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Diffugimus visu exsangues, illi agmine certo
Laocoonta petunt . . .–Aeneid, ii. 212-213.

Here the force is presented to us as terrible also; and contemplative sublimity passes into the pathetic. We see that force enter really into strife with man’s impotence. Whether it concerns Laocoon or ourselves is only a question of degree. The instinct of sympathy excites and frightens in us the instinct of preservation: there are the monsters, they are darting–on ourselves; there is no more safety, flight is vain.

It is no more in our power to measure this force with ours, and to refer it or not to our own existence. This happens without our co-operation, and is given us by the object itself. Accordingly our fear has not, as in the preceding moment, a purely subjective ground, residing in our soul; it has an objective ground, residing in the object. For, even if we recognize in this entire scene a simple fiction of the imagination, we nevertheless distinguish in this fiction a conception communicated to us from without, from another conception that we produce spontaneously in ourselves.

Thus the mind loses a part of her freedom, inasmuch as she receives now from without that which she produced before her own activity. The idea of danger puts on an appearance of objective reality, and affection becomes now a serious affair.

If we were only sensuous creatures, obeying no other instinct than that of self-preservation, we should stop here, and we should remain in a state of mere and pure affection. But there is something in us which takes no part in the affections of sensuous nature, and whose activity is not directed according to physical conditions. According, then, as this independently acting principle (the disposition, the moral faculty) has become to a degree developed in the soul, there is left more or less space for passive nature, and there remains more or less of the independent principle in the affection.

In the truly moral soul the terrible trial (of the imagination) passes quickly and readily into the sublime. In proportion as imagination loses its liberty, reason makes its own prevail, and the soul ceases not to enlarge within when it thus finds outward limits. Driven from all the intrenchments which would give physical protection to sensuous creatures, we seek refuge in the stronghold of our moral liberty, and we arrive by that means at an absolute and unlimited safety, at the very moment when we seem to be deprived in the world of phenomena of a relative and precarious rampart. But precisely because it was necessary to have arrived at the physical oppression before having recourse to the assistance of our moral nature, we can only buy this high sentiment of our liberty through suffering. An ordinary soul confines itself entirely to this suffering, and never comprehends in the sublime or the pathetic anything beyond the terrible. An independent soul, on the contrary, precisely seizes this occasion to rise to the feeling of his moral force, in all that is most magnificent in this force, and from every terrible object knows how to draw out the sublime.

The moral man (the father) [see Aeneid, ii. 213-215] is here attacked before the physical man, and that has a grand effect. All the affections become more aesthetic when we receive them second-hand; there is no stronger sympathy than that we feel for sympathy.

The moment [see Aeneid, ii. 216-217] had arrived when the hero himself had to be recommended to our respect as a moral personage, and the poet seized upon that moment. We already know by his description all the force, all the rage of the two monsters who menace Laocoon, and we know how all resistance would be in vain. If Laocoon were only a common man he would better understand his own interests, and, like the rest of the Trojans, he would find safety in rapid flight. But there is a heart in that breast; the danger to his children holds him back, and decides him to meet his fate. This trait alone renders him worthy of our pity. At whatever moment the serpents had assailed him, we should have always been touched and troubled. But because it happens just at the moment when as father he shows himself so worthy of respect, his fate appears to us as the result of having fulfilled his duty as parent, of his tender disquietude for his children. It is this which calls forth our sympathy in the highest degree. It appears, in fact, as if he deliberately devoted himself to destruction, and his death becomes an act of the will.