[Twenty-Third Letter]. Accordingly, the aesthetic condition is supervenient upon the spontaneity of reason and sense enhancing their function by a superior judgment in human and scientific affairs. Play, I must insist, is never trivial. The balance of freedom and rule, of joy and restraint as evident in games, and sport is all one with the agility and speed of intellect in its highest reaches; for as intellect meets with perception, necessity puts aside its seriousness, because it grows light [Fifteenth Letter]. A joy of discovery, of surprise, enlivens our most somber inquiries. Man must needs keep before him his games as reminders; for if he is serious with the agreeable, the comprehensible, and the good, with Beauty he plays. Which is to say, he resolves a tension and achieves a state of equipoise, a subtle balance between tension and release, in effect, a discipline of expression of a kind familiar to performing artists-an artistry of living and of inquiry. That is aesthetic education. In concluding my epistle to a later age, I humbly beseech you as I did my Lord and patron in the ninth of my Letters: Live with your century, but do not be its creature; render to your contemporaries what they need, not what they praise.... Think of them as they ought to be when you have to influence them, but think of them as they are when you are tempted to act on their behalf.