Hegel, Philosophy of Fine Art, intro.

AUTHOR OF “THE ART AND GENIUS OF TINTORET,” “AN ESSAY ON THE FUTURE OF POETRY,” AND OTHER WORKS

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

THE translation of Hegel’s “Aesthetik” or “Philosophy of Fine Art,” which is contained in the four volumes of the present work, is the first complete translation in English of the three volumes devoted to this subject in the collected edition (Berlin, 1835). I know of four partial translations in English of this work and one in French. These are Mr. W. M. Bryant’s translation of Part II,¹ Mr. Kedney’s short analysis of the entire work,² Mr. Hastie’s translation of Michelet’s short “Philosophy of Art,”³ prefaced by Hegel’s Introduction, partly translated and partly summarized and lastly Professor B. Bosanquet’s complete translation of Hegel’s first Introduction with notes.⁴

¹ New York, Appleton and Co.

² Chicago, Griggs and Co., 1885.

³Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, 1886. The translation is literal and of good quality for a little over thirty pages. After that it is a mere summary.

⁴ Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1886.

The French translation of M. Bénard purports to be more or less a reproduction of the entire work and runs into two large-sized volumes. It also is, however, so far as Hegel’s Introduction and the first two Parts are concerned, merely a compressed summary, and only in particular passages is the translation anything but a very free rendering of the original, though there is a far closer approach to this in Part III.

I have not seen Mr. Bryant’s translation. As any approach to an adequate reproduction of Hegel’s viwriting Mr. Hastie’s translation of Michelet’s work and Mr. Kedney’s analysis are of very little value.¹ Professor Bosanquet’s translation is admirable within the limits imposed. To that extent I have merely followed, as I was able, in my friend’s footsteps; but this advance covers little more than one sixteenth part of the entire work of 1,600 pages.

¹ Mr Kedney’s volume only amounts to about three hundred small-sized pages altogether.

With regard to all such analyses I entirely concur with Professor Bosanquet’s view stated in his preface, that such merely mislead if regarded as in any way a reflex of either Hegel himself or the German text. It is true that this work is—as are in their degree other volumes of the collected edition, the “Outlines of the Philosophy of Right” for example—a heterogeneous product, in our own instance not merely lacking the final revision of the author, but rather put together as such a connected treatise by the editor responsible (i) from several autograph MSS. of Hegel,² some of which were little more than fragmentary notes for lectures, (ii) supplemented further from notes³ taken by pupils who attended such lectures, the entire conglomerate being (iii) finally dovetailed together with connecting links by the editorial hand much as, to cite his own illustration, a careful picture restorer might do in order to secure the impression of a unified work, the unity aimed at by himself being rather that of a connected literary treatise than a series of lectures.

² The most important source were MSS. for lectures given in 1820. This formed the basis of further lectures in 1823, 1826, and 1829.

³ The notes to which our editor had access referred to the lectures given in 1823 and 1826, with others of those in 1826 and 1829.

It is obvious that a product of this nature will vary considerably throughout in the degree that the personality and unique flavour of Hegel himself, whether viewed as writer or thinker, asserts itself.

viiThe introductions¹ have been, it would appear, taken almost exclusively from Hegel’s own MSS.; but even these remained unrevised for the press, owing to the premature and sudden death of their author.

¹ The first introduction is obviously taken from Hegel’s MS., the editor not even venturing in this case to obliterate its form as an address in the lecture room. It represents perhaps the nearest approach we possess to the revised MS.

Of the greater portion of the work we can merely form our judgment of the nature of its authenticity from the content itself. On the whole I should myself say that the result was more favourable than might under such conditions have been expected. The editor assures us expressly that so far as all illustrations and the substantive content of the work is concerned no attempt has been made whatever to supplement the same. Hegel is throughout here entirely responsible. I think, further, that the endeavour claimed by the editor to preserve the general character and tone (Kolorit) of Hegel’s own diction has attained a degree of success that could only have been within the reach of devoted pupils and friends of the man himself, who for many years both attended his lectures and studied his published works. Whatever opinion, however, we may arrive at on this head there can hardly be two opinions as to the sources in which the main interest consists for a modern reader.

First, I should lay particular stress on the forceful and characteristic manner in which the fundamental philosophical conceptions which underlie the entire fabric are worked into and elaborated explicitly throughout its detail. The very nature of this unwearied and insistent interfusion (Durchdringung) of positive fact, whether historical, scientific, or aesthetic, with the dialectic movement of the Idea is here as essentially the method of Hegel as it is elsewhere. And this is so despite the fact that it is here presented for the most part in a form less repellent to the viiiordinary reader and less provocative of hostile criticism. Translators therefore, who, following the example of the French translator,¹ deliberately seek to lighten the burden of their cargo by throwing overboard what they choose to call the “injurious dialectic,” or the “dark labyrinth” of this aspect of our work may reproduce much that is of instruction or interest, but most certainly do not reproduce either the main strength of Hegel as a thinker, or the most characteristic impression—to say nothing of the repetitions—of such style or absence of literary style that he possessed.

¹ An almost inevitable defect of such a translation is that criticism may be offered without supplying the material necessary for any satisfactory verdict upon its sufficiency. Thus M. Bénard cites with approval an adverse criticism passed upon what is called Hegel’s inadequate treatment of the Idea of Beauty as a partial manifestation of the absolute Idea, but barely includes any of the passages which refer to this in his translation (note, p. 36). Such can lead to no conclusion whatever, though it obviously may entirely mislead his readers.

Secondly, if there is one feature more striking than any other in this work, which is bound at least to surprise anyone who still harbours the obsolete notion that this philosopher moved in an exclusively abstract region of idea remote from the concrete experience of life and scientific or artistic knowledge, it is the wealth and extraordinary range of the illustrations in these volumes no less than the vigour and freshness of their application. In this respect two translations which merely amount to a summary of theoretical content simply omit the vital or at least the most attractive heart of the interest.

As to the present claim of this laborious work to recognition and study, its historical significance is, I think, admitted by the most acknowledged authorities on the subject. As Schasler has called it, it is the first complete system of a philosophy of Art. The nature of its importance to our own most able and ixlearned historian of the Philosophy of Fine Art may not only be deduced from his own summary of its contents and significance in his invaluable historical survey,¹ but is further illustrated by the fact that he has reproduced the concluding portion of Hegel’s Introduction in extenso in an Appendix to this work.

¹ “History of Aesthetik,” by Bernard Bosanquet (Sonnenschein, 1892). See in particular pp. 333-362. With regard to the comparative value of the work of Schelling and Hegel on this subject the author says (p. 334): “It may be said that while we prefer Hegel to Schelling this is partly because Schelling is best represented in Hegel.” I can claim but a very limited firsthand knowledge of modern German works on Aesthetik. But I may observe that the section of Lötze’s history of German works on the subject devoted to Hegel’s “Philosophy of Fine Art” appears to me by no means equal in ability to other portions of the work. The aim of the author appears rather that of proving that his own researches occupy a ground wholly unoccupied by Hegel than of defining with any completeness the ground actually appropriated by Hegel.

Other writers have been less judicious both as hostile critics and in the degree of their praise or enthusiasm. One German authority has called it Hegel’s masterpiece. Such a title is, apart from any other ground, sufficiently excluded by its history alone. Whether Hegel might have made it his masterpiece had he lived is of course another question.

Other admirers, such as the late Professor Caird,² have more legitimately accepted such a distinction for the “Phenomenologie des Geistes.” Mr. Hastie will even have it that throughout “All is clear, radiant, harmonious and dim with the things that are a joy for ever.” Such an effusive display of abstract Vorstellung reminds one little of either the dour temper of the Swabian philosopher, or the concrete intelligence which most distinguishes him from his rivals now and in his lifetime. I can promise no such garden of Hesperides, or even Platonic banquet, to any of my readers. It is true that we have here, the xwork being primarily built upon lectures intended to instruct the ordinary student, no such parade of the dialectic method in its formal structure such as constitutes the root of offence in some other works of Hegel. But if we approach it with the belief that all is therefore the plain sailing we meet with in the world of journalistic art criticism and the commonsense conceptions of everyday life, or with the assurance that the work is, or can be, intelligible without some real attempt to grapple with the fundamental ideas of Hegelian metaphysic, we may find our disappointment very considerable. As a humble translator I am bound to say that in a very large number of passages I have by no means discovered immediacy of intelligibility or radiance to be a conspicuous feature of the original. Radiance is indeed, I should say, not an attribute emphatically characteristic of any kind of Teutonic literature, and least of all of its scientific and philosophical literature. The present work is certainly no exception. With its untiring, not to say remorseless, effort to press home in repeated expression, often but slightly varied, the same fundamental points, its dogged and endless persistence in the careful explication through rational definition of every kind of positive material that presents itself from the nature of the divine in man, or the soul of living beast to the accurate determination in the terms of expressed thought of a musical sound or an epigram or simile, with its wellnigh total disregard of the beauty of literary style, and its by no means unfrequent disregard of all principle of proportion in the co-ordination of its varied subject-matter—whatever else such a product may be it is most assuredly not, at least to English apprehension, reminiscent of the radiance either of Homer or Apollo.

² “Life of Hegel,” p. 110.

But though even sincere admiration may smile over such a description, it does unquestionably reflect to a remarkable extent the thoroughness, tenacity of xipurpose, the absence of superficial rhetoric, the wide range, the extraordinary combination of constructive idea and detailed knowledge and research we rightly associate with the most valued works of German science and philosophy. It has never been more needful than at this time of day to draw attention to such qualities, when the national bias is to ignore or belittle their presence. It is, moreover, not without passages which attain to a very real elevation of eloquence, eloquence marked by the profoundest earnestness and entirely free from the least flavour of bombast or sentimentalism. To the right kind of reader it can hardly fail to convey a certain fascination which is not merely due to the presence of a powerful and original intellect, but is equally inseparable from the product of a human soul intent upon getting at the heart of its subject, and keeping its vision throughout fixed on that. Nor is the mere breadth of the canvas and the depth of its content its only attraction. The work is indeed full of digressions of exceptional interest to the general reader, and as such bears the indelible stamp of Hegel’s manner as a lecturer, which his editor maintains stood out in such marked contrast to his more concise style as an author, drawing as he did when lecturing so largely on his encyclopaedic stores of knowledge.

To treat all the text as we now have it with the same respect may very possibly betoken to some an excess of zeal on the part of the translator; but after all the most important thing for an English reader is to know what the volumes actually contain. In dealing with Hegel the outlined sketch, whether secured through a process of distillation or adulteration, is by no means any compensation for the loss of the complete picture. If we are impatient over many aspects of this philosopher’s particularity, we had much better dispense with him altogether.

Sympathetically studied it is hardly too much to xiisay that this monumental work is an education in itself. It is at any rate one which cannot fail to enlarge our conceptions of the significance and dignity of human art. Nor is this by any means impossible, even though we are unable to concur in, or indeed remain insufficiently qualified to express a judgment upon all or even a few of the most important of its conclusions. But it is perhaps not wholly unnecessary to observe that before venturing upon a verdict in our wisdom we must, as Robert Browning submitted in reference to the criticism passed upon his poetry, have awakened both our senses and intelligence “that they may the better judge.” It is the modest aim of the present translation to make that preparatory process more easy for the English reader, to assist that intelligent assimilation of the truth as it appears to a great and world-famous thinker, which is the necessary condition of any criticism meriting respectful attention at all. Such assimilation is perhaps impossible in the case of Hegel without effort, and indeed something of sympathy with his general outlook and temper, making as he does little or no appeal whatever to the lover of literature as such, who had consequently far better leave him austerely alone to the consideration of others who are more attracted.

I do not propose in these prefatory remarks to enlarge further on the actual content of the work, or on the nature of the criticism which has been directed either to fundamental positions or matters of detail. Some of these I have referred to in my notes on the text where they are most obviously pertinent. The general reader will find a very useful introduction to some of the more primary difficulties in the study of Hegel in Professor Bosanquet’s prefatory essay to his translation. The more serious student can hardly dispense with the perusal of a considerable portion of the same writer’s history of Aesthetik, at least that portion which directly deals with the writings of Kant, xiiiSchiller, Goethe, Schelling, and Hegel himself on the subject.¹

¹ The most authoritative introduction to the study of the Hegelian standpoint for English readers is, of course, the late Professor Wallace’s Prolegomena to his translation of the lesser Logic, and the introduction to his translation of the Philosophy of Mind.

I hold my translation to be as literal as is possible consistently with an endeavour to render or interpret German philosophical language in the language or idiom of really expressive and intelligible English. It is now generally admitted that all translation is in the nature of an interpretation. However much I may have fallen short of my aim, that aim has been throughout to express the actual ideal content of the German, not merely with all the force and directness I could muster, but with as near an approach to the formal structure of the German text as was consistent with the like condition of really readable English. Above all I have striven to avoid the lassitude of mere paraphrase, that vague generalization of content which conceives itself to possess the right to eliminate from the text pretty much what it pleases.

The Index attached to the final volume is limited in its reference to proper names, and pre-eminently to illustrations in the text of works either of general literature, or other products of art, which I considered of use or interest to the general reader.

In the table of contents to the several volumes I have notified with brackets my own contributions to the German original. In all other respects I have retained the divisions of subject-matter as I found them recorded by Hegel or his editor.

F.P.O.

THE present inquiry¹ has for its subject-matter Aesthetic. It is a subject co-extensive with the entire realm of the beautiful; more specifically described, its province is that of Art, or rather, we should say, of Fine Art.

For a subject-matter such as this the term “Aesthetic “is no doubt not entirely appropriate, for “Aesthetic” denotes more accurately the science of the senses or emotion. It came by its origins as a science, or rather as something that to start with purported to be a branch of philosophy, during the period of the school of Wolff, in other words when works of art were generally regarded in Germany with reference to the feelings they were calculated to evoke, as, for example, the feelings of pleasure, admiration, fear, pity, and so forth. It is owing to the unsuitability or, more strictly speaking, the superficiality of this term that the attempt has been made by some to apply the name “Callistic” to this science. Yet this also is clearly insufficient inasmuch as the science here referred to does not investigate beauty in its general signification, but the beauty of art pure and simple. For this reason we shall accommodate ourselves to the term Aesthetic, all the more so as the mere question of 2nomenclature is for ourselves a matter of indifference. It has as such been provisionally accepted in ordinary speech, and we cannot do better than retain it. The term, however, which fully expresses our science is “Philosophy of Art,” and, with still more precision, “Philosophy of Fine Art.”

(a) In virtue of this expression we at once exclude the beauty of Nature from the scientific exposition of Fine Art. Such a limitation of our subject may very well appear from a certain point of view as an arbitrary boundary line, similar to that which every science is entitled to fix in the demarcation of its subject-matter. We must not, however, understand the limitation of “Aesthetic” to the beauty of art in this sense. We are accustomed, no doubt, in ordinary life to speak of a beautiful colour, a beautiful heaven, a beautiful stream, to say nothing of beautiful flowers, animals, and, above all, of beautiful human beings. Without entering now into the disputed question how far the quality of beauty can justly be predicated of such objects, and conse[383]quently the beauty of Nature comes generally into competition with that of art, we are justified in maintaining categorically that the beauty of art stands higher than Nature. For the beauty of art is a beauty begotten, a new birth of mind;¹ and to the extent that Spirit and its creations stand higher than Nature and its phenomena, to that extent the beauty of art is more exalted than the beauty of Nature. Indeed, if we regard the matter in its formal aspect, that is to say, according to the way it is there, any chance fancy that passes through any one’s head,² is of higher rank than any product of Nature. For in every case intellectual conception and freedom are inseparable from such a conceit. In respect to content the sun appears to us an absolutely necessary constituent of actual fact, while the perverse fancy passes away as something accidental and evanescent. None the less in its own independent being a natural existence such as the sun possesses no power of self-differentiation; it is neither essentially free nor self-aware; and, if we regard it in its necessary cohesion with other things, we do not regard it 3independently for its own sake, and consequently not as beautiful.

Merely to maintain, in a general way, that mind and the beauty of art which originates therefrom stand higher than the beauty of Nature is no doubt to establish next to nothing. The expression higher is obviously entirely indefinite; it still indicates the beauty of Nature and art as standing juxtaposed in the field of conception, and emphasizes the difference as a quantitative and accordingly external difference. But in predicating of mind and its artistic beauty a higher place in contrast to Nature, we do not denote a distinction which is merely relative. Mind, and mind alone, is pervious to truth, comprehending all in itself, so that all which is beautiful can only be veritably beautiful as partaking in this higher sphere and as begotten of the same. Regarded under this point of view it is only a reflection of the beauty appertinent to mind; that is, we have it under an imperfect and incomplete mode, and one whose substantive being is already contained in the mind itself.

And apart from this we shall find the restriction to the beauty of art only natural, for in so far as the beauties of Nature may have come under discussion—a rarer occurrence among ancient writers than among ourselves—yet at least it has occurred to no one to insist emphatically on the beauty of natural objects to the extent of proposing a science, or systematic exposition of such beauties. It is true that the point of view of utility has been selected for such exclusive treatment. We have, for example, the conception of a science of natural objects [384]in so far as they are useful in the conflict with diseases, in other words a description of minerals, chemical products, plants, animals, which subserve the art of healing. We do not find any analogous exploitation and consideration of the realm of Nature in its aspect of beauty. In the case of natural beauty we are too keenly conscious that we are dealing with an indefinite subject-matter destitute of any real criterion. It is for this reason that such an effort of comparison would carry with it too little interest to justify the attempt.

These preliminary observations over beauty in Nature and art, over the relation of both, and the exclusion of the first-mentioned from the province of our real subject-matter 4are intended to disabuse us of the notion that the limitation of our science is simply a question of capricious selection. We have, however, not reached the point where a demonstration of this fact is feasible for the reason that such an investigation falls within the limits of our science itself, and it is therefore only at a later stage that we can either discuss or prove the same.

Assuming, however, that we have, by way of prelude, limited our inquiry to the beauty of art, we are merely by this first step involved in fresh difficulties.

(b) What must first of all occur to us is the question whether Fine Art in itself is truly susceptible to a scientific treatment. It is a simple fact that beauty and art pervade all the affairs of life like some friendly genius, and embellish with their cheer all our surroundings, mental no less than material. They alleviate the strenuousness of such relations, the varied changes of actual life; they banish the tedium of our existence with their entertainment; and where nothing really worth having is actually achieved, it is at least an advantage that they occupy the place of actual vice. Yet while art prevails on all sides with its pleasing shapes, from the crude decorations of savage tribes up to the splendours of the sacred shrine adorned with every conceivable beauty of design, none the less such shapes themselves appear to fall outside the real purposes of life, and even where the imaginative work of art is not impervious to such serious objects, nay, rather at times even appear to assist them, to the extent at least of removing what is evil to a distance, yet for all that art essentially belongs to the relaxation and recreation of spiritual life, whereas its substantive interests rather make a call upon its strained energy. On such grounds an attempt to treat that which on its own account is not of a serious character with all the gravity of scientific exposition may very possibly appear to be unsuitable and pedantic. In any case from such a point of view art appears a superfluity if contrasted with the essential needs [385]and interests of life, even assuming that the softening of the soul which a preoccupation with the beauty of objects is capable of producing, does not actually prove injurious in its effeminate influence upon the serious quality of those practical interests. Owing to this fundamental assumption that they are a luxury it has 5often appeared necessary to undertake the defence of the fine arts relatively to the necessities of practical life, and in particular relatively to morality and piety; and inasmuch as this harmlessness is incapable of demonstration, the idea has been at least to make it appear credible, that this luxury of human experience contributes a larger proportion of advantages than disadvantages. In this respect serious aims have been attributed to art, and in many quarters it has been commended as a mediator between reason and sensuous associations, between private inclinations and duty, personified in short as a reconciler of these forces in the strenuous conflict and opposition which this antagonism generates. But it is just conceivable¹ that, even assuming the presence of such aims with all their indubitably greater seriousness, neither reason nor duty come by much profit from such, mediation, for the simple reason that they are incapable by their very nature of any such interfusion or compromise, demanding throughout the same purity which they intrinsically possess. And we might add that art does not become in any respect more worthy thereby of scientific discussion, inasmuch as it remains still on two sides a menial, that is, subservient to idleness and frivolity, if also to objects of more elevated character. In such service, moreover, it can at most merely appear as a means instead of being an object for its own sake. And, in conclusion, assuming that art is a means, it still invariably labours under the formal defect, that so far as it in fact is subservient to more serious objects, and produces results of like nature, the means which actually brings this about is deception. For beauty is made vital in the appearance.² Now it can hardly be denied that aims which are true and serious ought not to be achieved by deception; and though such an effect is here and there secured by this means, such ought only to be the case in a restricted degree; and even in the exceptional case we are not justified in regarding deception as the right means. For the means ought to correspond with the dignity of the aim. Neither semblance nor deception, but only what is itself real and true, possesses a title to create what is real and true. Just in the same way science has to investigate the true interests of the mind in 6accordance with the actual process of the real world and the manner of conceiving it as we actually find it.

[386]We may possibly conclude from the above grounds that the art of beauty is unworthy of philosophical examination. It is after all, it may be said, only a pleasant pastime, and, though we may admit more serious aims are also in its purview, nevertheless it is essentially opposed to such aims in their seriousness. It is at the most merely the servant of specific amusements no less than the exceptional serious objects, and for the medium of its existence as also for the means of its operations can merely avail itself of deception and show.

(c) But yet further in the second place, it is a still more plausible contention that even supposing fine art to be compatible generally with philosophical disquisition, none the less it would form no really adequate subject-matter for scientific enquiry in the strict sense. For the beauty of art is presented to sense, feeling, perception, and imagination: its field is not that of thought, and the comprehension of its activity and its creations demands another faculty than that of the scientific intelligence. Furthermore, what we enjoy in artistic beauty is just the freedom of its creative and plastic activity. In the production and contemplation of these we appear to escape the principle of rule and system. In the creations of art we seek for an atmosphere of repose and animation as some counterpoise to the austerity of the realm of law and the sombre self-concentration of thought; we seek for blithe and powerful reality in exchange for the shadow-world of the Idea. And, last of all, the free activity of the imagination is the source of the fair works of art, which in this world of the mind are even more free than Nature is herself. Not only has art at its service the entire wealth of natural form in all their superabundant variety, but the creative imagination is able inexhaustibly to extend the realm of form by its own productions and modifications. In the presence of such an immeasurable depth of inspired creation and its free products, it may not unreasonably be supposed that thought will lose the courage to apprehend such in their apparent range, to pronounce its verdict thereon, and to appropriate such beneath its universal formulae.

