 The sweet astonishment, the agreeable forgetting of ourself in the contemplation of a beautiful work of art, is also a proof that our gratification here is something subordinate, that we voluntarily allow ourself to be determined through the beautiful, to which we for a while concede a sort of sovereignty over all our own feelings. While the beautiful draws our consideration entirely to itself, it draws us for a while away from our self, it is the highest degree of pure and unselfish gratification that the beautiful affords us.  In the moment we sacrifice our individual, limited existence to a sort of higher existence. The gratification in the beautiful must thereby ever more approach that of unselfish love if it is to be genuine…. The beautiful in the work of art is not for me pure and unmixed until I completely think away its special relation to me and consider it is as something that has been brought forth entirely for its own sake, so that it could be something complete in itself. (Ibid., p. 545)