This chapter examines the conceptualization of life as formative form around 1800. Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment is the first book in the German tradition to articulate the new dynamic notion of life as a convergence of mind and nature. For Kant, aesthetic experience is important because it involves an intensification of the life of the mind (including the social dimension of mind as sensus communis) and enables us to develop a regulative notion of organic life. Kant's claim is that to understand the peculiar organization of natural beings, we must view them as products of an intrinsic formative activity, and hence as in some way analogous to the mind's power of cognitive and perceptual synthesis, which we experience most vividly in our encounter with beauty. Aesthetic experience allows us to grasp the nature of human, or symbolic, life and its place within the natural world.