Science, on the other hand, everyone must admit, is form7ally bound to occupy itself with thinking which abstracts from the mass of particulars: and for this very reason, from one point of view, the imagination and its contingency and caprice, in other words the organ of artistic activity and enjoyment, is excluded from it. On the other hand, when art gives joyous animation to just this gloomy and arid dryness of the notion, bringing its abstractions and divisions into reconciliation with concrete fact, supplementing with its detail what is wanting to the notion in this respect, even in that case a purely contemplative [387]reflection simply removes once more all that has been added, does away with it, conducting the notion once again to that simplicity denuded of positive reality which belongs to it and its shadowland of abstraction. It is also a possible contention that science in respect to content is concerned with what is essentially necessary. If our science of Aesthetic places on one side natural beauty, not merely have we apparently made no advance, but rather separated ourselves yet further from what is necessary. The expression Nature implies from the first the ideas of necessity and uniformity, that is to say a constitution which gives every expectation of its proximity and adaptability to scientific inquiry. In mental operations generally, and most of all in the imagination, if contrasted in this respect with Nature, caprice and superiority to every kind of formal restriction, caprice, it is here assumed, is uniquely in its right place, and these at once put out of court the basis of a scientific inquiry.

From each and all these points of view consequently, in its origin, that is to say, in its effect and in its range, fine art, so far from proving itself fitted for scientific effort, rather appears fundamentally to resist the regulative principle of thought, and to be ill-adapted for exact scientific discussion.

Difficulties of this kind, and others like them, which have been raised in respect to a thoroughly scientific treatment of fine art have been borrowed from current ideas, points of view, and reflection, the more systematic expansion of which we may read ad nauseam in previous literature, in particular French literature, upon the subject of beauty and the fine arts. Such contain to some extent facts which have their justification; in fact, elaborate arguments¹ are deduced 8therefrom, which also are not without their tincture of apparent plausibility. In this way, for instance, there is the fact that the configuration of beauty is as multifold as the phenomenon of beauty is of universal extension; from which we may conclude, if we care to do so, that a universal impulse towards beauty is enclosed in our common nature, and may yet further conceivably infer, that because the conceptions of beauty are so countless in their variety and withal are obviously something particular, it is impossible to secure laws of universal validity either relatively to beauty or our taste for it.

Before turning away from such theories to the subject, as we ourselves conceive it, it will be a necessary and preliminary task to discuss the questions and objections raised above.

First, as to the worthiness of art to form the object of scientific inquiry, it is no doubt the case that art can be utilized as a mere pas[388]time in the service of pleasure and entertainment, either in the embellishment of our surroundings, the imprinting of a delight-giving surface to the external conditions of life, or the emphasis placed by decoration on other objects. In these respects it is unquestionably no independent or free art, but an art subservient to certain objects. The kind of art, however, which we ourselves propose to examine is one which is free in its aim and its means. That art in general can serve other objects, and even be merely a pastime, is a relation which it possesses in common with thought itself. From one point of view thought likewise, as science subservient to other ends, can be used in just the same way for finite purposes and means as they chance to crop up, and as such serviceable faculty of science is not self-determined, but determined by something alien to it. But, further, as distinct from such subservience to particular objects, science is raised of its own essential resources in free independence to truth, and exclusively united with its own aims in discovering the true fulfilment in that truth.

Fine art is not art in the true sense of the term until it is also thus free, and its highest function is only then satisfied when it has established itself in a sphere which it shares with religion and philosophy, becoming thereby merely one 9mode and form through which the Divine, the profoundest interests of mankind, and spiritual truths of widest range, are brought home to consciousness and expressed. It is in works of art that nations have deposited the richest intuitions and ideas they possess; and not infrequently fine art supplies a key of interpretation to the wisdom and religion of peoples; in the case of many it is the only one. This is an attribute which art shares in common with religion and philosophy, the peculiar distinction in the case of art being that its presentation of the most exalted subject-matter is in sensuous form, thereby bringing them nearer to Nature and her mode of envisagement, that is closer to our sensitive and emotional life. The world, into the profundity of which thought penetrates, is a supersensuous one, a world which to start with is posited as a Beyond in contrast to the immediacy of ordinary conscious life and present sensation. It is the freedom of reflecting consciousness which disengages itself from this immersion in the “this side,” or immediacy, in other words sensuous reality and finitude. But the mind is able, too, to heal the fracture which is thus created in its progression. From the wealth of its own resources it brings into being the works of fine art as the primary bond of mediation between that which is exclusively external, sensuous and transitory, and the medium of pure thought, be[389]tween Nature and its finite reality, and the infinite freedom of a reason which comprehends. [(d)] Now it was objected that the element¹ of art was, if we view it as a whole, of an unworthy character, inasmuch as it consisted of appearance and deceptions inseparable from such. Such a contention would of course be justifiable, if we were entitled to assume that appearance had no locus standi² at all. An appearance or show is, however, essential to actuality. There could be no such thing as truth if it did not appear, or, rather, let itself appear,³ were it not further true for some one thing or person, for itself as also for spirit. Consequently it cannot be appearance in general against 10which such an objection can be raised, but the particular mode of its manifestation under which art makes actual what is essentially real and true. If, then, the appearance, in the medium of which art gives determinate existence to its creations, be defined as deception, such an objection is in the first instance intelligible if we compare it with the external world of a phenomena, and its immediate relation to ourselves as material substance, or view it relatively to our own world of emotions, that is our inward sensuous life. Both these are worlds to which in our everyday life, the life, that is, of visible experience, we are accustomed to attach the worth and name of reality, actuality and truth as contrasted with that of art, which fails to possess such reality as we suppose. Now it is just this entire sphere of the empirical world, whether on its personal side or its objective side, which we ought rather to call in a stricter sense than when we apply the term to the world of art, merely a show or appearance, and an even more unyielding form of deception. It is only beyond the immediacy of emotional life and that world of external objects that we shall discover reality in any true sense of the term. Nothing is actually real but that which is actual in its own independent right and substance,¹ that which is at once of the substance of Nature and of mind, which, while it is actually here in present and determinate existence, yet retains under such limitation an essential and self-concentred being, and only in virtue of such is truly real. The predominance of these universal powers is precisely that which art accentuates and manifests. In the external and soul-world of ordinary experience we have also no doubt this essence of actuality, but in the chaotic congeries of particular detail, encumbered by the immediacy of sensuous envisagement, and every kind of caprice of condition, event, character, and so forth. Now it is just the show and deception of this false and evanescent world which art disengages from the veritable significance of phenomena to which we have referred, implanting in the same a [390]reality of more exalted rank born of mind. The phenomena of art therefore are not merely 11not appearance and nothing more; we are justified in ascribing to them, as contrasted with the realities of our ordinary life, an actually higher reality and more veritable existence. To as little extent are the representations of art a deceptive appearance as compared with the assumed truer delineations of historical writing. For immediate existence also does not belong to historical writing. It only possesses the intellectual appearance of the same as the medium of its delineations, and its content remains charged with the entire contingent materia of ordinary reality and its events, developments and personalities, whereas the work of art brings us face to face with the eternal powers paramount in history with this incidental association of the immediate sensuous present and its unstable appearance expunged.

If, however, it is in contrast with philosophic thought and religious and ethical principles, that the mode of appearance of the shapes of art, is described as a deception, there is certainly this in support of the view that the mode of revelation attained by a content in the realm of thought is the truest reality. In comparison, nevertheless, with the appearance of immediate sensuous existence and that of historical narration, the show of art possesses the advantage that, in its own virtue, it points beyond itself, directing us to a somewhat spiritual, which it seeks to envisage to the conceptive mind. Immediate appearance, on the contrary, does not give itself out to be thus illusive, but rather to be the true and real, though as a matter of fact such truth is contaminated and obstructed by the immediately sensuous medium. The hard rind of Nature and the everyday world offer more difficulty to the mind in breaking through to the Idea than do the products of art.

But if from this particular point of view we place art thus highly, we must not, on the other hand, fail to remember that neither in respect to content or form is art either the highest or most absolute mode of bringing the true interests of our spiritual life to consciousness. The very form of art itself is sufficient to limit it to a definite content. It is only a particular sphere and grade of truth which is capable of being reproduced in the form of a work of art. Such truth must have the power in its own determinate character to go 12out freely into sensuous shape and remain adequate to itself therein, if it is to be the genuine content of art, as is the case, for example, with the gods of Greece. On the other hand there is a profounder grasp of truth, in which the form is no longer on such easy and friendly terms with the sensuous material as to be adequately accepted and expressed by that medium. [391]Of such a type is the Christian conception of truth; and above all it is the prevailing spirit of our modern world, or, more strictly, of our religion and our intellectual culture, which have passed beyond the point at which art is the highest mode under which the absolute is brought home to human consciousness. The type peculiar to art-production and its products fails any longer to satisfy man’s highest need. We are beyond the stage of reverence for works of art as divine and objects deserving our worship. The impression they produce is one of a more reflective¹ kind, and the emotions which they arouse require a higher test and a further verification. Thought and reflection have taken their flight above fine art. To those who are fond of complaint and grumbling such a condition of things may be held as a form of decadence; it may be ascribed to the obsession of passion and selfish interests, which scare away the seriousness of art no less than its blithesomeness. Or we may find the fault to lie in the exigencies of the present day, the complex conditions of social and political life, which prevent the soul, entangled as it is in microscopic interests, from securing its freedom in the nobler objects of art, a condition, too, in which the intelligence itself becomes a menial to such trifling wants and the interests they excite in sciences, which subserve objects of a like nature, and are seduced into the voluntary exile of such a wilderness.

But however we may explain the fact it certainly is the case that Art is no longer able to discover that satisfaction of spiritual wants, which previous epochs and nations have sought for in it and exclusively found in it, a satisfaction which, at least on the religious side, was associated with art in the most intimate way. The fair days of Greek art, as also the golden time of the later middle ages, are over. The reflective culture of our life of to-day makes it inevitable, 13both relatively to our volitional power and our judgment, that we adhere strictly to general points of view, and regulate particular matters in consonance with them, so that universal forms, laws, duties, rights, and maxims hold valid as the determining basis of our life and the force within of main importance. What is demanded for artistic interest as also for artistic creation is, speaking in general terms, a vital energy, in which the universal is not present as law and maxim, but is operative in union with the soul and emotions, just as also, in the imagination, what is universal and rational is enclosed only as brought into unity with a concrete sensuous phenomenon. For this reason the present time is not, if we review its conditions in their widest range, favourable to art. And with regard to the executive artist himself it is [392]not merely that reflection on every side, which will insist on utterance, owing to the universal habit of critical opinion and judgment, leads him astray from his art and infects his mind with a like desire to accumulate abstract thought in his creations; rather the entire spiritual culture of the times is of such a nature that he himself stands within a world thus disposed to reflection and the conditions it presupposes, and, do what he may, he cannot release himself either by his wish or his power of decision from their influence, neither can he by means of exceptional education, or a removal from the ordinary conditions of life, conjure up for himself and secure a solitude capable of replacing all that is lost.

In all these respects art is and remains for us, on the side of its highest possibilities, a thing of the past. Herein it has further lost its genuine truth and life, and is rather transported to our world of ideas than is able to maintain its former necessity and its superior place in reality. What is now stimulated in us by works of art is, in addition to the fact of immediate enjoyment, our judgment. In other words we subject the content, and the means of presentation of the work of art, and the suitability and unsuitability of both, to the contemplation of our thought. A science of art is therefore a far more urgent necessity in our own days than in times in which art as art sufficed by itself alone to give, complete satisfaction. We are invited by art to contemplate it reflectively, not, that is to say, with the 14object of recreating such art,¹ but in order to ascertain scientifically its nature.

[(e)] In doing our best to accept such an invitation we are confronted with the objection already adverted to, that even assuming that art is a subject adapted for philosophical investigation in a general way, yet it unquestionably is not so adapted to the systematic procedure of science. Such an objection, however, implies to start with the false notion that we can have a philosophical inquiry which is at the same time unscientific. In reply to such a point I can only here state summarily my opinion, that whatever ideas other people may have of philosophy and philosophizing, I myself conceive philosophical inquiry of any sort or kind to be inseparable from the methods of science. The function of philosophy is to examine subject-matter in the light of the principle of necessity, not, it is true, merely in accordance with its subjective² necessity or external co-ordination, classification, and so forth; it has rather to unfold and demonstrate the object under review out of the necessity of its own intimate nature. Until this essential process is made explicit the scientific quality of such an inquiry is absent. In so far, however, as the objective necessity [393]of an object subsists essentially in its logical and metaphysical nature the isolated examination of art may in such a case, at any rate, or rather inevitably must be carried forward with a certain relaxation of scientific stringency. For art is based upon many assumption, part of which relate to its content, part to its material or conceptive³ medium, in virtue of which art is never far from the borders of contingency and caprice. Consequently it is only relatively to the essential and ideal progression of its content and its means of expression that we are able to 15recall with advantage the formative principle of its necessity.¹

The objection that works of fine art defy the examination of scientific thought, because they originate in the unregulated world of imagination and temperament, and assert their effect exclusively on the emotions and the fancy with a complexity and variety which defies exact analysis, raises a difficulty which still carries genuine weight behind it.² As a matter of fact the beauty of art does appear in a form which is expressly to be contrasted with abstract thought, a form which it is compelled to disturb in order to exercise its own activity in its own way. Such a result is simply a corollary of the thesis that reality anywhere and everywhere, whether the life of Nature or mind, is defaced and slain by its comprehension; that so far from being brought more close to us by the comprehension of thinking, it is only by this means that it is in the complete sense removed apart from us, so that in his attempt to grasp through thought as a means the nature of life, man rather renders nugatory this very aim. An exhaustive discussion of the subject is here impossible; we propose merely to indicate the point of view from which the removal of this difficulty or impossibility and incompatibility might be effected. It will at least be readily admitted that mind is capable of self-contemplation, and of possessing a consciousness, and indeed one that implies a power of thought co-extensive with itself and everything which originates from itself. It is, in fact, precisely thought, the process of thinking, which constitutes the most intimate and essential nature of mind. It is in this thinking-consciousness over itself and its products, despite all the freedom and caprice such may otherwise and indeed must invariably possess—assuming only mind or spirit to be veritably pregnant therein—that mind exhibits the activity congenial to its essential nature. Art and the creations of art, being works which originate in and are begotten of the spirit, are themselves stamped with the hall-mark of spirit, 16even though the mode of its presentation accept for its own the phenomenal guise of sensuous reality, permeating as it does the sen[394]suous substance with intelligence. Viewed in this light art is placed from the first nearer to spirit and its thought than the purely external and unintelligent Nature. In the products of art mind is exclusively dealing with that which is its own. And although works of art are not thought and notion simply as such, but an evolution of the notion out of itself, an alienation of the same in the direction of sensuous being, yet for all that the might of the thinking spirit is discovered not merely in its ability to grasp itself in its most native form as pure thinking, but also, and as completely, to recognize itself in its self-divestment in the medium of emotion and the sensuous, to retain the grasp of itself in that “other” which it transforms but is not, transmuting the alien factor into thought-expression, and by so doing recovering it to itself. And moreover in this active and frequent relation to that “ other” than itself the reflective mind is not in any way untrue to itself. We have here no oblivion or surrender of itself; neither is it so impotent as to be unable to comprehend what is differentiated from that other;¹ what it actually does is to grasp in the notion both itself and its opposite. For the notion is the universal, which maintains itself in its particularizations, which covers in its grasp both itself and its “other,” and consequently contains the power and energy to cancel the very alienation into which it passes. For this reason the work of art, in which thought divests itself of itself,² belongs to the realm of comprehending thought; and mind, by subjecting it³ to scientific contemplation, thereby simply satisfies its most essential nature. For inasmuch as thought is its essence and notion, it can only ultimately find such a satisfaction after passing all the products of its activity through the alembic of rational thought, and in this way making them for the first time in very truth part of its own substance. But though art, as we shall eventually see 17with yet more distinctness, is far indeed from being the highest form of mind, it is only in the philosophy of art that it comes into all that it may justly claim.

In the same way art is not debarred from a philosophical inquiry by reason of its unregulated caprice. As already intimated, it is its true function to bring to consciousness the highest interests of mind. An immediate consequence of this is that, so far as the content of fine art is concerned, it cannot range about in all the wildness of an unbridled fancy; these interests of spirit posit categorically for the content that embodies them definite points of attachment,¹ however multifold and inexhaustible may be the forms and shapes they assume. The same may be said of the forms themselves. They too do not remain unaffected by constraining principles. It is not every chance form [395]which is capable of expressing and presenting these interests, capable of assimilating them and reproducing them. It is only through one determinate content that the form adequate to its embodiment is defined.

It is upon grounds such as these that we are also able to discover a track adapted to critical reflection through the apparently endless vistas of artistic creations and shapes.

We have now, I trust, by way of prelude, succeeded in restricting the content of our science on the lines of definition proposed. We have made it clear that neither is fine art unworthy of philosophical study, nor is such a philosophical study incapable of accepting as an object of its cognition the essence of fine art.

If we now investigate the required mode of such scientific investigation, we are here again face to face with two contradictory modes of handling the subject, each of which appears to exclude the other and to permit us to arrive at no satisfactory result.

On the one hand we observe the science of art, merely so 18to speak, from an external point of view busying itself with actual works of art, cataloguing them in a history of art, drawing up a sort of commentary upon extant works, or propounding theories which are intended to supply the general points of view for artistic criticism no less than artistic production.

On the other hand we find science wholly giving itself up in its independence and self-assured to the contemplation of the beautiful, offering generalizations which do not concern the specific characteristics of a work of art, producing in short an abstract philosophy of the beautiful.

1. With regard to the first mentioned method of study, the starting-point of which is the empirical study of definite facts, such is the path everyone must tread who means to study art at, all. And just as everyone nowadays, even though he does not actually concern himself with physical science, yet deems it indispensable to his intellectual equipment to have some kind of knowledge of the principles of that science,¹ so too it is generally considered more or less essential to any man of real cultivation, that he should possess some general knowledge of art; and indeed the pretension to be ranked as dilletante, or even as genuine connoisseur, meets with comparatively few exceptions.

(a) If however knowledge of this kind is really to claim the rank of connoisseurship of the first class it must be both varied in its character and of the widest range. It is an indispensable condition to such that it should possess an accurate knowledge of the wellnigh limitless field of particular works of art both of ancient and modern times, some of which have already disappeared, while others are only to be found in distant countries or portions of the globe, and which it is the misfortune of our situation to be unable to inspect. Add to this that every work of art belongs to one age, one nationality, and depends upon particular historical or other ends and ideas. On account of this it is indispensable that the finest type of art-scholarship should have at its command not merely historical knowledge of a wide 19range, but knowledge that is highly specialized. In other words, a work of art is associated with particular¹ detail in a peculiar sense, and a specific treatment is imperative to the comprehension and interpretation of it. And in conclusion this connoisseurship of the finest class does not merely imply like every other a retentive memory, but also a keen imaginative sense, in order to hold clearly before the mind the images of such artistic representations in all their characteristic lines, and above all, to have them ready for comparison with other works of art.

(b) Within the limits of such a method of study which is primarily historical,² distinct points of view will soon assert themselves which in the contemplation of such works we are not suffered to lose sight of, inasmuch as they are indispensable to a critical verdict. Such points of view, as is the case with other sciences the commencement of which is empirical, are summarized, after their due collection as separate units and comparison, in general criteria and propositions, emerging in a yet further stage of formal generalization in “Theories of the arts.” This is not the place to dwell at length upon literature of this kind; we will merely recall a few specimens of such work in the most general way. There is, for instance, the “Poetics” of Aristotle, which contains a theory of tragedy still of real interest. With still more pertinency among the ancients the “Ars Poetica” of Horace and the Essay on the “Sublime” by Longinus will exemplify generally the manner in which this type of theorizing is carried out. The general theses which are therein formulated are intended to stand as premises and rules, in accordance with which works of art ought to be produced, their necessity being above all insisted on in times of the decadence of poetry and art. They are, in short, prescriptions to the practitioner. The prescriptions, however, of these physicians of art were even less successful in their curative effect on art than are the ordinary ones in the restoration of bodily health.

As to such theories I will merely remark that although in 20their detail they contain much that is instructive, yet what they have to say is based on a very limited range of artistic production, which passed no doubt for the superlatively beautiful ones, but for all that occupied but a very restricted portion of the entire field of survey. From a further point of view such generalizations are in part very trivial reflections, which in their generality led up to no secure grasp of actual detail, though that is above all the matter of most importance. The epistle of Horace already cited is full of such general theses, and consequently a book for everyone, but one which for this very reason contains much of no importance at all. Take the lines:

“He carries all votes who has interfused the useful and the pleasant, by at the same time charming and instructing his reader.” This is no better than copybook headings such as “Stay where you are and earn an honest sixpence”—which are good enough as generalization, but are defective in the concrete determinacy upon which action depends. An interest of another kind deducible from this type of artistic study does not so much consist in the expressed object to promote the production of genuine works of art: the intention appears to be rather that of influencing the judgment of others upon artistic works by such theories, creating, in short, a standard of taste. It is for an object of this kind that Horne’s “Elements of Criticism,” the writings of Batteux, and Ramler’s “Introduction to the Fine Arts” have found many readers in their day. Taste, in this sense, has to do with co-ordination and artistic treatment, the thing in its right place, and all that concerns the finish of that which belongs to the external embodiment of a work of art. Add to this that to the principles of such a taste views were attached which belonged to the psychology in fashion at the time, views which had been discovered by empirical observations of capacities and activities of the soul, or of passions and their potential aggrandizement, succession, and so forth. It is, however, an invariable fact that every one forms his opinion of works of art, or characters, actions and events according to the measure of his insight and his perceptive 21temperament; and inasmuch as the formation of taste to which we have referred merely touched what was external and therefore jejune, and apart from this deduced its prescriptions entirely from a limited circle of artistic works and an intellectual culture and emotional discipline equally restricted, its sphere of influence was ineffective, and it had neither the power to comprehend the profounder significance¹ and the true, nor to make the vision more keen for their apprehension.

Such theories proceed through generalization as do the rest of the non-philosophic sciences. The content which they submit to examination is accepted from ordinary ideas as something final and received as such. Questions are then asked about the constitution of such a concept, the need for more distinct specification making itself apparent, and this too is borrowed from current ideas, and forthwith finally established from it in definitions. But in such a procedure we at once find ourselves on an insecure basis exposed to controversy. It might in the first instance no doubt appear that the beautiful was quite a simple idea. But we soon discover it combines several aspects; one writer will emphasize one of these, another some other one; or, even assuming the same points of view are considered, the question for dispute still remains which aspect is to be regarded as essential.

With regard to such questions it is generally reckoned as inseparable from scientific completeness, that the various definitions of the beautiful should be enumerated and criticized. For ourselves we do not propose to attempt this with such historical exhaustiveness as would unfold all the many refinements of such essays at definition, nor indeed on account of their historical interest. We simply, by way of illustration, shall offer a few specimens of the more recent and more interesting ways of regarding the matter which do in fact hit off pretty nearly what is actually implied in the idea of the beautiful. With this in view it is of first importance to recall Goethe’s definition of the beautiful, which Meyer has incorporated in his “History of the Creative Arts in Greece,” in which work he also brings forward the views of Hirt, though he does not actually mention his name.

