§1. I have thoughts of experiences and experiences themselves. I think the thought of sensing my open upturned palm and I sense my open upturned palm, and I know these to be different because my attention switches between the two. It takes much effort to attend to the latter in a sustained way. It might take just as much to strictly direct the thoughts that follow the thought too, but I don't think to make an attempt to. Although sometimes I wonder if this sort of mental discipline is what intelligence consists in.
John Frederick Lewis, Reception in the Harem, 1873
§2. Here is the thought of the experience and there is the experience itself. Thought proceeds rationally; one attends to a thought and moves through (although in my case the motion is more like slipping) a space structured by reason. Experience unfolds in accordance with natural laws; attending to it is to become aware of a space that is structured by a different logic. It is to be receptive to the world.
§3. As far as I can tell our attention can either settle on our receptive capacities or our rational. The trouble is that it is difficult to think profound things while being receptive to the world, and it is just as difficult to find much beauty in the world without thinking through things first. The way out is this: a refinement of one's perceptual capacities, which requires of one this division of their attention between experience and thought.
At the centre of Kant's system is the idea that what we experience as 'beauty' is really the free interplay of reason and imagination, meaning that the cyclical process of looking at something and trying to understand it and then looking at it with fresh eyes, and so forth, creates in us a pleasurable 'aesthetic' feeling - the stimulation of the senses, which we call "beauty. In certain circumstances, however - such as looking at a mountain or into deep space or at the soaring lines of a Gothic cathedral, or listening to certain music - the feedback loop between what we see or hear and what we are able to understand cycles beyond our ability to grasp it, filling us with awe in our attempt to imagine the infinitude of space or complexity of which we have had a glimpse, and to understand orders of existence beyond our ability to comprehend: this is the Sublime.