Because the experience of beauty is an experience of the freedom of the imagination in its play with the understanding, it can be taken as a palpable symbol of the freedom of the will to determine itself by moral laws that is necessary for morality but not itself something that can be directly experienced. In other words, it is the very independence of aesthetic response from direct determination by concepts, including moral concepts, that makes the experience of beauty an experience of freedom that can in turn symbolize moral freedom. Presumably this can be reconciled with Kant’s earlier claim that the sublime is the most appropriate symbol of morality by observing that while the experience of beauty makes the freedom of the will palpable to us, it is only the mixed experience of the sublime that brings home to feeling that this freedom must often be exercised in the face of resistance offered by our own inclinations.