22Hirt, one of the greatest among connoisseurs of the first class in our time, in his “Essay upon Fine Art” (Horen, 1797, seventh number), after considering the beautiful in the several arts, summarizes his conclusions in the statement that the basis of a just criticism of fine art and cultivation of taste is the idea of the Characteristic. In other words he defines the beautiful ultimately as the “Consummate¹ which is or can be an object of eye, ear, or imagination.” He then proceeds to define this “consummate” as “that which is adequate to its aim, which nature or art aimed at producing in the constitution of the object—after its generic kind and specific type.” For which reason it is necessary that, in order to instruct our critical sense of beauty, we should direct our attention, so far as possible, to the specific indications of the object’s essential constitution. It is, in fact, these insignia of individuality which are its characteristic. Consequently under the term character as a principle of art he understands “that definite individual characterization,² whereby forms, movement and gesture, mien and expression, local colouring, light and shadow, chiaroscuro and pose are severally distinguished in due relation of course to the requirements of the object previously selected.” This formula is more significant in its actual terms than other definitions in vogue. If we proceed to ask what the “characteristic” is we find that it implies, first, a content, as, for instance, a definite emotion, situation, event, action, individual person or thing; secondly, the specific manner in accordance with which such a content is represented. It is to this mode or manner of presentation that the artistic principle of the “characteristic” is related. It requires that every aspect of detail in the mode of expression shall subserve the clearer definition of that expression’s content, and become a vital member of such expression.

The abstract determination of the characteristic emphasizes therefore the pertinency with which particular de23tail ought to bring into prominence the content which it is intended to reproduce. Attempting an elucidation of this conception apart from technical phrase we may state the limitation implied in it as follows: In the drama, for instance, it is an action which constitutes the content. That is to say, the drama has to represent how this or that action takes place. Now men do all kinds of different things. They speak to each other, take their meals, sleep, put on their clothes, say this and that, and all the rest of it. But in all this business of life what does not lie in immediate relation with the particular action selected as the real dramatic content, must be excluded in order that relatively to it everything shall be significant. In the same way in a picture which only includes one moment of that action, and it is possible to accumulate—such are the countless vistas into which the objective world draws us—a mass of circumstances, persons, situations or other occurrences, which stand in no relation to the specific action as it actually occurs, nor subserve in any way the clearer characterization of the same. But according to the definition given of the characteristic only that ought to enter into a work of art, which is appertinent to the manifestation and essential expression of precisely this one content and no other. Nothing must declare itself as idle or superfluous.

This definition is no doubt of real importance, and from a certain point of view admits of justification. Meyer, however, in the work cited, is of opinion that the view propounded has vanished, every vestige of it, and in his opinion only to the advantage of art. Such a conception he thinks would in all probability lead to caricature. This judgment is based on the previous idea that an attempt of this kind to define the beautiful once and for all is associated with the notion of prescription. The philosophy of art has absolutely nothing to do with precepts for artists. The object is to unfold the essential nature of the beautiful, and—apart from any intention to propound rules for the executant—how it is illustrated in actual work, that is works of art. To such a criticism we may observe that the definition of Hirt no doubt includes what is capable of being caricature, for caricature may also be characteristic. The obvious point to make, however, against it is this, that in caricature character 24in its definition is emphasized to the point of exaggeration and is, if we may say so, a superfluity of the characteristic. But a surfeit of this kind is no longer appropriate to the characteristic, but a burdensome reiteration whereby the characteristic may itself be ousted from what it ought to be. Moreover, what is of the nature of caricature is displayed as the characteristic presentment of what is ugly, which is of course a mode of distortion. Ugliness is in its own right in this way more closely related to the content,¹ so that may be actually asserted that the principle of the characteristic includes also ugliness and the presentment of the same as a part of its essential determination. The definition of Hirt, of course, gives us no further account of the content of the beautiful. It merely supplies us in this respect with a purely formal statement, which, however, contains real truth in it although formulated in abstract terms.

There is, however, the further question—what Meyer would substitute for the artistic principle of Hirt, what he proposes himself? He deals in the first instance exclusively with the principle as we have it in ancient works of art, which, however, must contain in the widest connotation of the term the essential determinant² of beauty.³ In doing so he finds occasion to refer to Mengs and to Winckelmann’s definition of the Ideal, and expresses himself to the effect that he does not wish either to reject or wholly to accept this principle of beauty, but on the other hand that he feels no hesitation in subscribing to the opinion of an enlightened judge of art (that is Goethe), inasmuch as its meaning is distinct and it appears to solve the problem with more accuracy. Now what Goethe says is this: “The highest principle of the ancients was the significant; the 25highest result of successful artistic handling is the beautiful.”

If we look more closely at what this dictum implies we have again once more two aspects, that is to say a content or subject matter, and the mode of its presentation. In our consideration of a work of art we begin with that which is directly presented to us, and after seeing it we proceed to inquire what its significance or content is. That external husk possesses no value to us simply as such. We assume that there is an inward, an ideality or a significance behind it, in virtue of which the external appearance is made alive with mind or spirit. It is to this, its soul, that the external appearance points and attests. For an appearance which is significant of something does not present itself to us, and merely that which it is quâ externality, but something other than this; as also does the symbol for example and with yet more clarity the fable, the significance of which is simply the moral and teaching of the same. In fact there is no word which does not point to a meaning, possessing no value by itself. In the same way the human eye, the face, flesh, skin, the entire presence are a revelation of spirit, intelligence and soul; and in such a case the significance is without exception something beyond that which is offered in the bare appearance. In this way too the work of art must possess significance; it must not appear to have told its tale simply in the fact of particular lines, curves, surfaces, indentations, reliefs of stone-work, in particular colours, tones, sounds of words, whatever medium in fact art may employ. Its function is to unveil an inward or ideal vitality, emotion, soul, a content and mind, which is precisely what we mean by the significance of a work of art.

This demand, therefore, for significance in a work of art is to all intents, and in its embrace much the same thing as Hirt’s principle of the characteristic.

According to this conception we find as characteristic constituents of the beautiful an inward somewhat, a content, and an external rind which possesses that content as its significance. The inner or ideal constituent appears in the external and thus enables itself to be recognized, that which is external pointing away from itself to the inward. 26We cannot, however, pursue the matter here into further detail.

(c) But the earlier fashion of this “theory-spinning,” no less than the laying down of rules for the executant already adverted to, has already been thrust on one side despotically in Germany—mainly owing to the appearance of genuine living poetry—and the right of genius, its work and effects, have had their full independence insisted upon as against the pretensions of such rules of thumb and the broad water-ducts of theory. From this foundation of an art which is itself of truly spiritual rank, as also of a sympathy and absorption of the same, have arisen the receptivity and freedom which make it possible for us to enjoy and appreciate great works of art which have long since been within our reach, whether it be those of the modern world, of the Middle Ages, or of wholly foreign peoples of the Past, the works of India for example; works, which, in virtue of their antiquity or the remoteness of their nationality, possess unquestionably for ourselves a side alien to ourselves; but which, if we consider the way in which their content passes over and beyond such national limits, and the matter in it of common appeal to all mankind, can only be hall-marked by the prejudice of theory among the products of a barbarous or corrupt taste. This recognition of works of art anywhere and everywhere, works which depart from the specific circle and forms of those upon which in the main the abstractions of theory were based, has, as a primary consequence, led to the recognition of a peculiar type of art—the romantic art. It became necessary to apprehend the notion and the nature of the beautiful in a profounder way than these theories attempted. With this fact another, too, cooperated, viz., that the notions in its form of apperception, the mind as pure thought on its part reached in philosophy a point of profounder self-cognition, and was thereby compelled forthwith to grasp the essence of art too on profounder lines. In this way, even in virtue of the point in the process reached of this general evolution of human thought, the type of theorizing upon art we have described, both relatively to its principles no less than their elaboration, has become obsolete. It is only the scholarship of the history of art which retains an abiding value, and must continue to 27retain it in proportion as the boundaries of its survey have enlarged in every direction by means of the advance made in man’s powers of receptivity already noticed. Its business and function consists in the aesthetic appreciation of particular works of art and the knowledge of the historical, in other words the external conditions from which the work of art originates. It is an attitude of the mind, which, if assisted with sound sense and critical insight, supported too with historical knowledge, is an indispensable condition to the complete penetration into the individuality of a given work of art. The many writings of Goethe upon art and works of art are an excellent illustration. Theorizing, in the specific sense noticed, is not the aim of this type of examination, although no doubt it not unfrequently also busies itself with abstract principles and categories, and may drop into such a style unconsciously. If, however, without letting such deviations on our route detain us, we keep before our vision those concrete illustrations of artistic works, such at least, whatever else they may do, supply a philosophy of art with the visible warrant and confirmation of actual work, into the historical detail of which, in each particular case, philosophy is not permitted to enter.

This then may be accepted as the first method of art study. It starts from the particular work which we have before us.

2. The method or point of view to be contrasted with this, in other words an entirely theoretical reflection, which is concerned to cognize the beautiful as such from its own intrinsic wealth, and to penetrate to the idea of it, is essentially distinct from the first method. As is well known, Plato was the first to demand of philosophical inquiry in a profounder sense, that objects should not be cognized in their particularity, but in their universality, in their generic type, their essential being and its explicit manifestation. He maintained that this true essence¹ did not consist in particular actions which were good, in particular true opinions, handsome men or beautiful works of art, but in goodness, beauty, and truth in their universality. Now if in fact the beautiful ought to be cognized according to its essence and notion, this can only be effected by means of the thinking 28notion,¹ by means of which the logical and metaphysical nature of the Idea as such, as also of that of the particular Idea of the beautiful enters into the thinking consciousness. But the consideration of the beautiful in its self-independence and its idea may readily once more become an abstract metaphysic; and even though Plato is accepted as founder and pioneer, the Platonic abstraction no longer supplies all we require, not even for the logical Idea of the beautiful. We are bound to grasp this idea more profoundly and more in the concrete. The emptiness of content which clings to the Platonic Idea, no longer satisfies the richer philosophical requirements of the mind to-day. It is no doubt the case that we also in the philosophy of art must make the Idea of the beautiful our starting point; but it is by no means inevitable that we should adhere to the Platonic ideas in their abstraction, ideas from which the philosophy of the beautiful merely dates its origins.

3. The philosophical idea of the beautiful to indicate at any rate its true nature provisionally, must contain both extremes which we have described mediated in itself. It must combine, that is to say, metaphysical universality with the determinate content of real particularity. It is only by this means that it is grasped in its essential no less than explicit truth. For on the one hand it is then, as contrasted with the sterility of one-sided reflection, fruit-bearing out of its own wealth. It is its function, in consonance with its own notion, to develop into a totality of definite qualities, and this essential conception itself, no less than its detailed explication, comprises the necessary coherence of its particular features as also of the progress and transition of one phase thereof into another. On the other hand, these particulars into which the passage is made essentially carry the universality and essentiality of the fundamental notion as the particulars of which they appear. The modes of inquiry hitherto discussed lack both these aspects, and for 29this reason it is only the notion, as above formulated, in its completeness, which conducts us to definitive principles which are substantive, necessary, and self-contained in their completeness.

After these preliminaries we come to closer quarters with our actual subject-matter, namely, the philosophy of Fine Art;¹ and for the reason that we are undertaking to treat it scientifically, our commencement must be with the notional concept of the same. It is only after we have definitely ascertained this that we can map out the division of its parts, and with it the plan of the science as a whole. A division of this kind, if it is not to be, as is the case with non-philosophical inquiry, undertaken in a purely external way, must discover its principle in the notion of the subject treated itself.

Face to face with such a demand we are at once met by the question: “Whence do we arrive at such a conception?” If we begin with the notional concept of Fine Art itself the same at once becomes a pre-supposition and mere assumption. Mere assumptions, however, are excluded from the philosophical method; whatever here is allowed as valid must have its truth demonstrated, in other words must be established in its necessity.

We will endeavour to arrive at an understanding in a few words in the presence of this difficulty which invariably recurs in the introduction to every course of philosophical study if treated independently. The subject-matter of every 30science presents in the first instance two aspects for consideration: first, the fact that a given object is; secondly, the question what it is.

Upon the question of fact in ordinary scientific inquiry little difficulty is experienced. Indeed it might on a cursory view even appear ridiculous if the demand were made that we had to prove in geometry, for instance, that there were such objects as space, and geometrical figures, or in astronomy and physics that there was a sun, stars, and magnetic phenomena. In these sciences, which are concerned with what is actually presented to sense perception, objects are accepted from objective experience, and so far from it being regarded necessary to demonstrate (beweisen) them, it is deemed sufficient to point to (weisen) the bare facts. Yet even within the limits of non-philosophical instruction doubts may arise as to the existence of certain objects. In psychology, for example, the science of mind, the doubt is possible whether there is a soul, an intelligence, i.e., something distinct from material conditions, something immaterial,¹ independent and self-substantive, or in the theology whether a God actually exists. Moreover, assuming the objects of the science to be thus immaterial, in other words, merely present in the mind, and not a part of the objective world we perceive, we have to face the possible conviction that there is nothing in the mind, but that which it has evoked in virtue of its own activity. This brings up incidentally the question whether men have produced this idea or intuition which is inward to their minds or not, and even if we do actually accept the first alternative, whether they have not made such an idea once more to vanish, or depreciated the same at any rate to an idea of wholly subjective validity, whose content possesses no independent or self-contained existence.² In this way, for example, the beautiful has been frequently regarded as possessing no necessarily essential and independent stability in the world of our ideas; rather it is accepted 31as a pleasure purely personal to ourselves, due to the caprice of our senses.¹ Even our external intuitions, observations and perceptions frequently deceive and lead us astray; but still more is this the case with those ideas that do not arise from sense-perception, even though they possess in themselves the greatest vitality, and are able to transport us into passion, we are powerless to resist.

This doubt, then, whether an object of the inward world of our ideas and intuitions actually exists as an independent fact or not, as also that further incidental problem, whether the particular consciousness in question has produced it in itself, and whether the particular mode or process, in which it objectified it to itself, is also adequate to the object thus envisaged in its essential and independent nature—these are precisely the kind of questions which have awakened in men the higher demand of philosophy, which is that, even if there is every appearance that an object is, or that we have before us such an object, yet none the less that object must be expounded or demonstrated on the basis of its necessity. A demonstration of this kind, if developed on truly philosophical lines, ought at the same time to supply a sufficient answer to the question: What a given object is. To work this out fully would, however, carry us further than is now possible. We propose to limit ourselves to the following general remarks.

If we are to propound the necessity of our subject-matter, in other words the beauty of art, we are bound to prove that art, or the beautiful, is a result of antecedents such as, when regarded relatively to their true notional concept, conduct us with scientific necessity to the similar notion of fine art itself. Inasmuch as, however, we propose to make art the point of departure, and its idea and the objective presence of the same, and do not propose to deal with the antecedent conditions which are essential to the necessary exposition of its notional concept, for this reason art, in our treatment of it as a particular object of scientific 32inquiry, involves a pre-assumption, which lies outside the boundary of our investigation; which, implying as it does a different content, belongs, as scientifically treated, to another course of philosophical inquiry. We have therefore now no other alternative than frankly to accept the notional idea of art, so to speak, provisionally,¹ which is inevitable with every one of the particular philosophical sciences, if regarded in their abstract isolation. For it is the entire body of philosophy, and that alone, which either is or can be the comprehension of the universe as one essentially single organic totality; and which, as such a totality, self-evolved from its own notional Idea, and returning into itself so as to form a whole in virtue of the necessary principle in which it is placed relatively to itself, encloses itself, and all that is itself, into one single world of truth. In the coronal of this scientific necessity is every particular member thereof a self-complete circle which returns into itself, while, at the same time, and as imperatively, it possesses a necessary bond of connection with other parts. This bond of coherence is a backward from which it is self-derived, no less than a forward to which it is self-impelled onward, in so far as it fruitfully begets fresh material from its own resources, and renders the same open and pervious to scientific cognition. It is not therefore our purpose to demonstrate the Idea of the beautiful, which is our point of departure, or, in other words, to deduce it in all its necessity from the assumptions which are its antecedents in philosophy, and from the womb of which it is born. This is the object appropriate to an encyclopaedic development of philosophy as a whole and in its specific branches. For ourselves the notional concept of the beautiful and art is a pre-supposition supplied us by the system of philosophy. Inasmuch, however, as we are not prepared to discuss this system, and the association of art with it in the present context,² we have not as yet the idea 33of the beautiful before us in a scientific form: what we have and are able to deal with are simply the phases and aspects of the same as we find them in the various conceptions of beauty and art of our everyday conscious life, or as they have been conceived by previous writers. Having made our start at this point we shall then at a later stage pass on to the more fundamental investigation of those views, in order thereby to secure the advantage of, in the first instance, working out a general idea of our subject-matter no less than obtaining a provisional acquaintance, as a result of our necessarily brief criticism, with its higher principles, which will occupy our thoughts in the inquiry which follows.¹ By this means our final introduction² will supply a sort of overture to the exposition of the subject itself, and will aim at being a general concatenation and direction of our reflection on the real subject-matter before us. What in the first instance is known to us under current conceptions of a work of art may be subsumed under the three following determinations:

(1) A work of art is no product of Nature. It is brought into being through the agency of man.

(2) It is created essentially for man; and, what is more, it is to a greater or less degree delivered from a sensuous medium, and addressed to his senses.³

1. With regard to the first point, that a work of art is a product of [396]human activity, an inference has been drawn from this (a) that such an activity, being the conscious production of an external object can also be known and divulged, and learned and reproduced by others. For that which one is able to effect, another—such is the notion—is able to 34effect or to imitate,¹ when he has once simply mastered the way of doing it. In short we have merely to assume an acquaintance with the rules of art-production universally shared, and anybody may then, if he cares to do so, give effect to executive ability of the same type, and produce works of art. It is out of reasoning of this kind that the above-mentioned theories, with their provision of rules, and their prescriptions formulated for practical acceptance, have arisen. Unfortunately that which is capable of being brought into effect in accordance with suggestions of this description can only be something formally regular and mechanical. For only that which is mechanical is of so exterior a type that only an entirely empty effort of will and dexterity is required to accept it among our working conceptions, and forthwith to carry it out; an effort, in fact, which is not under the necessity to contribute out of its own resources anything concrete such as is quite outside the prescriptive power of such general rules.

This is apparent with most vividness when precepts of this kind are not limited to what is purely external and mechanical, but extend their pretensions to the activity of the artist in the sense that implies wealth of significance and intelligence. In this field our rules pass off to purely indefinite generalities, such as “the theme ought to be interesting, and each individual person must speak as is appropriate to his status, age, sex and situation.” But if rules are really to suffice for such a purpose their directions ought to be formulated with such directness of detail that, without any further co-operation of mind, they could be executed precisely in the manner they are prescribed. Such rules being, in respect to this content, abstract, clearly and entirely fall short of their pretension of being able to complete² the artistic consciousness. Artistic production is not a formal activity in accordance with a series of definitions; it is, as an activity of soul, constrained to work out of its own wealth, and to bring before the mind’s eye a wholly other and far richer content, and a more embracing and unique³ creation 35than ever can he thus prescribed. In particular cases such rules may prove of assistance, in so far, that is, as they contain something really definite and consequently useful for practice. But even here their guidance will only apply to conditions wholly external.

(b) This above indicated tendency has consequently been wholly [397]given up; but writers in doing so have only fallen as unreservedly into the opposite extreme. A work of art came to be looked upon, and so far rightly, as no longer the product of an activity shared by all men, but rather as a creation of a mind gifted in an extraordinary degree. A mind of this type has in this view merely to give free vent to its peculiar endowment, regarded as a specific natural power. It has to free itself absolutely from a pursuit of rules of universal application, as also from any admixture of conscious reflection with its creative and, as thus viewed, wholly instinctive powers, or rather it should be on its guard therefrom, the assumption being that such an exercise of conscious thought can only act on its creations as an infection and a taint. Agreeably to such a view the work of art has been heralded as the product of talent and genius; and it is mainly the aspect of natural gift inseparable from the ordinary conception of talent and genius, which has been emphasized. There is to some extent real truth in this. Talent is specific, genius universal capacity. With neither¹ of these can a man endow himself simply by the exercise of his self-conscious activity. We shall consider this at greater length in a subsequent chapter.²

In the present context we would merely draw attention to the false assumption in this view that in artistic production every kind of self-reflection upon the artist’s own activity was regarded as not merely superfluous, but actually injurious. In such a view the process of creation by talent or genius simply is taken to be a general state; or we may define it more precisely as a condition of inspiration. To such a condition, it is said, genius is in some measure exalted by the subject-matter itself; it is also to some extent 36voluntarily able to place itself under such a condition, a process of self-inhibition in which the genial service of the champagne bottle is not forgotten.¹ An idea of this kind was in vogue during the so-called “Epoch of Genius,” which originated with the early poetical work of Goethe, receiving subsequent illustration in those of Schiller. These poets by their rejection of all rules hitherto fabricated made as it were an entirely new start; with deliberate intention they ran counter to such rules, and while doing so distanced all competitors by many lengths. I do not, however, propose to discuss with more detail the confusions which have prevailed over the conception of inspiration and genius, and the notion, which even at the present day finds advocates, that inspiration simply by itself can effect anything and everything. The real and indeed sole point to maintain as essential is the thesis that although artistic talent and genius essentially implies an element of natural power, yet it is equally indispensable that it should be thoughtfully cultivated, that reflection should be brought to bear on the particular way it is exercised, and that it should be also kept alive with use and practice in actual work. The fact is that an important aspect of the creating process is merely facility in the use of a medium;² that is to say, a work of art possesses a purely technical side, which extends to the borders of mere handicraft. This is most obviously the case in architecture and sculpture, less so in painting and music, least of all in poetry. A facility here is not assisted at all by inspiration; what solely indispensable is reflection, industry, and practice. Such technical skill an artist simply must possess 37in order that he may be master over the external material, and not be thwarted by its obstinacy.

Add to this that the more exalted the rank of an artist the more profoundly ought he to portray depths of soul and mind; and these are not to be known by flashlight, but are exclusively to be sounded, if at all, by the direction of the man’s own intelligence on the world of souls and the objective world. In this respect, therefore, once more study is the means whereby the artist brings to consciousness such a [398]content, and appropriates the material and structure of his conceptions. At the same time no doubt one art will require such a conscious reception and cognitive mastery of the content in question more than another. Music, for example, which has exclusively to deal with the entirely undefined motion of the soul within, with the musical tones of that which is, relatively, feeling denuded of positive thought, has little or no need to bring home to consciousness the substance of intellectual conception.¹ For this very reason musical talent declares itself as a rule in very early youth, when the head is still empty and the emotions have barely had a flutter; it has, in fact, attained real distinction at a time in the artist’s life when both intelligence and life are practically without experience. And for the matter of that we often enough see very great accomplishment in musical composition and execution hung together with considerable indigence of mind and character. It is quite another matter in the case of poetry. What is of main importance here is a presentation of our humanity rich in subject-matter and reflective power, of its profounder interests, and of the forces which move it. Here at least mind and heart must them38selves be richly and profoundly disciplined by life, experience, and thought before genius itself can bring into being the fruit that is ripe, the content that has substance, and is essentially consummate. The early productions of Goethe and Schiller are characterized by an immaturity, we may even call it a rawness and barbarity, which really are appalling. This phenomenon, that in the majority of those experiments we find a preponderating mass of features which are absolutely prosaic, or at least uninspired and commonplace, is a main objection to the ordinary notion that inspiration is inseparable from youth and its sirocco season. These two men of genius were the first beyond question to give our nation true works of poetry, are, in fact, our national poets; but for all that it was only their mature manhood, which made it a present of creations profound, sterling of their kind, creations of genuine inspiration, and no less technically complete in their artistic form.¹ We naturally recall the case of the veteran Homer, who only composed and uttered his immortal songs in his old age.

