In the midst of the fearful kingdom of forces, and in the midst of the sacred kingdom of laws, the aesthetic impulse to form is at work,unnoticed, on the building of a third joyous kingdom of play and of semblance, in which man is relieved of the shackles of circumstance, and released from all that might be called constraint, alike in the physical and in the moral sphere.
Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Wilkinson and Willoughby, trs., Letter 27.8. The 'fearful kingdom of forces' is the physical world, in which everything works by physical laws; and the 'sacred kingdom of laws' is the moral world understood in Kantian terms, in which everything works by imperatives; the two are governed by necessities, albeit of different kinds. But our aesthetic impulse, or play impulse, as Schiller also calls it, is devoted to free play; as he puts it in the next paragraph, "To bestow freedom by means of freedom is the fundamental law of this kingdom."
