  From the premise that “The nature of the beautiful consists precisely in the fact that its inner essence lies outside of the limits of the power of thought, in its origination, in its own coming-to-be,” Moritz infers that “in the case of the beautiful, the power of thought can no longer ask, why is it beautiful?” (ibid., p. 564). The essence of beauty thus escapes ordinary conceptual thought. This is the basis for Moritz’s argument, in another essay entitled “The Signature of the Beautiful,” that the beautiful cannot be described, that is, that although words themselves may be beautiful, they cannot provide a description of beauty—even such a brilliant description as Winckelmann’s description of the Apollo Belvedere “rips apart the wholeness of this work of art,” and “is more damaging than useful to the contemplation of this sublime work of art” (“Die Signatur des Schönen,” Werke, volume II, pp. 579–88, at p. 588). And for this reason, the artistic genius cannot be fully conscious of what he does when he creates a beautiful work of art, for its beauty cannot be reduced to any concept that he can state (ibid., p. 585). Here Moritz arrives at results that are superficially similar to those Kant will arrive at a few years later—that aesthetic judgments cannot be grounded in determinate concept and that the process of creation by artistic genius cannot be guided and explained by determinate concepts. But he reaches these conclusions for very different reasons: Kant will draw these conclusions from his subjectivist account of the origin of aesthetic pleasure in a play of the cognitive powers that is free rather than determined by concepts, while Moritz draws these conclusions from his conception that a beautiful object always intimates the order of the world-whole that is beyond our grasp through any of the ordinary powers of mind. In other words, Moritz draws his conclusions from his version of an aesthetics of truth, while Kant will draw similar conclusions from an aesthetics based on the idea of the free play of mental powers.