(c) A third view, held relatively to the idea of a work of art as a product of human activity, concerns the position of such towards the phenomena of Nature. The natural tendency of ordinary thinking in this respect is to assume that the product of human art is of subordinate rank to the works of Nature. The work of art possesses no feeling of its own; it is not through and through a living thing, but, regarded as an external object, is a dead thing. It is usual to regard that which is alive of higher worth than what is dead. We may admit, of course, that the work of art is not in itself capable of movement and alive. The living, natural thing is, whether looked at within or without, an organization with the life-purpose of such worked out into the minutest detail. The work of art merely attains to the show of animation on its surface. Below this it is ordinary stone, wood, or canvas,² 39or in the case of poetry idea, the medium of such being speech and letters. But this element of external existence is not that which makes a work a creation of fine art. A work of art is only truly such in so far as originating in the human spirit, it continues to belong to the soil from which it sprang, has received, in short, the baptism of [399]the mind and soul of man, and only presents that which is fashioned in consonance with such a sacrament. An interest vital to man, the spiritual values which the single event, one individual character, one action possesses in its devolution and final issue, is seized in the work of art and emphasized with greater purity¹ and clarity than is possible on the ground of ordinary reality where human art is not. And for this reason the work of art is of higher rank than any product of Nature whatever, which has not submitted to this passage through the mind. In virtue of the emotion and insight, for example, in the atmosphere of which a landscape is portrayed by the art of painting, this creation of the human spirit assumes a higher rank than the purely natural landscape. Everything which partakes of spirit is better than anything begotten of mere Nature. However this may be, the fact remains that no purely natural existence is able, as art is, to represent divine ideals.

And further, all that the mind borrows from its own ideal content it is able, even in the direction of external existence, to endow with permanence. The individual living thing on the contrary is transitory; it vanishes and is unstable in its external aspect. The work of art persists. At the same time it is not mere continuation, but rather the form and pressure thereon of the mintage of soul-life which constitutes its true pre-eminence as contrasted with Nature’s reality.

But this higher position we have thus assigned to the work of art is yet further contested by another prevalent conception of ordinary ideas. It is contended that Nature and all that proceeds from her are a work of God, created by His goodness and wisdom. The work of art is on the contrary merely a human product fashioned by human hands according to human design. The fallacy implied in this contrast between the products of Nature viewed as a divine creation and human activity as of wholly finite energy con40sists in the apparent assumption that God is not operative in and through man, but limits the sphere of His activity to Nature alone. We must place this false conception entirely on one side if we are desirous of penetrating to the true idea of art; or rather, as opposed to such a conception we ought to accept the extreme opposite thereto, namely, that God is more honoured by that which mind makes and creates than by everything brought into being and fashioned in the natural process. For not only is there a divinity in man, but it is actually effective in him in a form which is adequate to the essential nature of God in a far higher degree than in the work of Nature. God is a Spirit, and it is only in man that the medium, through which the Divine passes, possesses the form of spirit fully conscious of the activity in which it manifests its ideal presence. [400]In Nature the medium correspondent to this is the unconscious sensuous¹ and external materia, which is by many degrees inferior to consciousness in its worth. In the products of art God works precisely as He works through the phenomena of Nature. The divine substance, however, as it is asserted in the work of art has secured, being begotten of spirit life itself, a highway commensurable to its existence; determinate existence in the unconscious sensuousness of Nature is not a mode of appearance adequate to the Divine Being.

(d) Assuming, then, that the work of art is a creation of man in the sense that it is the offspring of mind or spirit we have still a further question in conclusion, which will help us to draw a more profound inference still from our previous discussion. That question is, “What is the human need which stimulates art-production?” On the one hand the artistic activity may be regarded as the mere play of accident, or human conceits, which might just as well be left alone as attempted. For, it may be urged, there are other and better 41means for carrying into effect the aims of art, and man bears within himself higher and more weighty interests, than art is capable of satisfying. In contrast to such a view art appears to originate in a higher impulse, and to satisfy more elevated needs, nay, at certain times the highest and most absolute of all, being, as it has been, united to the most embracing views of entire epochs and nations upon the constitution of the world and the nature of their religion.

This inquiry, however, concerning a necessity for art which shall not be merely contingent, but absolute, we are not as yet able to answer with completeness; it demands, in fact, a concreter mode of exposition than is compatible with the form of this introduction. We must accordingly deem it sufficient for the present merely to establish the following points.

The universal and absolute want from which art on its side of essential form¹ arises originates in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness, in other words that he renders explicit to himself, and from his own substance,² what he is and all in fact that exists. The objects of Nature exist exclusively in immediacy and once for all.³ Man, on the contrary, as mind reduplicates himself. He is, to start with, an object of Nature as other objects; but in addition to this, and no less truly, he exists for himself; he observes himself, makes himself present to his imagination and thought, and only in virtue of this active power of self-realization is he actually mind or spirit. This consciousness of himself man acquires in a twofold way; in the first instance theoretically. This is so in so far as he is under a constraint to bring himself in his own inner life to consciousness—all which moves in the human heart, all that surges up and strives therein—and generally, so far as he is impelled to make himself an object of perception [401]and conception, to fix for himself definitively that which thought discovers as essential being, and in all that he summons out of himself, no less than in that which is received from without, to recognize only himself. And secondly, this realization is effected through a 42practical activity. In other words man possesses an impulse to assert himself in that which is presented him in immediacy, in that which is at hand as an external something to himself, and by doing so at the same time once more to recognize himself therein. This purpose he achieved by the alteration he effects in such external objects, upon which he imprints the seal of his inner life, rediscovering in them thereby the features of his own determinate nature. And man does all this, in order that he may as a free agent divest the external world of its stubborn alienation from himself—and in order that he may enjoy in the configuration of objective fact an external reality simply of himself. The very first impulse of the child implies in essentials this practical process of deliberate change in external fact. A boy throws stones into the stream, and then looks with wonder at the circles which follow in the water, regarding them as a result in which he sees something of his own doing. This human need runs through the most varied phenomena up to that particular form of self-reproduction in the external fact which is presented us in human art. And it is not merely in relation to external objects that man acts thus. He treats himself, that is, his natural form, in a similar manner: he will not permit it to remain as he finds it; he alters it deliberately. This is the rational ground of all ornament and decoration, though it may be as barbarous, tasteless, entirely disfiguring, nay, as injurious as the crushing of the feet of Chinese ladies, or the slitting of ears and lips. For it is among the really cultured alone that a change of figure, behaviour, and every mode and manner of self-expression will issue in harmony with the dictates of mental elevation.¹

This universal demand for artistic expression² is based on the rational impulse in man’s nature to exalt both the world of his soul experience and that of Nature for himself into the conscious embrace of mind as an object in which he rediscovers himself. He satisfies the demand of this spiritual freedom by making explicit to his inner life all that exists, no less than from the further point of view giving a 43realized external embodiment to the self made thus explicit. And by this reduplication of what is his own he places before the vision and within the cognition of himself and others what is within him. This is the free rationality of man, in which art as also all action and [402]knowledge originates. We shall investigate at a later stage the specific need for art as compared with that for other political and ethical action, or that for religious ideas and scientific knowledge.

2. We have hitherto considered the work of art under the aspect that it is fashioned by man; we will now pass over to the second part of our definition, that it is produced for his sense-apprehension, and consequently is to a more or less degree under obligations to a sensuous medium.

(a) This reflection has been responsible for the inference that the function of fine art is to arouse feeling, more precisely the feeling which suits us—that is, pleasant feeling. From such a point of view writers have converted the investigation of fine art into a treatise on the emotions and asked what kind of feelings art ought to excite—take fear, for example, and compassion—with the further question how such can be regarded as pleasant, how, in short, the contemplation of a misfortune can bring satisfaction. This tendency of reflection dates for the most part from the times of Moses Mendelssohn, and many such trains of reasoning may be found in his writings. A discussion of this kind, however, did not carry the problem far. Feeling is the undefined obscure region of spiritual life. What is felt remains cloaked in the form of the separate personal experience under its most abstract persistence;¹ and for this reason the distinctions of feeling are wholly abstract; they are not distinctions which apply to the subject-matter itself. To take examples—fear, anxiety, care, dread, are of course one type of emotion under various modifications; but in part they are purely quantitative degrees of intensity, and in part forms which reflect no light on their content itself, but are indifferent to it. In the case of fear, for instance, an existence is assumed, for which the individual in question 44possesses an interest, but sees at the same time the negative approach which threatens to destroy this existence, and thereupon discovers in immediate fusion within himself the above interest and the approach of that negative as a contradictory affection of his personal life. A fear of this sort, however, does not on its own account condition any particular content; it may associate with itself subject-matter of the most opposed and varied character. The feeling merely as such is in short a wholly empty form of a subjective state. Such a form may no doubt in certain cases itself be essentially complex, as we find it is with hope, pain, joy, and pleasure; it may also in this very complexity appropriate various modes of content, as, for example, we have a feeling of justice, an ethical feeling, a [403]sublime religious feeling, and so forth; but despite the fact that a content of this kind is present in different modes of feeling, no light whatever is thereby thrown on such content which will disclose its essential and definite character. The feeling throughout remains a purely subjective state which belongs to me, one in which the concrete fact vanishes, as though contracted to a vanishing point in the most abstract of all spheres.¹ For this reason an inquiry over the nature of the emotions which art ought or ought not to arouse, comes simply to a standstill in the undefined; it is an investigation which deliberately abstracts from genuine content and its concrete substance and notion. Reflection upon feeling is satisfied with the observation of the personal emotional state and its singularity, instead of penetrating and sounding the matter for study, in other words the work of art, and in doing so bidding good-bye to the wholly subjective state and its conditions. In feeling, however, it is just this subjective state void of content which is not merely accepted, but becomes the main thing; and that is precisely why people are so proud of having emotions. And for no other reason that is why such an investigation is tedious owing to its indefinite 45nature and emptiness, and even repellent in its attention to trivial personal idiosyncrasies.

(b) Inasmuch, however, as the work of art is not merely concerned with exciting some kind of emotion or other—for this is an object it would share without any valid distinction with eloquence, historical composition, religious edification and much else—but is only a work of art in so far as it is beautiful, it occurred to reflective minds to discover a specific feeling for beauty, and a distinct sense-faculty correspondent with it. In such an inquiry it soon became clear that a sense of this kind was no definite and mere¹ instinct rigidly fixed by Nature, which was able by itself and independently to distinguish the beautiful. As a consequence the demand was made for culture as a condition precedent to such a sense, and the sense of beauty as thus cultivated was called taste, which, albeit an instructed apprehension and discovery of the beautiful, was none the less assumed to persist in the character of immediate feeling. We have already discussed the way in which abstract theory attempted to form such a sense of taste, and how external and one-sided that sense remained. While the critical sense generally of the time when such ideas were in currency was lacking in the universality of its principles, as a specific critique of particular works of art it was less concerned to substantiate a judgment more decisive than hitherto—indeed the [404]material to effectuate this was not as yet forthcoming—than to promote in a general way the cultivation of such a taste.² Conse46quently this educative process also came to a halt in the region of the more indefinite, and merely busied itself by its reflections in the fitting out of feeling as a sense of beauty in such a way that beauty could immediately be discovered whenever and wherever it might chance to appear. The real depth of the subject-matter remained notwithstanding a closed book to such a taste. Profundity of this kind demands not merely sensitive reception and abstract thought, but the reason in its concrete grasp and the most sterling qualities of soul-life. Taste on the contrary is merely directed to the outside surfaces, which are the playground of the feelings, and upon which one-sided principles may very well pass as currency. But for this very reason our so-called good taste is scared by every kind of profounder artistic effect, and is dumb where the ideal significance¹ is in question, and all mere externalities and accessories vanish. For when great passions and the movements of a profound soul assert themselves, we do not bother ourselves any more with the finer distinctions of taste and its retail traffic in trifles. It is² conscious that genius leaves such ground far behind it in its stride; and shrinking before that power feels on its part far from comfortable, not knowing very well which way to turn.

(c) Thus it is the further change has come about that critics of art-production no longer have an eye simply to the education of taste, or are intent upon the illustration of such a sense. The connoisseur, or art-scholar, has taken the place of the man, or judge of artistic taste. The positive side of art-scholarship, in so far as it implies a sound and exhaustive acquaintance with the entire embrace of what is distinctive and peculiar in a given work of art, we have already maintained to be a necessary condition of artistic research. A work of art, owing to its nature, which, if it is material from one point of view, is also related to a particular person, originates from specific conditions of the most varied kind, among which as exceptionally important we may mention the date and place of its origins, the characteristic personality of the artist, and, above all, the degree of executive accomplishment secured by the art. All 47these points of view have to be taken into consideration if we wish to obtain a view and knowledge of such a work which is clear in its outlines, and founded on a true basis, nay, even wish to enjoy it rightly. It is with these that our art-scholarship is mainly occupied; and all that it can do for us in this way should be gratefully accepted. Though it is quite [405]true such art-scholarship must be reckoned as of essential importance, it ought not to be regarded as the sole, or indeed the highest, constituent in the relation of the contemplative spirit to a work of art and art generally. Such art-scholarship (this is the defective tendency) may restrict itself wholly to a knowledge of purely external characteristics, either on the side of technique or historical condition, or in other directions; it may continue to possess the barest inkling of the true nature of a given work, or simply no knowledge at, all. It may even form a depreciatory verdict on the value of profounder inquiries as compared with purely matter of fact, technical, and historical knowledge. Yet even so an art-scholarship, assuming it to be really genuine and thorough, at least proceeds upon grounds and knowledge which are definite, and an intelligent judgment; and it is association with such that our more accurate review of the distinct, if also to some extent exterior, aspects of a work of art, and our estimate of their relative significance, is secured.

(d) Following the above observations upon the modes of inquiry which were suggested by that aspect of a work of art in which, as itself an object with a material medium, it possessed an essential relation to man as himself receptive through sense, we will now examine this point of view in its more essential connection with art itself. We propose to do this partly (α) in respect to the art-product viewed as an object, partly (β) as regards the personal characteristics of the artist, his genius, talent, and so forth. We do not, however, propose to enter into matter which can in this connection exclusively proceed from the knowledge of art according to its universal concept.¹ The truth is we are not as yet in the full sense on scientific ground; we have merely reached the province of external reflection.

(α) There is no question, then, that a work of art is 48presented to sensuous apprehension. It is submitted to the emotional sense, whether outer or inner, to sensuous perception and the imaged sense, precisely as the objective world is so presented around us, or as is our own inward sensitive nature. Even a speech, for example, may be addressed to the sensuous imagination and feeling. Notwithstanding this fact, however, the work of art is not exclusively directed to the sensuous apprehension, viewed, that is, as an object materially conditioned. Its position is of the nature, that along with its sensuous presentation it is fundamentally addressed to the mind. The mind is intended to be affected by it and to receive some kind of satisfaction in it.

[406]This function of the work of art at once makes it clear how it is that it is in no way intended to be a natural product or, on the side where it impinges on Nature, to possess the living principle of Nature. This, at least, is a fact whether the natural product is ranked lower or higher than a mere work of art, as people are accustomed to express themselves in the tone of depreciation.

In other words the sensuous aspect of a work of art has a right to determinate existence only in so far as it exists for the human mind, not, however, in so far as itself, as a material object, exists for itself independently.

If we examine more closely in what way the sensuous materia is presented to man we find that what is so can be placed under various relations to the mind.

(αα) The lowest in grade and that least compatible with relation to intelligence is purely sensuous sensation. It consists primarily in mere looking, listening, just as in times of mental overstrain it may often be a relaxation to go about without thought, and merely listen and have a look round. The mind, however, does not rest in the mere apprehension of external objects through sight and hearing; it makes them objective to its own inward nature, which thereupon is impelled itself to give effect to itself in these things as a further step under a sensuous mode, in other words, it relates itself to them as desire. In this appetitive relation to the external world man, as a sensuous¹ particular thing, stands in a relation of opposition to things in general 49as in the same way particulars. He dos not address himself to them with open mind and the universal ideas of thought; he retains an isolated position, with its personal impulses and interests, relatively to objects as fixed in their obduracy as himself, and makes himself at home in them by using them, or eating them up altogether, and, in short, gives effect to his self-satisfaction by the sacrifice he makes of them. In this negative relation desire requires for itself not merely the superficial show of external objects, but the actual things themselves in their material concrete existence. Mere pictures of the wood, which it seeks to make use of, or of the animals, which it hopes to eat up, would be of no service to desire. Just as little is it possible for desire to suffer the object to remain in its freedom; its craving is just this to force it to annihilate this self-subsistency and freedom of external facts, and to demonstrate that these things are only there to be destroyed and devoured. But at the same time the particular person is neither himself free, begirt as he is by the particular limited and tran[407]sitory interests of his desires, for his definite acts do not proceed from the essential universality and rationality of his will, neither is he free relatively to the external world, for desire¹ remains essentially determined by things and related to them.

This relation, then, of desire is not that in which man is related to the work of art. He suffers it to exist in its free independence as an object; he associates himself with it without any craving of this kind, rather as with an object reflective of himself,² which exists solely for the contemplative faculty of mind. For this reason, as we have said, the work of art, although it possesses sensuous existence, does not require sensuous concrete existence, nor yet the animated life of such objects. Or, rather, we should add, it ought not to remain on such a level, in so far as its true function is exclusively to satisfy spiritual interests, and to shut the door on all approach to mere desire. Hence we can understand 50how it is that practical desire rates the particular works of Nature in the organic or inorganic world, which are at its service, more highly than works of art, which are obviously useless in this sense, and only contribute enjoyment to other capacities of man’s spirit.

(ββ) A second mode under which the externally present comes before the conscious subject is, as contrasted with the single sensuous perception and, active desire, the purely theoretical relation to the intelligence. The theoretic contemplation of objects has no interest in consuming the same in their particularity and satisfying or maintaining itself through the sense by their means; its object is to attain a knowledge of them in their universality, to seek out their ideal nature and principle, to comprehend them according to their notional idea. Consequently this contemplative interest is content to leave the particular things as they are, and stands aloof from them in their objective singularity, which is not the object of such a faculty’s investigation. For the rational intelligence is not a property of the particular person in the sense that desire is so; it appertains to his singularity as being itself likewise essentially universal. So long as it persists in this relation of universality to the objects in question, it is his reason in its universal potency which is attempting to discover itself in Nature, and thereby the inward or essential being of the natural objects, which his sensuous existence does not present under its mode of immediacy, although such existence is founded therein. This interest of contemplation, the satisfaction of which is the task of science, is, however, shared in this scientic form just as little by art as it shared in the common table of those impulses of the purely practical desire. [408]Science can, it is true, take as its point of departure the sensuous thing in its singularity, and possess itself of some conception, how this individual thing is present in its specific colour or form. But for all that this isolated thing of sense as such possesses no further relation to mind, inasmuch as the interest of intelligence makes for the universal, the law, the thought and notion of the object, and consequently not only does it forsake it in its immediate singularity, but it actually transforms it within the region of idea,¹ 51converting a concrete object of sense into an abstract subject-matter of thought, that is converting it into something other than the same object of its sensuous perception actually was. The artistic interest does not follow such a process, and is distinct from that of science for this reason. The contemplation of art restricts its interest simply in the way in which the work of art, as external object, in the directness of its definition, and in the singularity wherein it appears to sense, is manifested in all its features of colour, form, and sound, or as a single isolated vision of the whole; it does not go so far beyond the immediately received objective character as to propose, as is the case with science, the ideal or conceptive thinking of this particular objectivity under the terms of the rational and universal notion which underlies it.

The interest of art, therefore, is distinguishable from the practical interest of desire in virtue of the fact that it suffers its object to remain in its free independence, whereas desire applies it, even to the point of destruction, to its own uses. The contemplation of art, on the other hand, differs from that of a scientific intelligence in an analogous way¹ in virtue of the fact that it cherishes an interest for the object in its isolated existence, and is not concerned to transform the same into terms of universal thought and notion.

(γγ) It follows, then, that, though the sensuous materia is unquestionably present in a work of art, it is only as surface or show of the sensuous that it is under any necessity to appear. In the sensuous appearance of the work of art it is neither the concrete material stuff, the empirically perceived completeness and extension of the internal organism which is the object of desire, nor is it the universal thought of pure ideality, which in either case the mind seeks for. Its aim is the sensuous presence, which, albeit suffered to persist in its sensuousness, is equally entitled to be delivered from the framework of its purely material substance. Consequently, as compared with the immediately envisaged and incorporated object of Nature, the sensuous presence [409]in the 52work of art is transmuted to mere semblance or show, and the work of art occupies a midway ground, with the directly perceived objective world on one side and the ideality of pure thought on the other. It is not as yet pure thought, but, despite the element of sensuousness which adheres to it, it is no longer purely material existence, in the sense at least that stones, plants, and organic life are such. The sensuous element in a work of art is rather itself somewhat of ideal intension,¹ which, however, as not being actually the ideal medium of thought, is still externally presented at the same time as an object. This semblance of the sensuous presents itself to the mind externally as the form, visible appearance, and harmonious vibration of things. This is always assuming that it suffers the objects to remain in their freedom as objective facts, and does not seek to penetrate into their inward essence by abstract thought, for by doing so they would (as above explained) entirely cease to exist for it in their external singularity.

For this reason the sensuous aspect of art is only related to the two theoretical² senses of sight and hearing; smell, on the other hand, taste, and the feeling of touch are excluded from the springs of art’s enjoyment. Smell, taste, and 53touch come into contact with matter simply as such,¹ and with the immediate sensuous qualities of the same; smell with the material volatization through the air; taste with the material dissolution of substance, and touch or mere bodily feeling with qualities such as heat, coldness, smoothness, and so forth. On this account these senses cannot have to do with the objects of art, which ought to subsist in their actual and very independence, admitting of no purely sensuous or rather physical relation. The pleasant for such senses is not the beauty of art. Thus art on its sensuous side brings before us deliberately merely a shadow-world of shapes, tones, and imaged conceptions,² and it is quite beside the point to maintain that it is simply a proof of the impotence and limitations of man that he can only present us with the surface of the physical world, mere schemata, when he calls into being his creative works. In art these sensuous shapes and tones are not offered as exclusively for themselves and their form to our direct vision. They are presented with the intent to secure in such shape satisfaction for higher and more spiritual interests, inasmuch as they are mighty to summon an echo and response in the human spirit evoked from all depths of its conscious life. In this way the sensuous is spiritualized in art, or, in other words, the life of spirit comes to dwell in it under sensuous guise.

