  In fact, Mendelssohn’s analysis of our mixed emotions in the experience of tragedy is even more subtle than this, for a further aspect of it is that our knowledge that we are experiencing represented rather than real people allows us to enjoy sympathy with the perfections of the noble characters who are depicted rather than pity at their weaknesses or at the fate that overcomes them. But rather than pursuing this, I want to make to make one further point about Mendelssohn’s general account of our enjoyment of the engagement of our powers of knowing and desiring. This explanation of a fundamental source of aesthetic pleasure as arising from the engagement of those two powers might seem to conflict with Mendelssohn’s influential ascription of aesthetic pleasure to a third faculty, the “faculty of approval,” distinguished from both the “faculty of cognition” and the “faculty of desire.” Mendelssohn introduces this third faculty in the Morning Lessons, a quarter-century after his early writings on aesthetics. There he says that