 Building on these distinctions, Schiller claims in Letter 24 that both individual humans and humanity in general must follow three developmental stages: physical, aesthetic, and moral (NA XX, 388/E 156). In their initial natural state, humans are ruled by nature. When reason begins to stir, “man leaves the narrow confines of the present in which mere animality stays bound, in order to strive towards an unlimited future” (NA XX, 390/E 159). But because reason seems entirely opposed to natural life, its unconditional laws are experienced as only coercive: humans then either resist reason’s law, resorting to eudaemonism, or enslave themselves to it, denying their sensuous natures entirely (NA XX, 390–1/E 158–9). Beauty, by contrast, can unite humans’ natural and rational sides; it can facilitate our entry into the “world of ideas” but without leaving behind “the world of sense” (NA XX, 396/E 163). It can, then, convince us that the moral law is not a foreign imposition and allow us to live in harmony with its dictates.