[410](β) For this reason, however, a product of art is only possible in so far as it has received its passage through the 54mind, and has originated from the productive activity of mind. This brings us to another question we have to answer, and it is this: “How is the sensuous or material aspect, which is imperative as a condition of art, operative in the artist as conjoined to his personal productive activity?”¹ Now this mode or manner of artistic production contains, as an activity personal to the artist, in essentials just the same determinants which we found posited in the work of art. It must be a spiritual activity, which, however, at the same time possesses in itself the element of sensuousness and immediacy. It is neither, on the one hand, purely mechanical work, such as is purely unconscious facility in sleight of hand upon physical objects, or a stereotyped activity according to teachable rule of thumb; nor, on the other hand, is it a productive process of science, which tends to pass from sensuous things to abstract ideas and thoughts, or is active exclusively in the medium of pure thought. In contrast to these the two aspects of mental idea and sensuous material must in the artistic product be united. For example, it would be possible in the case of poetical compositions to attempt to embody what was the subject-matter in the form of prosaic thought in the first instance, and only after doing so to attach to the same imaginative ideas rhymes and so on, so that as a net result such imagery would be appendent to the abstract reflections as so much ornament and decoration. An attempt of this kind, however, could only lead us to a poor sort of poetry, for in it we should have operative a twofold kind of activity in its separation, which in the activity of genuine artistic work only holds good in inseparable unity. It is this true kind of creative activity which forms what is generally described as the artistic imagination. It is the rational element, which in its import as spirit only exists, in so far as it actively forces its way into the presence of consciousness, yet likewise, and only subject to this condition, displays all its content to it55self under a sensuous form. This activity possesses therefore a spiritual content, but it clothes the same in sensuous image, and for this reason that it is only able to come to a knowledge of the same under this sensuous garb. We may compare such a process with that of a man of experience in life, a man, shall we add, of real geniality and wit, who—while at the same time being fully conscious in what the main importance of life consists, what are the things which essentially bind men together, what moves them and is the mainspring of their lives—nevertheless has neither brought home this content in universal maxims, nor indeed is able to unfold [411]it to others in the generalities of the reflective process, but makes these mature results of his intelligence without exception clear to himself and others in particular cases, whether real or invented, or by examples and such like which hit the mark. For in the ideas of such a man everything shapes itself into the concrete image determinate in its time and place, to which therefore the addition of names and any other detail of external condition causes no difficulty. Yet such a kind of imagination rather rests on the recollection of conditions, he has lived through, actual experience, than it is a creative power of itself. Memory preserves and renews the particularity and external fashion of such previous events with all their more distinct circumstances, but on the other hand does not suffer the universal to appear independently. The creative imagination of an artist is the imagination of a great mind and a big heart; it is the grasp and excogitation of ideas and shapes, and, in fact, nothing less than this grasp of the profoundest and most embracing human interests in the wholly definite presentation of imagery borrowed from objective experience. A consequence of this is, that imagination of this type¹ is based 56in a certain sense on a natural gift, a general talent for it, as we say, because its creative power essentially implies an aspect of sense presentation. It is no doubt not unusual to speak in the same way of scientific “talent.” The sciences, however, merely presuppose the general capacity for thought, which does not possess, as imagination does, together with its intellectual activity, a reference to the concrete testimony of Nature, but rather precisely abstracts from the activity that form in which we find it in Nature. It would be, therefore, truer to the mark if we said there is no specific scientific talent in the sense of a purely natural endowment. Imagination,¹ on the other hand, combines within it a mode of instinct-like creativeness. In other words the essential plasticity and material element in a work of art is subjectively present in the artist as part of his native disposition and impulse,² and as his unconscious activity belongs in part to that which man receives straight from Nature. No doubt the entire talent and genius of an individual is not wholly 57exhausted by that we describe as natural capability. The creation of art is quite as much a spiritual and self-cognized process; but for all that we affirm that its spirituality contains an element of plastic or configurative facility which Nature¹ confers on it. For this reason, though almost anybody can reach a certain point in art, yet, in order to pass beyond this—and it is here that the art in question really begins—a talent for art which is inborn and of a higher order altogether is indispensable.

[412]Considered simply as a natural basis a talent of this kind asserts itself for the most part in early youth, and is manifested in the restless persistency, ever intent with vivacity and alertness, to create artistic shapes in some particular sensuous medium, and to make this mode of expression and utterance the unique one or the one of main importance and most suitable. And thus also a virtuosity up to a certain point in the technique of art which is arrived at with ease is a sign of inborn talent. A sculptor finds everything convertible into plastic shape, and from early days takes to modeling clay; and so on generally whatever men of such innate powers have in their minds, whatever excites and moves their souls, becomes forthwith a plastic figure, a drawing, a melody, or a poem.

(γ) Thirdly, and in conclusion: the content of art is also in some respects borrowed from the objective world perceived in sense, that is Nature; or, in any case, if the content is also of a spiritual character, it can only be grasped in such a way, that the spiritual element therein, as human relations, for example, are displayed in the form of phenomena which possess objective reality.

3. There is yet another question to solve, namely, what the interest or the End is, which man proposes to himself in the creation of the content embodied by a work of art. This was, in fact, the third point of view, which we propounded relatively to the art-product. Its more detailed discussion will finally introduce us to the true notional concept of art itself.

If we take a glance at our ordinary ideas on this subject, one of the most prevalent is obviously

(a) The principle of the imitation of Nature. According 58to this view the essential aim or object of art consists in imitation, by which is understood a facility in copying natural forms as present to us in a manner which shall most fully correspond to such facts. The success of such an exact representation of Nature is assumed to afford us complete satisfaction.

(α) Now in this definition there is to start with absolutely nothing but the formal aim to bring about the bare repetition a second time by man, so far as his means will permit of this, of all that was already in the external world, precisely too in the way it is there. A repetition of this sort may at once be set down as

(αα) A superfluous task for the reason that everything which pictures, theatrical performances represent by way of imitation—animals, natural scenery, incidents of human life—we have already elsewhere before us in our gardens or at home, or in other examples of the [413]more restricted or extended reaches of our personal acquaintance. Looked at, moreover, more closely, such a superfluity of energy can hardly appear otherwise than a presumptuous trifling; it is so because

(ββ) It lags so far behind Nature. In other words art is limited in its means of representation. It can only produce one-sided illusions, a semblance, to take one example, of real fact addressed exclusively to one sense. And, moreover, if it does wholly rely on the bare aim of mere imitation, instead of Nature’s life all it gives us ever is the mere pretence of its substance. For some such reason the Turks, who are Mohammedans, will not put up with any pictures or copies of men and other objects. When James Bruce, in his travels through Abyssinia, showed a painted fish to a Turk, that worthy was at first astonished; but, quickly recovering himself, he made answer as follows: “If this fish shall rise up against you at the last day, and say, ‘You have certainly given me a body, but no living soul,’ how are you going to justify yourself against such a complaint?” The prophet himself, moreover, if we may believe the Sunna, said to the two women Ommi Hubiba and Ommi Selma, who told him of certain pictures in the Æthiopian churches: “These pictures will rise up in judgment against their creators on the Last Day.” There are, no doubt, no less examples of com59pletely deceptive imitation. The painted grapes of Zeuxis have been accepted from antiquity and long after as an instance of art’s triumph, and also of that of the principle of imitation, because, we are told, actual doves pecked at them. We might add to this ancient example that more modern one of Bültner’s monkey, which bit to pieces a painted cockchafer in Rösel’s “Diversions of Insects,” and was consequently forgiven by his master, although he destroyed by this means a fine copy of the precious work, because he proved thus the excellence of its illustrations. But if we will only reflect a moment on such and other instances we can only come to the conclusion that instead of praising works of art, because they have deceived even doves and monkeys, the foolish people ought to be condemned who imagine that the quality of a work of art is enhanced if they are able to proclaim an effect of the same so miserable as the supreme and last word they can say for it. In short, to sum up, we may state emphatically that in the mere business of imitation art cannot maintain its rivalry with Nature, and if it makes the attempt it must look like a worm which undertakes to crawl after an elephant.

(γγ) Having regard, then, to this invariable failure, that is, relative failure of human imitation as contrasted with the natural prototype, we have no end left us but the pleasure offered by sleight of [414]hand in its effort to produce something which resembles Nature. And it is unquestionably a fact that mankind are able to derive enjoyment from the attempt to reproduce with their individual labour, skill, and industry what they find around them. But a delight and admiration of this kind also becomes, if taken alone,¹ indeed just in proportion as the copy follows slavishly the thing copied, so much the more icily null and cold, or brings its reaction of surfeit and repugnance. There are portraits which, as has been drily remarked, are positively shameless in their likeness;² and Kant brings forward a further example of this pleasure in imitation pure and simple to the effect that we are very soon tired of a man—and there really are such—who is able to imitate the nightingale’s song quite perfectly; 60for we no sooner find that it is a man who is producing the strain than we have had enough of it. We then take it to be nothing but a clever trick, neither the free outpouring of Nature, nor yet a work of art. We expect, in short, from the free creative power of men something quite other than a music of this kind, which only retains our interest when, as in the case of the nightingale’s note, it breaks forth in unpremeditated fashion, resembling in this respect the rhythmic flood of human feeling, from the native springs of its life. And as a general rule this delight we experience in the skill of imitation can only be of a restricted character; it becomes a man better to derive enjoyment from that which he brings to birth from himself. In this respect the invention of every insignificant technical product is of higher rank; and mankind may feel more proud at having invented the hammer, nail, and so forth, than in making themselves adepts as imitators. For this abstract zest in the pursuit of imitation is on the same lines as the feat of the man who had taught himself to throw lentils through a small aperture without missing. He made an exhibition of this feat to Alexander, and Alexander merely made him a present as a reward for this art, empty and useless as it was, of a bushel of lentils.

(β) Inasmuch as, moreover, the principle of imitation, is purely formal, objective beauty itself disappears, if that principle is accepted as the end. For the question is then no longer what is the constitution of that which is to be imitated, but simply whether the copy is correct or no. The object and the content of the beautiful comes to be regarded as a matter of indifference. When, in other words, putting the principle of mere imitation on one side, we speak, in connection with animals, human beings, places, actions, and characters, of a distinction between beauty and ugliness, it remains none the less the fact that relatively to such a principle we are referring to a distinction [415]which does not properly belong to an art for which we have appropriated this principle of imitation to the exclusion of all others. In such a case, therefore, whenever we select objects and attempt to distinguish between their beauty and ugliness, owing to this absence of a standard we can apply to the infinite forms of Nature, we have in the final resort only left us the personal 61taste, which is fixed by no rule, and admits of no discussion. And, in truth, if we start, in the selection of objects for representation, from that which mankind generally discover as beautiful and ugly, and accept accordingly for artistic imitation, in other words, form their particular taste, there is no province in the domain of the objective world which is not open to us, and which is hardly likely to fail to secure its admirer. At any rate, among men we may assume that, though the case of every husband and his wife may be disputed, yet at least every bridegroom regards his bride as beautiful, very possibly being the only person who does so; and that an individual taste for a beauty of this kind admits of no fixed rules at all may be regarded as a bit of luck for both parties. If, moreover, we cast a glance wholly beyond mere individuals and their accidental taste to that of nations, this again is full of diversity and opposition. How often we hear it repeated that a European beauty would not please a Chinaman, or even a Hottentot—a Chinaman having a totally distinct notion of beauty from that of a black man, and the black man in his turn from that of a European. Indeed, if we consider the works of art of those extra-European peoples, their images of gods, for instance, which have been imaginatively conceived as worthy of veneration and sublime, they can only appear to us as frightful idols; their music will merely ring in our ears as an abominable noise, while, from the opposite point of view, such aliens will regard our sculptures, paintings, and musical compositions as having no meaning or actually ugly.

(γ) But even assuming that we abstract from an objective principle of art, and retain the beautiful as established on the subjective and individual taste, we shall soon discover, from the point of view of art itself, that the imitation of natural objects, which appeared to be a universal principle, and indeed one secured by important authorities, is not to be relied upon, at least under this general and wholly abstract conception of it. If we look at the particular arts we cannot fail to observe that, albeit painting and sculpture portray objects which resemble those of Nature, or the type of which is essentially borrowed from Nature, the works of architecture on the contrary—and this, too, is one of the fine arts—quite as little as the compositions of 62poetry, to [416]the extent at least that these latter are not restricted to mere description, cannot justly be described as imitations of Nature. At any rate, if we are desirous of maintaining such a thesis with respect to the arts thus excluded, we should find ourselves forced to make important deviations from the track, in order to condition our proposition in various ways, and level down our so-called truth at least to the plane of probability. But once accept probability, and we should again be confronted with a great difficulty in determining precisely what is and what is not probable; and in the end no one could really think of or succeed, even if he did so, in excluding from poetry all compositions of an entirely capricious and completely imaginative¹ character.

The end or object of art must therefore consist in something other than the purely formal² imitation of what is given to objective sense, which invariably can merely call into being technical legerdemain and not works of art.³ It is no doubt an essential constituent of a work of art that it should have natural forms as a foundation, because the mode of its representation is in external form, and thereby along with it in that of natural phenomena. In painting it is obviously an important study to learn to copy with accuracy colours in their mutual relations, such as light effects and reflections, and so forth, and, with no less accuracy, the forms and shapes of objects carried into their most subtle gradations of line. It is in this respect that in modern times more particularly the principle of the imitation of Nature and naturalism generally has come into vogue. The object has been to recall an art, which has deteriorated 63into weakness and nebulosity, to the strength and determinate outlines of Nature, or, in yet another direction, as against the purely arbitrary caprice and convention of a studio, which is in truth as remote from Nature as it is from art, and merely indicates the path of art’s declension, to assert the claim of the legitimate, direct, and independent, no less than coherent stability of natural fact. But while admitting that from a certain point of view such an effort is reasonable enough, yet for all that the naturalism which it demands, taken by itself, is neither the substantive thing, not yet of primary importance, in the true basis of art; and although the external fact in its natural appearance constitutes an element of essential value, yet the objective fact alone does not supply the standard of rightness, nor is the mere imitation of external phenomena, in their external shape that is, the end of art.

(b) And as a consequence of this we have the further question—“What is the true content of art, and with what aim is that content brought before us?” On this head we are confronted by the common [417]opinion that it is the task and object of art to bring before our sense, feeling, and power of emulation¹ every thing that the spirit of man can perceive or conceive. Art has in short to realize for us the well-known saying, “Nihil humani a me alienum puto.” Its object is therefore declared to be that of arousing and giving life to slumbering emotions, inclinations, passions of every description, of filling the heart up to the brim; of compelling mankind, whether cultured or the reverse, to pass through all that the human soul carries in its most intimate and mysterious chambers, all that it is able to experience and reproduce, all that the heart is able to stir and evoke in its depths and its countlessly manifold possibilities; and yet further to deliver to the domain of feeling and the delight of our vision all that the mind may possess of essential and exalted being in its thought and the Idea—that majestic hierarchy of the noble, eternal, and true; and no less to interpret for us misfortune and misery, wickedness and crime; to make the hearts of men realize through and 64through¹ all that is atrocious and dreadful, no less than every kind of pleasure and blessedness; and last of all to start the imagination like a rover among the day-dream playing-fields of the fancy, there to revel in the seductive mirage of visions and emotions which captivate the senses. All this infinitely manifold content—so it is held—it is the function of art to explore, in order that by this means the experience of our external life may be repaired of its deficiences, and yet from a further point of view that the passions we share with all men² may be excited, not merely that the experiences of life may not have us unmoved, but that we ourselves may thereafter long to make ourselves open channels of a universal experience. Such a stimulus is not presented on the plane of actual experience itself;³ but can only come through the semblance of it, that is to say through the illusions which art, in its creations, substitutes for the actual world. And the possibility of such a deception, by means of the semblances of art, depends on the fact that all reality must for man pass through the medium of the vision and imaginative idea; and it is only after such a passage that it penetrates the emotional life and the will. In such a process it is of no consequence whether it is immediate external reality which claims his attention, or whether the result is effected by some other way, in other words by means of images, symbols, and ideas, which contain and display the content of such actuality. Men are able to imagine things, which do not actually exist, as if they did exist. Consequently it is precisely the same thing for our emotional life, whether it is the objective world or merely the show of the same, in virtue of which a [418]situation, a relation, or any content of life, in short, is brought home to us. Either mode is equally able to stir in us an echo to the essential secret which it carries, whether it be in grief or joy, in agitation or convulsion, and can cause to flow through us the feelings and passions of anger, hate, pity, anxiety, fear, love, reverence and admiration, honour and fame.

65The awakening of every kind of emotion in us, the drawing our soul through every content of life, the realization of all these movements of soul-life by means of a presence which is only external as an illusion—this it is which, in the opinion described, is pre-eminently regarded as the peculiar and transcendent power of artistic creation.

We must not, however, overlook the fact that in this view of art as a means to imprint on the soul and the mind what is good and evil alike, to make man more strong in the pursuit of what is noblest, no less than enervate his definite course,¹ by transporting his emotional life through the most sensuous and selfish desires, the task as yet proposed to art remains throughout of an entirely formal character; without possessing independently an assured aim all that art can offer is the empty form for every possible kind of ideal and formative content.

(c) As a matter of fact art [also has*] this formal side, namely, that it is able to bring before our senses and feeling and artistically adorn every possible kind of material, precisely as the thoughts of ordinary reflection² elaborate every possible subject-matter and modes of action, supplying the same with its equipment of reasons and vindications. In the presence, however, of such a variety of content we cannot fail to observe that these diversified emotions and ideas, which it is assumed art has to stimulate or enforce, intersect each other, contradict and mutually cancel each other. Indeed, under this aspect, the more art inspires men to emotions thus opposed, to that extent precisely it merely enlarges the cleavage in their feelings and passions, and sets them staggering about in Bacchantic riot, or passes over into sophistry and scepticism precisely as your ordinary free thinkers do. This variety of the material of art itself compels us, therefore, not to remain satisfied with so formal a determination. Our rational nature forces its way into this motley array of discord, and demands to see the resur66rection of a higher and more universal purpose from these elements despite their opposition, and to be conscious of its attainment. Just in a similar manner the social life of mankind and the State are no doubt credited with the aim that in them all human capacities and all individual potencies should meet with ex[419]pansion and expression in all their features and tendencies. But in opposition to so formal a view there very quickly crops up the question in what unity these manifold manifestations are to be concentrated, and what single end they must have for their fundamental concept and ultimate end. Just as in the case of the notional concept of the human State so too there arises in that of human art the need, as to a part thereof, for an end common to the particular aspects, no less than in part for one which is more exalted and substantive in its character.¹

As such a substantive end the conclusion of reflection is readily brought home to us that art possesses at once the power and function to mitigate the savagery of mere desires.

(α) With regard to this first conception we have merely to ascertain what characteristic peculiar to art implies this possibility of eliminating this rawness of desire, and of fettering and instructing the impulses and passions. Coarseness in general has its ground-root in an unmitigated self-seeking of sensuous impulses, which take their plunge off and are exclusively intent on the satisfaction of their concupiscence. Sensual desire is, however, all the more brutal and domineering, in proportion as, in its isolation and confinement, it appropriates the entire man, so that he does not retain the power to separate himself in his universal capacity from this determinacy and to maintain the conscious presence of such universality.² Even if the man in such a case exclaims, “the 67passion is mightier than myself,” though it is true no doubt that for that man’s mind the abstract ego is separate from the particular passion, yet it is purely so in a formal way. All that such a separation amounts to is that as against the force of the passion the ego, in its universal form or competency, is of no account at all. The savageness of passion consists therefore in the fusion¹ of the ego as such a universal with the confined content of its desire, so that a man no longer possesses volitional power outside this single passion. Such savageness and untamed force of the possibilities of passion art mitigates in the first instance to the extent that it brings home to the mind and imagination of man what he does actually feel and carry into effect in such a condition. And even if art restricts itself to this that it places before the vision of the mind pictures of passion, nay, even assuming such to be flattering pictures, yet for all that a power of amelioration is contained therein. At least we may say, that by this means is brought before a man’s intelligence what apart from such presentment he merely is. The man in this way contemplates his impulses and inclinations; and whereas apart from this they whirl him [420]away without giving him time to reflect, he now sees them outside himself and already, for the reason that they come before him rather as objects than a part of himself, he begins to be free from them as aliens. For this reason it may often happen that an artist, under the weight of grief, mitigates and weakens the intensity of his own emotions in their effect upon him by the artistic representation of them. Comfort, too, is to be found even in tears. The man who to start with is wholly given up to and concentrated in sorrow, is able thus, at any rate, to express that which is merely felt within in a direct way. Yet more alleviating is the utterance of such inner life in words, images, musical sound, and shapes.

It was therefore a good old custom in the case of funerals and layings-out to appoint wailing women, in order to give audible expression to grief, or generally to create an external sympathy. For manifestations of sympathy bring the content of human sorrow to the sufferer in an objective form; he is by their repetition driven to reflect upon it, and the burden is thereby made lighter. And so it has from of 68old been considered that to weep or to speak oneself out are equally means whereby freedom is secured from the oppressing burden, or at least the heart is appreciably lifted. Consequently the mitigation of the violence of passions admits of this general explanation that man is released from his unmediated confinement¹ in an emotion, becomes aware of it as a thing external to himself, to which he is consequently obliged to place himself in an ideal relation. Art, while still remaining within the sphere of the senses, faces man from the might of his sensitive experience by means of its representations. No doubt we frequently hear that pet phrase of many that it is man’s duty to remain in immediate union with Nature. Such union is in its unmediated purity nothing more or less than savagery and wildness; and art, precisely in the way that it dissolves this unity for human beings, lifts them with gentle hands over this inclosure in Nature. The way men are occupied with the objects of art’s creation remains throughout of a contemplative² character; and albeit in the first instance it educates merely an attention to the actual facts portrayed, yet over and beyond this, and with a power no less decisive, it draws man’s attention to their significance, it forces him to compare their content with that of others, and to receive without reserve the general conclusions of such a survey and all the ramifications³ such imply.

(β) To the characteristic above discussed adheres in natural sequence the second which has been predicated of art as its essential aim, namely, the purification of the passions, an instruction, that is, [421]and a building to moral completeness. For the defining rôle that art has to bridle savage nature and educate the passions remained one wholly formal and general, so that the further question must arise as to a specific kind and an essential and culminating point of such an educative process.

