  Indeed, in his lectures on anthropology—which he began offering only in 1772–73, thus a decade after Herder had studied with him—Kant had made the connection between the free play of the faculties and the feeling of life clear and central to his aesthetic theory.  There Kant argued that “Gratification or pleasure is the feeling of the promotion of life,” indeed that life itself “is the consciousness of a free and regular play of all the powers and faculties of human beings.” He equated the free play of our powers and faculties with their unhindered activity, and thus found the ultimate source of all pleasure in the unhindered activity of our powers: