Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (German: Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen) is a 1764 book by Immanuel Kant.

Some of his examples of feelings of the beautiful are the sight of flower beds, grazing flocks, and daylight.

Of the Attributes of the Beautiful and Sublime in Man in General Kant described the relationship between these finer feelings and humanity.

The beautiful, when it degenerates, produces triflers, fops, dandies, chatterers, silliness, bores, and fools.

In this example, since you do not afford helping all needy ones, you have behaved unjustly, and it is out of the domain of principles and true virtue.

True virtue is the quality of raising the feeling of humanity's beauty and dignity to a principle.

According to Kant, among all people with diverse temperaments, a person with melancholy frame of mind is the most virtuous whose thoughts, words and deeds are one of principles.

"A profound feeling for the beauty and dignity of human nature and a firmness and determination of the mind to refer all one's actions to this as to a universal ground is earnest, and does not at all join with a changeable gaiety nor with the inconstancy of a frivolous person."

With this observation, Kant will attempt to fit the various feelings of the beautiful and sublime, and the resulting moral characters, into Galen's rigid arrangement of the four humours or human temperaments: melancholic, sanguine, choleric, and phlegmatic.

In a marriage, the husband and wife unite their disparate attributes to form, as it were, a single moral person.

He qualifies his remarks by stating, "[W]hether these national differences are contingent and depend upon the times and the type of government, or are bound by a certain necessity to the climate, I do not here inquire."

The feeling of the Germans is an almost equal blend of both the beautiful and the splendid sublime in that they are much concerned with outward appearances.

The feeling of the noble sublime predominates with the English, whose actions are guided by principles rather than impulses.

North American Indians, however, have a feeling for the sublime in that they are adventurous, honorable, truthful, proud, brave, and valorous.

Kant claimed that his time witnessed "the sound taste of the beautiful and noble blossoming forth both in the arts and sciences and in respect to morals."

He declared that it is necessary to educate the younger generation so that they will have noble simplicity, high morals, and finer feelings.