(αα) The doctrine of the purification of the passions shares in the defect previously noted as adhering to the mitigation 69of desires. It does, however, emphasize more closely the fact that the representations of art needed a standard, by means of which it would be possible to estimate their comparative worth and unworth. This standard is just their effectiveness to separate what is pure from that which is the reverse in the passions. Art, therefore, requires a content which is capable of expressing this purifying power, and in so far as the power to assert such effectiveness is assumed to constitute the substantive end of art, the purifying content will consist in asserting that effective power before consciousness in its universality and essentiality.¹

(ββ) It is a deduction from the point of view just described that it is the end of art to instruct. Thus, on the one hand, the peculiar character of art consists in the movement of the emotions and in the satisfaction which is found in this movement, even in fear, compassion, in painful agitation and shock—that is to say, in the satisfying concern of the feelings and passions, and to that extent in a complacent, delighted, or enthusiastic attitude to the objects of art and their presentation and effect: while, on the other hand, this artistic object is held to discover its higher standard exclusively in its power to instruct, in the fabula docet, and thereby in the usefulness, which the work of art is able to exercise on the recipient. In this respect the Horatian adage

contains, concentrated into a few words, all that in after times has been drawn out as a doctrine of art through every conceivable grade of dilution to the last extreme of insipidity.

In respect, then, to such instruction we have to ask whether the idea is that the same ought to be direct or indirect in the work of art, explicit or implicit.

Now if the question at issue is one of general importance 70to art about a universal rather than contingent purpose, such an ultimate end, on account of the essential spirituality of art, can only be itself of spiritual import; in other words, so far from being of accidental importance it must be true in virtue of its own nature and on its own [422]account. An end of this kind can only apply to instruction in so far as a genuine and essentially explicit content is brought before the mind by means of the work of art. From such a point of view we are entitled to affirm that it is the function of art to accept so much the more of a content of this nature within its compass in proportion to the nobility of its rank, and that only in the verity of such a content will it discover the standard according to which the pertinency of or the reverse of what is expressed is adjudged. Art is in truth the primary¹ instructress of peoples.

But, on the other hand, if the object of instruction is so entirely treated as an end that the universal nature of the content presented cannot fail to be asserted and rendered bluntly and on its own account explicit as abstract thesis, prosaic reflection or general maxim, rather than merely in an indirect way contained by implication in the concrete embodiment of art, then and in that case, by means of such a separation, the sensuous, plastic configuration, which is precisely that which makes the artistic product a work of art, is merely an otiose accessory, a husk, a semblance, which are expressly posited as nothing more than shell and semblance. Thereby the very nature of a work of art is abused. For the work of art ought not to bring before the imaginative vision a content in its universality as such, but rather this universality under the mode of individual concreteness and distinctive sensuous particularity. If the work in question does not conform to such a principle, but rather sets before us the generalization of its content with the express object of instruction pure and simple, then the imaginative no less than the material aspect of it are merely an external and superfluous ornament, and the work of art is 71itself a shattered thing within that ornament,¹ a ruin wherein form and content no longer appear as a mutually adherent growth. For, in the case supposed, the particular object of the senses and the ideal content apprehended by the mind² have become external to one another.

Furthermore, if the object of art is assumed to consist in utilitarian instruction of this kind, that other aspect of delight, entertainment, and diversion is simply abandoned on its own account as unessential; it has now to look for its substance to the utility of the matter of instruction, to which it is simply an accompaniment. But this amounts to saying, that art does not carry its vocation and purpose in itself, but that its fundamental conception is in something else, to which it subserves as a means. Art becomes, in short, merely one of the many means, which are either of use, or may be employed to secure, the aim of instruction. This brings us to the boundary line where art can [423]only cease to be an end on its own independent account; it is deliberately deposed either to the mere plaything of entertainment, or a mere means of instruction.

(γγ) The line of this limit is most emphasized when the question is raised as to the end or object of highest rank for the sake of which the passions have to be purified or men have to be instructed. This goal has frequently in modern-times been identified with moral improvement, and the end of art is assumed to consist in this that its function is to prepare our inclinations and impulses, and generally to conduct us to the supreme goal of moral perfection. In this view we find instruction and purification combined. The notion is that art by the insight it gives us of genuine moral goodness, in other words, through its instruction, at the same time summons us to the process of purification, and in this way alone can and ought to bring about the improvement of mankind as the right use they can make of it and its supreme object.

72With reference to the relation in which art stands to the end of improvement, we may practically say the same thing as we did about the didactic end. It may readily be admitted that art as its principle ought not to make the immoral and its advance its end. But it is one thing deliberately to make immorality the aim of its presentation and another not expressly to do so in the case of morality. It is possible to deduce an excellent moral from any work of art whatever; but such depends, of course, on a particular interpretation and consequently on the individual who draws the moral. The defence is made of the most immoral representations on the ground that people ought to become acquainted with evil and sin in order to act morally. Conversely, it has been maintained that the portrayal of Mary Magdalene, the fair sinner, who afterwards repented, has seduced many into sin, because art makes repentance look so beautiful, and you must first sin before you can repent. The doctrine of moral improvement, however logically carried out, is not merely satisfied that a moral should be conceivably deducible from a work of art through interpretation; on the contrary, it would have the moral instruction clearly made to emerge as the substantive aim of the work;¹ nay, further, it would deliberately exclude from art’s products all subjects; characters, actions, and events which fail to be moral in its own sense. For art, in distinction from history and the sciences, which have their subject-matter determined for them, has a choice in the selection of its subjects.

In order that we may be in a position to estimate this view of the moral end of art on the basis of principle, we ought above all to raise the question as to the precise standpoint of the morality which is recommended for our reception by this view. If we examine more closely the standpoint of morality such as is submitted us to-day under an enlightened interpretation,² we soon discover that its conception does not immediately coincide with that which we describe 73in a general way as virtue, respectability,¹ uprightness, and so forth. To be a respectable honest man is not sufficient to make a man moral in the sense under discussion, for morality in this sense implies reflection and the definite consciousness of what is consonant with duty, and the acts which issue from such a consciousness. Now duty is itself the law of the will, which man, however, freely establishes out of himself, and thereon is taken to determine himself to this duty for duty’s sake and its fulfilment’s sake; in other words he only does good as acting under the conviction already secured that it is the good. This law—the duty which is selected and carried into effect for duty’s sake to be the rule of conduct out of free conviction and the inner conscience—is, on its own account, the abstract universal of the will, which is the absolute antithesis to Nature, the impulses of sense, selfish interests, the passions and all that is commonly described collectively as emotional life and heart. In this opposition the one side is regarded as negating the other; and for the reason that both are present in the individual in their opposition, he is compelled, as determining himself from his own identity, to adopt the choice of one to the rejection of the other. Such a decision and the act carried out in accordance with it merely become moral from the standpoint now considered on the one hand in virtue of the free conviction of duty, and on the other by reason of the victory secured not only over the particular will, the natural motives, inclinations, passions and so on, but also in virtue of the noble feelings and higher impulses. For the modern ethic starts from the fixed opposition between the will in its spiritual universality and its sensuous natural particularity; it does not consist in the perfected mediation of these opposed aspects, but in their mutual conflict as 74opposed to one another, which carries with it the demand, that the impulses in their antagonism to duty ought to yield to it.

An opposition of this nature is not merely present to mind in the restricted confines of moral action; it asserts itself as a fundamental severation and antithesis between that which is actual essentially, and on its own account, and that which is external reality and existence.¹ Apprehended in entirely formal terms it is the contrast exposed by the universal, in so far as it is fixed in its substantive independence over against the particular, as the latter is also on its part rigidly exterior to it. In more concrete form it appears in Nature as the opposition of the abstract law to the wealth of particular phenomena, each of which possesses its specific characteristics. It appears in mind as that between the sensuous and spiritual in man, as the conflict of spirit with the flesh; it is that of duty for duty’s sake; of the cold imperative with particular impulses, the warm heart, the sensuous inclinations and impulses, in a word with man simply as individual. Or it appears as the harsh antagonism between the inward freedom and the external necessity of natural condition, and, lastly, as the contradiction of the dead, essentially emptied, concept, when confronted with the fulness of concrete life, in other words, of theory and subjective thought as contrasted with objective existence and experience.

Such are antithetical points of view, the discovery of which is not to be ascribed either to the ingenuity of reflective minds, or the pedantry of a philosophical cult. They have in all ages, if in manifold guise, occupied and disquieted the human consciousness, although it is our more modern culture which has emphasized their opposition most deliberately, and forced it in each case to the keenest edge of contradiction. Intellectual culture, or rather the rapier edge of the modern understanding, creates in man this contrast, which converts him into some amphibious animal. He is compelled to live in two worlds mutually contradictory; and in this divided house consciousness, too, wanders aimlessly; tossed over from one side to the other it is unable to dis75cover permanent satisfaction¹ for itself in either one side or the other. For, on the one hand, we see mankind confined within common reality and earthly temporal condition, oppressed by necessity and want, in Nature’s toils, entangled in matter, in sensuous aims and their enjoyment, dominated and whirled away by impulse and passion. On the other band he lifts himself up to eternal ideas, to a realm of thought and freedom. As Will he legislates for himself universal laws and destinations,² he disrobes the world of the life and blossom of its reality; he dissolves it in abstractions, that the mind may vindicate its right and intrinsic worth by this very dissolution of Nature’s rights and such maltreatment, a process in which he brings home to her again the necessity and violence he has experienced at her hands. Such a cleavage of life and mind is, however, accompanied for modern culture with the demand that a contradiction so deep-seated should be dissolved. The mere understanding of abstract reflection is unable to disengage itself from the obstinacy of such contradictions. The solution consequently remains here for consciousness a mere ought, and the present and reality is merely moved within the continuous unrest of a to and fro, which seeks for that reconciliation it is unable to find. The problem therefore arises whether such a many-sided and fundamental antagonism, which is unable to pass beyond the mere ought and postulate of its solution, can be the essential and wholly expressed truth,³ and, indeed, the final and supreme consummation. If the culture of the civilized world has fallen into such a contradiction it becomes the task of philosophy to dissolve the same, in other words to demonstrate that neither the one side or the other, in its onesided abstractness, should be held to possess truth, but that they contain within themselves the principle of their dissolution. The truth only then comes before us in the reconciliation and mediation of both; and this mediation is no mere postulate, but is, in its 76essential nature, and in its actual presence the at the same time accomplished and self-accomplishing. And, in fact, this view agrees directly with unwitting¹ faith and will, which always has before its conscious life this contradiction in its resolution, and in action accepts it as its aim and carries it into effect. All that philosophy achieves is to contribute the insight of thought into the essence of such cleavage. It demonstrates, or seeks to demonstrate, how that which truth really is is simply the resolution of the fracture, and, be it added, not in the sense that this antagonism and its alternative aspects in any way are not, but in the sense that they are there² in reconciliation.

[424](d) When discussing moral improvement as the ultimate end accepted for art it was found that its principle pointed to a higher standpoint. It will be necessary also to vindicate this standpoint for art.

Thereby the false position to which we have already directed attention vanishes, namely, that art has to serve as a means for moral ends and the moral end of the world generally by means of its didactive and ameliorating influence, and by doing so has its essential aim not in itself, but in something else. If we therefore continue still to speak of an end or goal of art, we must at once remove the perverse idea, which in the question, “What is the end?” will still make it include the supplemental query, “What is the use?” The perverseness consists in this that the work of art would then have to be regarded as related to something else, which is 77presented us as what is essential and ought to be. A work of art would in that case be merely a useful instrument in the realization of an end which possessed real and independent importance outside the realm of art. As opposed to this we must maintain that it is art’s function to reveal truth under the mode of art’s sensuous or material configuration, to display the reconciled antithesis previously described, and by this means to prove that it possesses its final aim in itself, in this representation in short and self-revelation. For other ends such as instruction, purification, improvement, procuring of wealth, struggle after fame and honour have nothing whatever to do with this work of art as such, still less do they determine the fundamental idea¹ of it.

It is then from this point of view, into which the reflective consideration of our subject-matter finally issues, that we have to grasp the fundamental idea of art in terms of its ideal or inward necessity, as it is also from this point of view that historically regarded the true appreciation and acquaintance with art took its origin. For that antithesis, to which we have drawn attention, did not merely assert its presence within the general thought of educated men, but equally in philosophy as such. It was only after philosophy was in a position to overcome this opposition absolutely that it grasped the fundamental notion of its own content, and, to the extent it did so, the idea of Nature and of art.

For this reason, as this point of view implies the reawakening of philosophy in the widest connotation of the term, so also it is the re-awakening of the science of art. We may go further and affirm that aesthetic as a science is in a real sense primarily indebted to this re-awakening for its true origination, and art for its higher estimation.

From this point of transition, I will briefly summarize the historical subject-matter that I have in my mind’s eye, partly on account of the historical importance itself, and in part because thereby the points of view are more clearly indicated 78to which importance is attached, and upon the basis of which we propose to continue the superstructure. In its most general definition that basis consists in this, that the beauty of art has become recognized as one of the means which resolve and bring back to unity that antithesis and contradiction between the mind and Nature as they repose in abstract alienation from each other in themselves, whether this latter is regarded as external phenomena or the inward world of individual feeling and emotion.¹

1. It was the philosophy of Kant which, in the first instance, not merely experienced the want of such a point of union, but secured definite knowledge of it and brought it clearly before the mind. Speaking generally, Kant accepted as his basis for intelligence no less than for the will the rationality which relates itself to itself or freedom, the self-consciousness that discovers and knows itself essentially as infinite. This knowledge of the absoluteness of reason in its essential substance, which has proved in more modern times the turning-point of philosophy, this absolute point of departure deserves recognition, and does not admit of refutation, even though in other respects the Kantian philosophy is inadequate. But at the same time it was Kant who through falling back upon the fixed opposition between subjective thought and objective things, between abstract universality and the sensuous individuality of the will, in a pre-eminent degree strained to the extremest limit the very antithesis of morality we have previously adverted to, inasmuch as over and above this he emphasized the practical operation of mind to the disadvantage of the contemplative. In virtue of this fixity of the antithesis as cognized by the faculty of the understanding he had no other alternative than to express the unity exclusively in the form of subjective ideas for which no adequate reality could be demonstrated as correspondent; or, on its practical side, as postulates, which it was no doubt possible to deduce from the practical reason, but whose essential being was not within the cognition of thought, and the practical fulfilment of which remained throughout a mere “ought” deferred to infinity. And for this reason, though Kant did actually bring the reconciled opposition within the compass of intelligible 79ideas, he was neither able to develop its essential, truth scientifically, nor to assert the same as actual and exclusive reality. Unquestionably Kant did press beyond this point, in the sense, that is to say, that he discovered the unity demanded in what he called the intuitive understanding; but in this respect too he is held up by the opposition of subjectivity and objectivity, so that, while he no doubt offers us a resolution in an abstract sense of the antithesis between conception and reality, universality and particularity, understanding and sense-perception, and suggests the Idea, yet he once more conceives this resolution and reconciliation itself in a wholly subjective sense, not as being true and real both essentially and on its own independent account. In this respect the Critique of the power of the judgment, in which he investigates the aesthetic and teleological power of the judgment is both instructive and remarkable. The beautiful objects of Nature and art, the products of Nature with their adaptations to ends, by means of which he approaches more closely the notion of the organic and the living, he considers wholly from the point of view of the reflection which judges them subjectively. And indeed Kant himself generally defines the power of judgment as “the capacity to think the particular as comprised under the universal,” and calls the power of judgment reflective “when it has only the particular submitted to it, and has to discover the universal under which it is subsumed.” To this end it requires a law, a principle, which it has to contribute to itself; and Kant affirms teleology to be this law. With regard to the conception of freedom which belongs to the practical reason the achievement of end or purpose gets no further than a mere “ought”; and in the teleological judgment, however, relatively to the living thing, Kant does manage to regard the living organism in such a way that the notional concept, the universal, succeeds in also including the particular, and as end does not determine the particular and external, the structure of the members from outside, but as an inward principle, and under the mode, that the particular conforms to the end spontaneously. Yet with such a judgment once more it is assumed that the objective nature of the thing is not known, but that it is only a mode of subjective reflection which is thereby expressed. In a similar way Kant so 80conceives the aesthetic judgment that it neither proceeds from the understanding, as such, in other words as the faculty of ideas, nor yet from the sensuous perception as such, and its varied manifold, but from the free play of the understanding and the imagination. In this common agreement of the faculties of knowledge the object finds its relation to the individual consciousness, and its feeling of pleasure and contentment.

(a) Now this general feeling of contentment is, in the first place, without any interest, that is to say, it is devoid of relation to our appetitive faculty. If we have an interest of curiosity, shall we say, or a sensuous interest excited for a physical want, a desire for possession and use, then the objects are not important for their own sake, but in virtue of our need of them. In a case such as this what exists merely possesses a value in relation to such a need, and, the relation is of the kind, that the object is on the one side and on the other is an attribute distinct from the object to which we relate it none the less. As an illustration if I consume the object in order to nourish myself therewith, this interest rests exclusively in me, and remains alien to the object. Now, in Kant’s view, our position relatively to the beautiful is not of this description. The aesthetic judgment suffers that which is externally presented to subsist in free independence, proceeding as it does from the desire to permit the object to persist on its own account and to retain its end unimpaired within itself. This is, as we have already observed, an important observation.

(b) In the second place, Kant maintains that the beautiful is definable as that which without a conception, i.e., without a category of the understanding, is placed before us as the object of a universal satisfaction. To estimate the beautiful an educated mind is indispensable. The man in the street¹ has no judgment about the beautiful; this judgment, in fact, claims universal validity. The universal is no doubt in the first instance simply, as such, an abstraction, one which, however, is in its essential and on its independent account, true; and consequently carries essentially the 81property and demand to pass also as universally valid. In this sense, too, the beautiful ought to be universally recognized, although the mere concepts of the understanding are compatible with no judgment thereupon. The good—the right which enters into particular actions, for example—is subsumed under universal concepts, and the action is accepted as good, if it is conformable to such concepts. The beautiful, on the contrary, ought, according to this view, to arouse a universal satisfaction without any such mediation of concept. This simply means that in the contemplation of the beautiful we are not conscious of the notional concept or any subsumption under it, and do not permit the independent passage of the separation between the particular object and the universal concept, which is present in all other cases of the judgment.

(c) Thirdly, in this view of Kant, the beautiful ought to have the teleological form to the extent that the teleological relation is apprehended in the object without the idea of an end. This is substantially a mere repetition of the view just discussed. Any natural product—take, for instance, a plant or an animal—is organized as adapted to an end, and is so immediately to us in this its teleological purpose, that we have no conception of the end on its own account as separate and distinct from the actual presence of the object. It is in this way that the beautiful also is presented us teleologically. In finite teleology end and means remain external to each other; the end stands in no essential inner relation to the material means of its execution.¹ In this case the idea of the end as recognized in apartness² is distinguishable from the object in which the end appears as realized. The beautiful, on the contrary, exists as teleological in the essential sense, without means and end appearing as disparate in aspects distinct from each other. For example, the purpose of the members of the organism is the principle of life which exists in the members as actual therein. In their 82separation¹ the parts cease to be members of a whole. For in the living thing the end and material medium of the end are so immediately united, that the existing being only exists in so far as the end remains indwelling. The beautiful, as thus regarded and in Kant’s view, does not carry its teleological purpose as an external form attached to it: but the teleological correspondence of the inner and outer is to be regarded as the immanent nature of the beautiful object.

(d) Fourthly and finally the view of Kant posits the beautiful under the mode that it is recognized without a universal concept as object of a necessary feeling of satisfaction. Necessity is an abstract category, and indicates an ideal and essential relation between two aspects or sides: if the one is, and because the one is, then, and for that reason, the other is also. The one likewise includes the other within its determinate nature. Cause is meaningless without effect. The pleasure which we obtain from beauty is necessary in this sense, and it is so wholly without a relation to conceptions, that is to say the categories of the understanding. Thus, no doubt, we derive pleasure from what is symmetrical, for this is constructed in accord with an idea of the understanding. Kant, however, demands more as a definition of delight in art than the unity and uniformity of such an idea as this.

Now what we find in all these theses of Kant is the non-severation of that which otherwise is assumed to be distinct in consciousness. In the beautiful this separation is found to be abolished. The universal and particular, purpose and means, idea and object completely interpenetrate each 83other. Thus, too, Kant sees the beauty of art as a concurrence, in which the particular itself is conformable to the conception. Particulars, taken alone, are primarily, both as against each other and the universal, of a contingent nature; and this very contingent element, whether we find it in sense, feeling, susceptibility, or impulse, is now in the beauty of art not merely subsumed under the categories of the understanding, and dominated by the notion of freedom in its abstract universality, but united to the universal in such a way that it appears inwardly and on its own merits as realized fact adequate thereto. By this means thought is incorporated in fine art, and the material is not externally defined by such thought, but continues to exist in its own freedom. In other words, what is natural—the senses, emotional temperament, and so forth—possess in themselves measure, end, and agreement. Perception and feeling, too, in the same way are raised to a power of spiritual universality; and thought no less not merely renounces its hostility to Nature, but is made blithe therein. Feeling, pleasure, and enjoyment are thereby justified and sanctified, and thus it is that Nature and freedom, sense and idea in one presence discover their just place and their satisfaction. Yet even this apparently complete reconciliation is ultimately still assumed to be¹ merely subjective in respect to our judgment no less than our productive activity, and not to be essentially and on its own account either the true or real.

These may, I think, be taken to be the main results of the Critique of Kant so far as they affect our present inquiry. It constitutes the starting-point for the true conception of the beauty of art. Such a conception could, however, only make itself effective as the higher comprehension of the true union of necessity and freedom, particular and universal, sensuous and rational, by its overcoming the defects still latent in the previous standpoint.

