  The answer to this question can be found in Moritz’s longer essay On the formative Imitation of the Beautiful. Here, after a more extended contrast between the beautiful, the useful, and the good, Moritz adds to his previous account that a beautiful object is something that seems to us to be “a whole subsisting for itself” insofar as it “strikes our senses or can be grasped by our imagination,” and that “to that extent our instruments of sensation prescribe its measure to the beautiful” (Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen, Werke, volume II, pp. 551–78, at pp. 558–9). Here he aligns himself with the tradition of Wolff and Baumgarten by asserting that the perception of beauty is a perception of perfection by means of the senses or their extension through imagination. But he still owes us an explanation of what the internal and objective perfection of the beautiful object is. This comes next, when he states that it is actually the “interconnection of the whole of nature” insofar as we grasp it by means of the senses and imagination that we contemplate and admire in a beautiful work of art, or that it is intimated to us by such a work. “Every beautiful whole from the hand of the formative artist is thus a little impression of the highest beauty in the great whole of nature” (ibid., p. 560; see also “Grundlinien,” p. 592). The beautiful intimates the true order of the world-whole to us in a way that the use of our ordinary powers of thought, imagination, and sense on particular pieces of the world-whole cannot do. Only in the experience of the beautiful can we actually get a sense of the order of the world-whole.