiates through the walls, it eludes our fingers. It undergoes the most surprising transformations; it grows wings or fins; now it has a shining body, now an inconspicuous one. It