2. It must in fact be admitted that the artistic sense of a profound and, at the same time, philosophical spirit anticipated philosophy in the stricter sense by its demand for and expression of the principle of totality and reconciliation in its opposition to that abstract finiteness of thought, that 84duty for duty’s sake, that understanding faculty devoid of any substantive content, which one and all apprehend nature and reality, sense and feeling, merely as a limit something downright alien or hostile. It is Schiller who must be credited with the important service of having broken through the Kantian subjectivity and abstractness of thought, and of having ventured the attempt to pass beyond the same by comprehending in thought the principles of unity and reconciliation as the truth, and giving artistic realization to that truth. For Schiller, in his aesthetic investigations, did not merely adhere to art and its interest unaffected by their relation to philosophy proper, but he compared his own interest in the beauty of art in their due relation to philosophical principles; and it is only from the starting-point of these latter and by their aid that he penetrated the profounder nature and notional concept of Beauty. Thus we are conscious that it was a feature of a certain period of his productive activity that he was actively engaged with reflective thought, more perhaps than was wholly favourable to the simple and direct beauty of his work as an art product. The deliberate character of abstract reflections, and even the interest of the philosophical notion, arrest the attention in several of his poems. He has, in fact, been made the subject of stricture on this account; and especially his work has been blamed and depreciated in its contrast with the equable serenity and straightforward simplicity of Goethe’s ideas and more objective naturalism. But in this respect Schiller as poet did but pay the debt of his century. A real ideal evolution¹ was responsible, the recognition of which only redounds to the honour of this sublime soul and profound genius, as it has been no less of signal profit to science and knowledge. This stimulating movement of science during the same epoch also diverted Goethe from the sphere, most distinctively his own, as poet. But just as Schiller was absorbed in the study of the ideal depths of the mind, so the characteristic predilection of Goethe inclined to the physical aspect of art, to external nature, such 85as animal and vegetable organization, crystals, cloud-formation and colours. To such scientific inquiry Goethe applied his extraordinary powers of intuition, which in these provinces have driven off the field the theories of the mere understanding and their errors, just as Schiller, on the other side, succeeded in demonstrating the Idea of the free totality of Beauty as against the theory of the analytical understanding relative to volition and thinking. An entire series of Schiller’s productions is devoted to this insight into the nature of art. Above all in importance come the “Letters upon aesthetic education.” In these letters the main point of departure is that every individual man contains within himself the natural capacity of an ideal humanity. This genuine human being is represented by the State, which, in his view, is the objective, universal, and, in short, normal form, in which the separate individuals or subjects of such human consciousness aim at making all coalesce and concentrate in unity. There were then, in his view, two imaginable ways in which man in the temporal process could thus coalesce with the human being in the notional Idea.¹ On the one hand this could be effected in the suppression of individuality by the State under its generic idea of morality, law, and intelligence:² while, on the other, a similar result could be effected by the individual himself raising himself to the level of such a generic conception, in other words, by the man of the particular temporal condition ennobling himself to the level of the essential man of the Idea. Now, in this view, reason demands unity as such, the generic attribution; Nature, however, asks for variety and individuality, and both these legislatures make a simultaneous claim upon man. Confronted with the conflict of these antagonistic rivals, aesthetic education simply consists in giving actual effect to the demand for their mediation and reconcilement. The aim of such an education is, according to Schiller, to give vital form to inclination, the senses, impulse and emotional life in such a way that they become essentially permeated with mind; and, from the reverse point of view, that reason, freedom, and spirituality come 86forth from the grave-clothes of their abstractedness, are mated in union with the natural element thus essentially rationalized, and thus receive the substance of flesh and blood. Beauty is therefore affirmed to be the conformative unification¹ of the rational and the sensuous, and this union is pronounced the truly real.

This view of Schiller will in its general terms be all the more readily recognized in “Anmuth und Würde,”² as also in his poems for the reason that the praise of women is in such works more particularly the theme. It was pre-eminently in their character that he recognized and emphasized the spontaneously present conjunction of the spiritual and natural.

This unity of the universal and particular, of freedom and necessity, of spirituality and the natural element, which Schiller conceived with scientific thoroughness as the principle and essence of art, and endeavoured indefatigably to call into actual life by means of art and aesthetic education, has received yet further recognition in the Idea itself, cognized as the supreme principle of knowledge and of existence, the Idea in this sense being apprehended as sole truth and reality. By means of this acknowledgment science, in the philosophy of Schelling, attained its absolute standpoint; and although art had already begun to assert its peculiar rights and dignity in their relation to the highest interests of man, it was only now that the notion itself and the scientific position of art were discovered. It was then that art was—even if, from a certain point of view, with a measure of perversity, which this is not the proper place to discuss—accepted with due reference to its exalted and true vocation. Even before this time and independently Winckelmann had been inspired by his observation of the ideals of the ancients in a way which prompted the creation of a new sense of artistic contemplation, the disengagement of it from the association of vulgar aims and mere imitation of Nature, and exercised a mighty influence in the discovery of the idea of art in works of art and in its history. Winckelmann ought, in fact, to be regarded as belonging to the type of men who have been able in the field of art to supply the mind with a new organ and wholly new methods of observa87tion. His views have, however, exercised less influence on the theory and the scientific knowledge of art.

To summarize these historical antecedents further yet more briefly, in association with the renaissance of our modern philosophy, A. W. and Friedrich von Schlegel, impelled by their zest for novelty and all that was either distinctive or arresting, assimilated just so much of the philosophical ideas as was compatible with minds essentially critical, though by no means really philosophical in any strict sense of the term. Neither of these writers in fact can claim the reputation of being speculative thinkers. They did, however, in virtue of their critical sagacity, at least approach the standpoint of the Idea; and with the aid of remarkable boldness of speech and audacity of innovation—to which, however, but very few ingredients of genuine philosophy contributed—directed a brilliant polemic against views hitherto received, and by this means unquestionably introduced a novel standard of criticism and new ways of looking at things which were of superior value to those they attacked. For the reason, however, that their criticism was not accompanied with a knowledge of the nature of such a standard based on philosophical principles, a lack of definition and continuity was inseparable from this standard; and they at one time attempted too much and again at another too little. Despite, therefore, of the fact that it may be reckoned to their credit that they have once more drawn attention to and emphasized with genuine enthusiasm much hitherto regarded as obsolete and too little appreciated by their times, the works of the older Italian masters, for example, and certain Flemish paintings, as also the “Niebelungen Lied” among other things; despite the fact that they even endeavoured with zeal to acquire knowledge of matter barely known at all, such as the poetry and mythology of India, nevertheless they not only attached too high an importance to the works of such a period, but also themselves committed the mistake of admiring works of very average merit, such as the comedies of Holberg, or of attaching an absolute value to what possessed a purely relative worth, or even of boldly proving themselves the enthusiasts of a perverse tendency and a subordinate standpoint as though one of first-rate importance.

883. From this tendency, and particularly from the opinions¹ and doctrines of Friedrich von Schlegel, issued in all its manifold forms the so-called Irony. The idea had its profounder root, as to one of its aspects, in the philosophy of Fichte, in so far as the principles of that philosophy were applied to art. Friedrich von Schlegel, as also Schelling, made the standpoint of Fichte their point of departure. Schelling passed wholly beyond it; Fried. von Schlegel elaborated it in his own peculiar fashion, and then flung himself free of it. With reference to the more intimate connection of the doctrines of Fichte with one tendency of this irony, it is only necessary to emphasize the following point in our present context, namely this, that Fichte posits the Ego as the absolute principle of all knowledge, reason, and cognition, and in fact posits it as the Ego which persists throughout in its abstraction of pure form. For this reason this Ego is, in the second place, wholly and essentially simple, and, on the one hand, it is the negation of every particularity, attribute—in short, every content—for every positive subject-matter² is overwhelmed in this abstract freedom and unity. On the other hand, every content, which is to pass muster for the Ego, is posited and recognized as exclusively so in virtue of the activity of the Ego. Whatever is, is only in virtue of the Ego; whatever is through me (that is, my Ego) I am in turn able to annihilate.

Now if we abide in these entirely vacant forms, which originate in the absoluteness of the abstract Ego, nothing can then be regarded as of value in itself, that is, essentially and on its own account.³ It is exclusively produced by the subjectivity of the Ego. But this being so, it follows that the Ego remains lord and master over everything. In no sphere of morals or law, of all that is human or divine, profane or sacred, is there anything at all which would not in the first instance have to be posited by the Ego, and which 89consequently could not equally be nullified by the same agency. This is nothing less than making all that exists on its own actual and independent warranty a mere semblance, not true and a part of reality on account of itself and by its own instrumentality, but a mere show in virtue of the Ego, within whose power and caprice it remains at the free disposition of such. To suffer its presence and to destroy it stands purely in the favour of the Ego, which has attained the absolute standpoint as essentially the Ego, that and nothing more than that.

Thirdly, the Ego is a living, active individual, and its life consists in bringing home its individuality to itself no less than to others, in giving expression to itself and revealing itself among phenomena.¹ For every man during his life endeavours to realize himself and does realize himself. In relation to the beautiful and art this means that he lives the life of an artist, and shapes his life artistically. But, according to the principle now discussed, I live as artist when all my action and expression whatever, in so far as it has to do with a content, is for myself on the plane of mere semblance, and assumes a formal content which is wholly at my disposal. So I am not truly serious either about this content or, speaking generally, about its expression and realization. Genuine seriousness only issues from a substantive interest, a subject-matter which itself possesses a rich content, such as truth, morality, and so on—in other words, from a content which as it stands I regard as essential, so that I only become essential on my own account, in so far as I have absorbed myself in such a content, and have come to conform myself to it in the entire range of my thought and action. At the standpoint at which the artist is the Ego, which both posits and resolves everything through its own essential fiat,² for which no content of consciousness appears as absolute and essentially independent, but only as itself a semblance created and destroyable, such seriousness can find no place, 90nothing here receiving a right to be save the formalism of the Ego.

No doubt for others my self-revealment, in which I appear to them, may be taken seriously, inasmuch as they interpret me as though in reality I was in earnest about the business; but therein they are deluded, poor, borné creatures, without the faculty or the power to comprehend and attain to the height of my argument. And by this it is brought home to me that everyone is not so free (e.g., that is formally free) as to see in all which is usually of value, dignity and sanctity to mankind, merely a product of each man’s own possibilities of inclination, which is operative in permitting him to determine and make rich the course of his life, or the reverse. It is thus that this virtuosity of your ironical artist’s life comes to be credited as some god-like geniality, for which every conceivable thing is a purely spectral creature, to which the free creator, knowing himself to be absolutely unattached, does not yoke himself, for he can ever annihilate the same no less than create it. Whoever has reached such a standpoint of god-like geniality consequently looks down in his superior fashion on all other mortals. They are ruled out as narrow and dull, in so far, that is, as law, morals, and the rest retain for them a validity that is assured, obligatory, and essential. And the individual who thus lives this artist life, which he does no doubt associate with others, whether friends or mistresses or I know not what, yet as man of genius sets no real stock on such relations as they stand to his individual personality and particular actions. All these are as nothing in their contrast to the universal which is his in its own and independent warranty, namely that genius which faces all such with irony. This is the universal import of the genial god-like irony as this concentration of the Ego in itself, for which all bands are broken, and which can only live in the bliss of self-enjoyment. This irony was the discovery of Herr Fried. von Schlegel, and many have chattered about it after him, or it may be are giving us a fresh sample of such chatter.

The proximate form of this negativity which has been called irony is, then, on the one hand, the illusory nature¹ of 91all that is matter of fact, or moral, or of substantive content, the nothingness of all that is objective and of essential and independent worth. So long as the Ego adheres to such a standpoint as this, everything appears to be null and void, the personal subjectivity alone excepted, which thereby becomes hollow and empty, and nothing but conceit itself. Conversely, however, from the opposite point of view, the Ego may also fail to find satisfaction in this self-delight; it may prove an insufficient supply to its craving, so that it now feels a thirst for what is secure and substantive, definite and essential interests. From a situation such as this there arises unhappiness and the contradiction, that whereas, on the one hand, the individual seeks to penetrate into truth and longs after objectivity, yet on the other he is unable to divest himself of this isolation and self-seclusion, is unable to overcome this unsatisfied and abstract soul-inwardness, and consequently is seized with a fit of sentimental yearning, which we have also marked as one of the emanations of the philosophy of Fichte. The discontent of this quiescence and impotence, which is unable either to act or set its hands to anything, lest it have to surrender the harmony within, and which remains unreal and empty, even though it may be essentially unflecked, despite all its craving for reality and the absolute—is the source of morbid saintliness¹ and yearning. A soul that is fair or saintly in a true sense acts and is a reality. But all that yearning and heart burning is merely the feeling of the nothingness of the empty and vain personage, who has it, and yet has not the power to cast himself adrift of this empty void, and fill, himself with that which is solid and substantive. In so far, however, as the irony is made an art type it did not restrict itself in giving artistic shape to the life and particular individuality of the man who appropriated the irony. Over and beyond the artistic content of his own actions, etc., the artist had also to produce objective works of art as the creations of his imagination. The principle of such productions, which mainly are confined to the domain of poetry, is once more the display of the godlike as Irony. The ironical here, however, as genial individuality, consists in 92the self-annihilation of what is noble, great, and excellent. Consequently the independent figures of art will also have to illustrate the principle of absolute subjectivity, and to do so by exhibiting all that is of human worth and dignity as a mere naught in this process of self-annihilation. This implies not merely that we are not to take seriously justice, morality and truth, but that there is really nothing in what is highest and best. In short it amounts to this, that irony contradicts and annihilates itself as manifested in individuals, characters and actions, and consequently is an irony which overreaches itself.¹ This mode or art-type, abstractly considered, approaches closely to the principle of comedy. At the same time we ought fundamentally to distinguish the comic from the ironical as thus associated. For the comic must be limited to the making null what is essentially itself of no worth, that is to say, a false and contradictory appearance, a whim, for instance, a piece of egotism, a particular caprice, as set over against a mighty passion; or even some principle, assumed to be efficacious, or rigid maxims may be thus exposed in their nullity. But it is wholly a different matter, when what is in fact moral and true, generally something with really substantive core, is asserted in an individual and through the same as essentially of no account. Such an individual is then nugatory and despicable in his character, and the weakness and absence of character are thus introduced into the representation. In this distinction, therefore, between the ironical and the comic the point of real importance is what is the nature of the content which is destroyed. They are in the case of irony evil, good for nothing subjects, persons unable to hold staunchly to their fixed and important purposes, only too ready to give it up and to permit its destruction within them. Your “ Irony” loves this irony of the characterless. For true character implies on the one hand an essential substance in its purpose, and on the other adherence to such a purpose, so that individuality would be rifled of its veritable existence, if it was compelled to let it drop and give it up. This doggedness and stability constitutes the keynote of character. Cato can only live as Roman and 93republican. Now if irony is made the keynote of the representation, we have the extreme antithesis to art accepted as the true principle of the work of art. For what we have here is in part insipid figures, in part figures that have neither content nor defined position.¹ Seeing that what is of substance in them is proved to be an illusion. And, last of all, we have into the bargain those yearning floods and unresolved contradictions of the soul. Compositions of this kind are not likely to arouse real interest. And for this very reason it is precisely from the advocates of this Irony that we have the continuous round of lament over the public’s want of critical sense, artistic insight and genius, which of course cannot appreciate the lofty ways of such an Irony; in other words what the public does not like is this very mediocrity, which is the half of it mere trifling,² and the other half without distinctive character. And it is right that these spectre-like, moon-shine gazing natures are no favourites; it is a comfort to think that this insincerity and hypocrisy is not in fashion, and that what men, on the contrary, demand imperatively are full and veritable interests, and no less so characters which remain true to the weighty substance at their core. We may add as a matter of historical interest that it was Solger and Ludwig Tieck who above all accepted irony as the highest principle of art.

This is not the place to speak of Solger at the length he really merits; and I must content myself with a few general remarks. Solger was not, as the others were, satisfied with a superficial philosophical culture. A truly speculative impulse of his innermost nature made him probe the very depths of the philosophical idea. And in doing so he came upon the dialectical phase of the Idea, that transition point which I call the infinite absolute negativity, the activity of the idea in its negation of itself as infinite and universal, in order to pass into finiteness and particularity, and with no less truth once more in order to annul this negation, and in so doing 94to establish again the universal and infinite within the finite and particular. Solger did not get beyond this negativity; and unquestionably it is a phase¹ in the speculative idea; but nevertheless, as exclusively conceived in this dialectic unrest and dissolution of the infinite no less than the finite, it is only such a phase contributory, and not, as Solger imagined, the Entire Idea. Unfortunately Solger’s life was too early broken off to permit him to grasp the concrete evolvement of the philosophical Idea in all it implies. And so he never got beyond this aspect of negativity, which possesses an affinity with the dissolution by irony of all that is determinate no less than essentially substantive, a negative movement which he identified with the principle of artistic activity. Yet in the actual conditions of his life, and with due reference to the stability, seriousness, and sterling qualities of his character, he was neither himself an ironic artist in the sense we have previously described, nor was his really profound instinct for true works of art, a sense which a long course of study of art had developed greatly, either of such an ironical character. So much we will venture in the vindication of Solger, whose life, philosophy, and actual contributions to art merit being wholly kept separate from the apostles of irony previously named.

With regard to Ludwig Tieck, his culture, too, dates from that period in which Jena was the literary centre. Tieck and others who belonged to these superior people are on excellent terms with such modes of expression, without being able to tell us much what they mean. Thus Tieck always insists on the importance of Irony. But when it comes to delivering judgment on great works of art, though his recognition and description of their greatness is no doubt beyond reproach, yet if one imagines that in any particular example—let us say “Romeo and Juliet”—we have the opportunity put for an explanation of that in which here the irony consists, we are wide of the mark. We hear nothing more whatever about Irony.

[425]1. After the above introductory observations we may now pass on to the consideration of our subject itself. We are, however, still within the introduction; and being so I do not propose to attempt anything more than indicate by way of sketch the main outlines of the general course of the scientific inquiry which is to follow it. Inasmuch, however, as we have referred to art as issuing from the absolute Idea itself, and, indeed, have assigned as its end the sensuous presentation of the Absolute itself, it will be incumbent on us to conduct this survey of the entire field in such a way, as at least to disclose generally, how the particular parts originate in the notional concept of the beauty of art. We must therefore attempt to awaken some idea of this notion in its broadest significance.

It has already been stated that the content of art is the Idea, and the form of its display the configuration of the sensuous or plastic image. It is further the function of art to mediate these two aspects under the reconciled mode of free totality. The first determinant implied by this is the demand that the content, which has to secure artistic representation, shall disclose an essential capacity for such display. If this is not so all that we possess is a defective combination. A content that, independently, is ill adapted to plastic form and external presentment is compelled to accept this form, or a matter that is of itself prosaic in its character is driven to make the best it can of a mode of presentation which is antagonistic to its nature.

The second requirement, which is deducible from the first, is the demand that the content of art should be nothing essentially abstract. This does not mean, however, that it should be merely concrete in the sense that the sensuous object is such in its contrast to all that is spiritual and the content of thought, regarding these as the essentially simple and abstract. Everything that possesses truth for Spirit, no less than as part of Nature, is essentially concrete, and, 96despite its universality, possesses both ideality¹ and particularity essentially within it. When we state, for example, of God that he is simple One, the Supreme Being as such, we have thereby merely given utterance to a lifeless abstraction of the irrational understanding. Such a God, as He is thus not conceived in His concrete truth, can supply no content for art, least of all plastic art. Consequently neither the Jews nor the Turks have been able to represent their God, who is not even an ab[426]straction of the understanding in the above sense, under the positive mode in which Christians have represented Him. For in Christianity God is conceived in His Truth, and as such essentially concrete, as personality,² as the subjective focus of conscious life, or, more accurately defined, as Spirit. And what He is as Spirit is made explicit to the religious apprehension as a trinity of persons, which at the same time are, in their independence, regarded as One. Here is essentiality, universality, and particularity, no less than their reconciled unity, and it is only a unity such as this which gives us the concrete. And inasmuch as a content, in order to unveil truth at all, must be of this concrete character, art makes the demand for a like concreteness, and, for this reason, that a purely abstract universal does not in itself possess the property to proceed to particularity and external manifestation, and to unity with itself therein.

97If, then, a sensuous form and configuration is to he correspondent with a true and therefore concrete content, such must in the third place likewise be as clearly individual, entirely concrete and a self-enclosed unity. This character of concreteness, predicable of both aspects of art, the content no less than the representation, is just the point in which both coalesce and fall in with one another. The natural form of the human body is, for example, such a sensuous concrete capable of displaying Spirit in its essential concreteness and of adapting itself wholly to such a presentment. For which reason we must quit ourselves of the idea that it is a matter of mere accident that an actual phenomenon of the objective world is accepted as the mode in which to embody such a form coalescent with truth. Art does not lay hold of this form either because it is simply there or because there is no other. The concrete content itself implies the presence of external and actual, we may even add the sensuous appearance. But to make this possible this sensuous concrete, which is essentially impressed with a content that is open to mind, is also essentially addressed to the inward conscious life, and the external mode of its configuration, whereby it is visible to perception and the world of idea, has for its aim the being there exclusively for the soul and mind of man. This is the sole reason that content and artistic conformation are dovetailed one into the other. The purely sensuous concrete, that is external Nature as such, does not exclusively originate in such an end. The variously coloured plumage of birds is resplendent unseen; the notes of this song are unheard. The Cereus,¹ which only blossoms for a night, withers away without any admiration from another in the wilderness of the southern forests; and these forests, receptacles themselves of [427]the most beautiful and luxuriant vegetation, with the richest and most aromatic perfumes, perish and collapse in like manner unenjoyed. The work of art has no such naive and independent being. It is essentially a question, an address to the responding soul of man, an appeal to affections and intelligence.

Although the endowment by art of sensuous shape is not in this respect accidental, yet on the other hand it is not the 98highest mode of grasping the spiritually concrete. Thought is a higher mode of presentment than that of the sensuous concrete. Though abstract in a relative sense; yet it must not be one-sided, but concrete thinking, in order to be true and rational. The extent to which a definite content possesses for its appropriate form sensuous artistic representation, or essentially requires, in virtue of its nature, a higher and more spiritual embodiment is a question of difference exemplified at once if we compare the Greek gods with God as conceived under Christian ideas. The Greek god is not abstract, but individual, and is in close association with the natural human form. The Christian God is also, no doubt, a concrete personality, but under the mode of pure spiritual actuality, who is cognized as Spirit and in Spirit.¹ His medium of determinate existence is therefore essentially knowledge of the mind and not external natural shape, by means of which His representation can only be imperfect, and not in the entire depths of His idea or notional concept.

Inasmuch, however, as it is the function of art to represent the Idea to immediate vision in sensuous shape and not in the form of thought and pure spirituality in the strict sense, and inasmuch as the value and intrinsic worth of this presentment consists in the correspondence and unity of the two aspects, that is the Idea and its sensuous shape, the supreme level and excellence of art and the reality, which is truly consonant with its notion, will depend upon the degree of intimacy and union with which idea and configuration appear together in elaborated fusion. The higher truth consequently is spiritual content which has received the shape adequate to the conception of its essence; and this it is which supplies the principle of division for the philosophy of art. For before the mind can attain to the true notion of its absolute essence, it is constrained to traverse a series of stages rooted in this very notional concept; and to this course of stages which it unfolds to itself, corresponds a coalescent series, immediately related therewith, of the plastic types of art, under the configuration whereof mind as art-spirit presents to itself the consciousness of itself.²

[428]99This evolution within the art-spirit has further itself two sides in virtue of its intrinsic nature. First, that is to say, the development is itself a spiritual and universal one; in other words there are the definite and comprehensive views of the world¹ in their series of gradations which give artistic embodiment to the specific but widely embracing consciousness of Nature, man, and God. Secondly, this ideal or universal art-development has to provide for itself immediate existence and sensuous configuration, and the definite modes of this art-actualization in the sensuous medium are themselves a totality of necessary distinctions in the realm of art—that is to say, they are the particular types of art. No doubt the types of artistic configuration on the one hand are, in respect to their spirituality, of a general character, and not restricted to any one material, and the sensuous existence is similarly itself of varied multiplicity of medium. Inasmuch, however, as this material potentially possesses, precisely as the mind or spirit does, the Idea for its inward soul or significance, it follows that a definite sensuous involves with itself a closer relation and secret bond of association with the spiritual distinctions and specific types of artistic embodiment.²

Relatively to these points of view our philosophy will be divided into three fundamental parts.

First, we have a general part. It has for its content and object the universal Idea of fine art, conceived here as the Ideal, together with the more elaborated relation under which it is placed respectively to Nature and human artistic production.

Secondly, we have evolved from the notional concept of 100the beauty of art a particular part, in so far as the essential distinctions, which this idea contains in itself; are unfolded in a graduated series of particular modes of configuration.¹

Thirdly, there results a final part which has to consider the particularized content of fine art itself. It consists in the advance of art to the sensuous realization of its shapes and its consummation in a system of the several arts and their genera and species.

2. In respect to the first and second of these divisions it is important to recollect, in order to make all that follows intelligible, that the Idea, viewed as the beautiful in art, is not the Idea in the strict sense, that is as a metaphysical Logic apprehends it as the Absolute. It is rather the Idea as carried into concrete form in the direction of express realization, and as having entered into immediate and adequate unity with such reality. For the Idea as such, although it is both potentially and explicitly true, is only truth in its universality and not as [429]yet presented in objective embodiment. The Idea as fine art, however, is the Idea with the more specific property of being essentially individual reality, in other words, an individual configuration of reality whose express function it is to make manifest the Idea—in its appearance. This amounts to the demand that the Idea and its formative configuration as concrete realization must be brought together under a mode of complete adequacy. The Idea as so conceived, a reality, that is to say, moulded in conformity with the notional concept of the Idea, is the Ideal. The problem of such consonancy might, in the first instance, be understood in the wholly formal sense that the Idea might be any idea so long as the actual shape, it matters not what the shape might be, represented this par101ticular Idea and no other. In that case, however, the required truth of the Ideal is a fact simply interchangeable with mere correctness, a correctness which consists in the expression of any significance in a manner adapted to it, provided that its meaning is thereby directly discoverable in the form. The Ideal, however, is not to be thus understood. According to the standard or test of its own nature any content whatever can receive adequate presentation, but it does not necessarily thereby possess a claim to he the fine art of the Ideal. Nay, more, in comparison with ideal beauty the presentation will even appear defective. And in this connection we may once for all observe—though actual proof is reserved to a later stage—that the defects of a work of art are not invariably to be attributed to defects of executive skill. Defectiveness of form arises also from defectiveness of content. The Chinese, Hindoos, and Egyptians, for example, in their artistic images, sculptured deities and idols, never passed beyond a formless condition, or a definition of shape that was vicious and false, and were unable to master true beauty. And this was so for the reason that their mythological conceptions, the content and thought of their works of art, were still essentially indeterminate, or only determinate in a false sense, did not, in fact, attain to a content which was absolute in itself. Viewed in this sense the excellence of works of art is so much the greater in the degree that their content and thought is ideal and profound. And in affirming this we have not merely in our mind the degree of executive mastery displayed in the grasp and imitation of natural form as we find it in the objective world. For in certain stages of the artistic consciousness and its reproductive effects the desertion and distortion of the conformations of Nature is not so much due to unintentional technical inexperience or lack of ability, as it is to deliberate alteration, which originates in the mental content itself, and [430]is demanded by the same. From this point of view there is therefore imperfect art, which, both in technical and other respects, may be quite consummate in its own specific sphere, yet if tested with the true notion of art and the Ideal can only appear as defective. Only in the highest art are the Idea and the artistic presentation truly consonant with one another in the sense that the objective embodiment of the Idea is in itself essentially 102and as realized the true configuration, because the content of the Idea thus expressed is itself in truth the genuine content. It is appertinent to this, as already noted, that the Idea must be defined in and through itself as concrete totality, thereby essentially possessing in itself the principle and standard of its particularization and definition as thus manifested objectively. For example, the Christian imagination will only be able to represent God in human form and with man’s means of spiritual expression, because it is herein that God Himself is fully known in Himself as mind or Spirit. Determinacy is, as it were, the bridge to phenomenal presence. Where this determinacy is not totality derived from the Idea itself, where the Idea is not conceived as that which is self-definitive and self-differentiating, it remains abstract and possesses its definition, and with it the principle for the particular mode of embodiment adapted to itself not within itself but as something outside it. And owing to this the Idea is also still abstract and the configuration it assumes is not as yet posited by itself. The Idea, however, which is essentially concrete, carries the principle of its manifestation in itself, and is thereby the means of its own free manifestation. Thus it is only the truly concrete Idea that is able to evoke the true embodiment, and this appropriate coalescence of both is the Ideal.

3. But inasmuch as in this way the Idea is concrete unity, this unity can only enter the artistic consciousness by the expansion and further mediation of the particular aspects of the Idea; and it is through this evolution that the beauty of art receives a totality of particular stages and forms. Therefore, after we have considered fine art in its essence and on its own account, we must see how the beautiful in its entirety breaks up into its particular determinations. This gives, as our second part, the doctrine of the types of art. The origin of these types is to be found in the varied ways under which the Idea is conceived as the content of art; it is by this means that a distinction in the mode of form under which it manifests itself is conditioned. These types are therefore simply the different modes of relation which obtain between the Idea and its configuration, relations which emanate from the Idea itself, and thereby present us with the general [431]basis of division for this sphere. 103For the principle of division must always be found in the notional concept, the particularization and division of which it is.

We have here to consider three relations of the Idea to its external process of configuration.

(a) First, the origin of artistic creation proceeds from the Idea when, being itself still involved in defective definition and obscurity, or in vicious and untrue determinacy, it becomes embodied in the shapes of art. As indeterminate it does not as yet possess in itself that individuality which the Ideal demands. Its abstract character and one-sidedness leaves its objective presentment still defective and contingent. Consequently this first type of art is rather a mere search after plastic configuration than a power of genuine representation. The Idea has not as yet found the formative principle within itself, and therefore still continues to be the mere effort and strain to find it. We may in general terms describe this form as the symbolic type of art. The abstract Idea possesses in it its external shape outside itself in the purely material substance of Nature, from which the shaping process proceeds, and to which in its expression it is entirely yoked. Natural objects are thus in the first instance left just as they are, while, at the same time the substantive Idea is imposed upon them as their significance, so that their function is henceforth to express the same, and they claim to be interpreted, as though the Idea itself was present in them. A rationale of this is to be found in the fact that the external objects of reality do essentially possess an aspect in which they are qualified to express a universal import. But as a completely adequate coalescence is not yet possible, all that can be the outcome of such a relation is an abstract attribute, as when a lion is understood to symbolize strength.

On the other hand this abstractness of the relation makes present to consciousness no less markedly how the Idea stands relatively to natural phenomena as an alien; and albeit it expatiates in all these shapes, having no other means of expression among all that is real, and seeks after itself in their unrest and defects of genuine proportion, yet for all that it finds them inadequate to meet its needs. It consequently exaggerates natural shapes and the phenomena of Nature 104in every degree of indefinite and limitless extension; it flounders about in them like a drunkard, and seethes and ferments, doing violence to their truth with the distorted growth of unnatural shapes, and strives vainly by the contrast, hugeness, and splendour of the forms accepted to exalt the phenomena to the plane of the Idea. For the Idea is here still [432]more or less indeterminate, and unadaptable, while the objects of Nature are wholly definite in their shape.

Hence, on account of the incompatibility of the two sides of ideality and objective form to one another, the relation of the Idea to the other becomes a negative one. The former, being in its nature ideal, is unsatisfied with such an embodiment, and posits itself as its inward or ideally universal substance under a relation of sublimity over and above all this inadequate superfluity of natural form. In virtue of this sublimity the natural phenomena, of course, and the human form and event are accepted and left simply as they are, but at the same time, recognized as unequal to their significance, which is exalted far above all earthly content.

These features constitute in general terms the character of the primitive artistic pantheism of the East, which, on the one hand, charges the meanest objects with the significance of the absolute Idea, or, on the other, compels natural form, by doing violence to its structure, to express its world-ideas. And, in consequence, it becomes bizarre, grotesque, and deficient in taste, or turns the infinite but abstract freedom of the substantive Idea contemptuously against all phenomenal existence as alike nugatory and evanescent. By such means the significance cannot be completely presented in the expression, and despite all straining and endeavour the final inadequacy of plastic configuration to Idea remains insuperable. Such may be accepted as the first type of art—symbolic art with its yearning, its fermentation, its mystery, and sublimity.

(b) In the second type of art, which we propose to call “Classical,” the twofold defect of symbolic art is annulled. Now the symbolic configuration is imperfect, because, first, the Idea here only enters into consciousness in abstract determinacy or indeterminateness: and, secondly, by reason of the fact that the coalescence of import with embodiment 105can only throughout remain defective, and in its turn also wholly abstract. The classical art-type solves both these difficulties. It is, in fact, the free and adequate embodiment of the Idea in the shape which, according to its notional concept, is uniquely appropriate to the Idea itself. The Idea is consequently able to unite in free and completely assonant concord with it. For this reason the classical type of art is the first to present us with the creation and vision of the complete Ideal, and to establish the same as realized fact.

The conformability, however, of notion and reality in the classical type ought not to be taken in the purely formal sense of the coalescence of a content with its external form, any more than this was pos[433]sible in the case of the Ideal. Otherwise every copy from Nature, and every kind of portrait, every landscape, flower, scene, and so forth, which form the aim of the presentment, would at once become classical in virtue of the fact of the agreement it offers between such content and form. In classical art, on the contrary, the characteristic feature of the content consists in this, that it is itself concrete Idea, and as such the concrete spiritual; for it is only that which pertains to Spirit which is veritable ideality.¹ To secure such a content we must find out that in Nature which on its own account is that which is essentially and explicitly appropriate to the spiritual. It must be the original notion itself,² which has invented the form for concrete spirituality, and now the subjective notion—in the present case the spirit of art—has merely discovered it, and made it, as an existence possessed of natural shape, concordant with free and individual spirituality. Such a configuration, which the Idea essentially possesses as spiritual, and indeed as individually determinate spirituality, when it must perforce appear as a temporal phenomenon, is the human form. Personification and anthropomorphism have frequently been abused as a degradation of the spiritual. But art, in so far as its function is to bring to vision the spiritual in sensuous guise, must advance to such anthropomorphism, inasmuch as Spirit is only adequately presented 106to perception in its bodily presence. The transmigration of souls in this respect an abstract conception,¹ and physiology ought to make it one of its fundamental principles, that life has necessarily, in the course of its evolution, to proceed to the human form, for the reason that it is alone the visible phenomenon adequate to the expression of intelligence.

The human bodily form, then, is employed in the classical type of art not as purely sensuous existence, but exclusively as the existence and natural shape appropriate to mind. It has therefore to be relieved of all the defective excrescences which adhere to it in its purely physical aspect, and from the contingent finiteness of its phenomenal appearance. The external shape must in this way be purified in order to express in itself the content adequate for such a purpose; and, furthermore, along with this, that the coalescence of import and embodiment may be complete, the spirituality which constitutes the content must be of such a character that it is completely able to express itself in the natural form of man, without projecting beyond the limits of such expression within the sensuous and purely physical sphere of existence. Under such a condition Spirit is at the same time defined as particular, the spirit or mind of man, not as simply absolute and eter[434]nal. In this latter case it is only capable of asserting and expressing itself as intellectual being.²

Out of this latter distinction arises, in its turn, the defect which brings about the dissolution of the classical type of art, and makes the demand for a third and higher form, namely the romantic type.

(c) The romantic type of art annuls the completed union of the Idea and its reality, and occurs, if on a higher plane, to the difference and opposition of both sides, which remained unovercome in symbolic art. The classical type of art no doubt attained the highest excellence of which the sensuous embodiment of art is capable. The defect, such as it is, is due to the defect which obtains in art itself throughout, the 107limitations of its entire province, that is to say. The limitation consists in this, that art in general and, agreeably to its fundamental idea, accepts for its object Spirit, the notion of which is infinite concrete universality, under the guise of sensuously concrete form. In the classical type it sets up the perfected coalescence of spiritual and sensuous existence as adequate conformation of both. As a matter of fact, however, in this fusion mind itself is not represented agreeably to its true notional concept. Mind is the infinite subjectivity of the Idea, which as absolute inwardness,¹ is not capable of freely expanding in its entire independence, so long as it remains within the mould of the bodily shape, fused therein as in the existence wholly congenial to it.

To escape from such a condition the romantic type of art once more cancels that inseparable unity of the classical type, by securing a content which passes beyond the classical stage and its mode of expression. This content, if we may recall familiar ideas—is coincident with what Christianity affirms to be true of God as Spirit, in contrast to the Greek faith in gods which forms the essential and most fitting content of classical art. In Greek art the concrete ideal substance is potentially, but not as fully realized, the unity of the human and divine nature; a unity which for the very reason that it is purely immediate and not wholly explicit, is manifested without defect under an immediate and sensuous mode. The Greek god is the object of naive intuition and sensuous imagination. His shape is therefore the bodily form of man. The sphere of his power and his being is individual and individually limited; and in his opposition to the individual person² is an essence and a power with whom the inward life of soul³ is merely potentially in unity, but does not itself possess this unity as inward subjective knowledge. The higher stage is the knowledge of this implied unity, which in its latency the classical art-type receives as its [435]content and is able to perfectly represent in bodily shape. This elevation of mere potentiality into self-conscious 108knowledge constitutes an enormous difference. It is nothing less than the infinite difference which, for example, separates man generally from the animal creation. Man is animal; but even in his animal functions he is not restricted within the potential sphere as the animal is, but becomes conscious of them, learns to understand them, and raises them—as, for instance, the process of digestion—into self-conscious science. By this means man dissolves the boundaries of his merely potential immediacy; in virtue of the very fact that he knows himself to be animal he ceases to be merely animal, and as mind is endowed with self-knowledge.

If, then, in this way the unity of the human and divine nature, which in the previous stage was potential, is raised out of this immediate into a self-conscious unity, it follows that the genuine medium for the reality of this content is no longer the sensuous and immediate existence of what is spiritual, that is, the physical body of man, but the self-aware inner life of soul itself. Now it is Christianity—for the reason that it presents to mind God as Spirit, and not as the particular individual spirit, but as absolute in spirit and in truth—which steps back from the sensuousness of imagination into the inward life of reason, and makes this rather than bodily form the medium and determinate existence of its content. So also, the unity of the human and divine nature is a conscious unity exclusively capable of realization by means of spiritual knowledge, and in Spirit. The new content secured thereby is consequently not indefeasibly bound up with the sensuous presentation, as the mode completely adequate, but is rather delivered from this immediate existence, which has to be hypostatized as a negative factor, overcome and reflected back into the spiritual unity. In this way romantic art must be regarded as art transcending itself, albeit within the boundary of its own province, and in the form of art itself.

We may therefore briefly summarize our conclusion that in this third stage the object of art consists in the free and concrete presence of spiritual activity,¹ whose vocation it is to appear as such a presence or activity for the inner world of conscious intelligence. In consonance with such an object 109art cannot merely work for sensuous perception. It must deliver itself to the inward life, which coalesces with its object simply as though this were none other than itself,¹ in other words, to the intimacy of soul, to the heart, the emotional life, which as the medium of Spirit itself essentially strives after freedom, and seeks and possesses its reconciliation only in the inner chamber of [436]spirit. It is this inward or ideal world which constitutes the content of the romantic sphere: it will therefore necessarily discover its representation as such inner idea or feeling, and in the show or appearance of the same. The world of the soul and intelligence celebrates its triumph over the external world, and, actually in the medium of that outer world, makes that victory to appear, by reason of which the sensuous appearance sinks into worthlessness.

On the other hand, this type of art, like every other, needs an external vehicle of expression. As already stated, the spiritual content has here withdrawn from the external world and its immediate unity into its own world. The sensuous externality of form is consequently accepted and represented, as in the symbolic type, as unessential and transient; furthermore the subjective finite spirit and volition is treated in a similar way; a treatment which even includes the idiosyncracies or caprice of individuals, character, action, or the particular features of incident and plot. The aspect of external existence is committed to contingency and handed over to the adventurous action of imagination, whose caprice is just as able to reflect the facts given as they are,² as it can change the shapes of the external world into a medley of its own invention and distort them to mere caricature. For this external element has no longer its notion and significance in its own essential province, as in classical art. It is now discovered in the emotional realm, and this is manifested in the medium of that realm itself rather than in the external and its form of reality, and is able to secure or to recover again the condition of reconciliation with itself in 110every accident, in all the chance circumstance that falls into independent shape, in all misfortune and sorrow, nay, in crime itself.

Hence it conies about that the characteristics of symbolic art, its indifference, incompatibility and severance of Idea from configurative expression, are here reproduced once more, if with essential difference. And this difference consists in the fact that in romantic art the Idea, whose defectiveness, in the case of the symbol, brought with it the defect of external form, has to display itself as Spirit and in the medium of soul-life as essentially self-complete. And it is to complete fundamentally this higher perfection that it withdraws itself from the external element. It can, in short, seek and consummate its true reality and manifestation nowhere but in its own domain.

This we may take to be in general terms the character of the symbolic, classical, and romantic types of art, which in fact constitute the three relations of the Idea to its embodiment in the realm of human art. They consist in the aspiration after, the attainment and tran[437]scendency of the Ideal, viewed as the true concrete notion of beauty.

4. In contrast to these two previous divisions of our subject the third part presupposes the notional concept of the Ideal, and the universal art-types. It in other words consists in their realization through specific sensuous media. We have consequently no longer to deal with the inner or ideal evolution of the beauty of art in conformity with its widest and most fundamental determinations. What we have now before us to consider is how these ideal determinants pass into actual existence, how they are distinguishable in their external aspect, and how they give an independent and a realized shape to every element implied in the evolution of this Idea of beauty as a work of art, and not merely as a universal type. Now it is the peculiar differences immanent in the Idea of beauty which are carried over by it into external existence. For this reason in this third fundamental division these general art-types must themselves supply the basic principle for the articulation and definition of the particular arts. Or, to put the same thing another way, the several species of art possess in themselves the same essential differences, which we have already become acquainted 111with as the universal art-types. External objectivity, however, to which these types are subjected in a sensuous and consequently specific material, necessitates the differentiation of these types into diverse and independent modes of realization, in other words, those of particular arts. Each general type discovers its determinate character in one determinate external material or medium, in which its adequate presentation is secured under the manner it prescribes. But, from another point of view, these types of art, inasmuch as their definition is none the less consistent with the fact of the universality of their typical import, break through the boundaries of their specific realization in some definite art-species, and achieve an existence in other arts no less, although their position in such is of subordinate importance. For this reason, albeit the particular arts belong specifically to one of these general art-types respectively, the adequate external embodiment whereof they severally constitute, yet this does not prevent them, each after its own mode of external configuration, from representing the totality of these art-types.¹ To summarize, then, in this third principal division we are dealing with the beauty of art, as it unveils itself in a world of realized beauty by means of the arts and their creations. The content of this world is the beautiful, and the true beautiful, as we have seen, is spiritual being in concrete form, the Ideal; or apprehended with still more intimacy it is the absolute mind and truth itself. This region of divine truth artistically presented to sensuous [438]vision and emotion forms the centre of the entire world of art. It is the independent, free and divine Image,² which has completely appropriated the externality of form and medium, and now wears them simply as the means of its self-manifestation. Inasmuch, however, as the beautiful is unfolded here as objective reality, and in this process is differentiated into particular aspects and phases, this centre posits its extremes, as realized in their peculiar actuality, in antithetical relation to itself. Thus one of these extremes 112consists of an objectivity as yet devoid of mind, which we may call the natural environment of God. Here the external element, when it receives form, remains as it was, and does not possess its spiritual aim and content in itself, but in another.¹ The other extreme is the divine as inward, something known, as the manifold particularized subjective existence of Deity. It is the truth as operative and vital in sense, soul, and intelligence of particular persons, which does not persist as poured forth into its mould of external shape, but returns into the inward life of individuals. The Divine is under such a mode at once distinguishable from its pure manifestation as Godhead, and passes itself thereby into the variety of particularization which belongs to every kind of particular subjective knowledge, feeling, perception, and emotion. In the analogous province of religion with which art, at its highest elevation, is immediately connected, we conceive the same distinction as follows. First, we imagine the natural life on Earth in its finitude as standing on one side; but then, secondly, the human consciousness accepts God for its object, in which the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity falls away; then, finally, we advance from God as such to the devotion of the community, that is to God as He is alive and present in the subjective consciousness. These three fundamental modifications present themselves in the world of art in independent evolution.

(a) The first of the particular arts with which, according to their fundamental principle, we have to start is architecture considered as a fine art. Its function consists in so elaborating the external material of inorganic Nature that the same becomes intimately connected with Spirit as an artistic and external environment. Its medium is matter itself as an external object, a heavy mass that is subject to mechanical laws; and its forms persist as the forms of inorganic Nature coordinated with the relations of the abstract understanding such as symmetry and so forth. In this material and in these forms the Ideal is incapable of realization as concrete spirituality, and the reality thus presented remains confronting the Idea as an external fabric with 113which it enters into no fusion, or has only entered so far as to es[439]tablish an abstract relation. And it is in consequence of this that the fundamental type of the art of building is that of symbolism. Architecture is in fact the first pioneer on the highway toward the adequate realization of Godhead. In this service it is put to severe labour with objective nature, that it may disengage it by its effort from the confused growth of finitude and the distortions of contingency. By this means it levels a space for the God, informs His external environment, and builds Him His temple, as a fit place for the concentration of Spirit, and its direction to the absolute objects of intelligent life. It raises an enclosure for the congregation of those assembled, as a defence against the threatening of the tempest, against rain, the hurricane, and savage animals. It in short reveals the will thus to assemble, and although under an external relation, yet in agreement with the principles of art. A significance such as this it can to a greater or less extent import into its material and its forms, in proportion as the determinate content of its fabric, which is the object of its operations and effort, is more or less significant, is more concrete or more abstract, more profound in penetrating its own essential depth, or more obscure and superficial. Indeed architecture may in this respect proceed so far in the execution of such a purpose as to create an adequate artistic existence for such an ideal content in its very forms and material. In doing so, however, it has already passed beyond its peculiar province and is diverted into the stage immediately above it of sculpture. For the boundary of sculpture lies precisely in this that it retains the spiritual as an inward being which persists in direct contrast to the external embodiment of architecture. It can consequently merely point to that which is absorbed in soul-life as to something external to itself.

(b) Nevertheless, as above explained, the external and inorganic world is purified by architecture, it is coordinated under symmetrical laws, and made cognate with mind, and as a result the temple of God, the house of his community, stands before us. Into this temple, in the second place, the God himself enters in the lightning-flash of individuality which smites its way into the inert mass, permeating the 114same with its presence. In other words the infinite¹ and no longer purely symmetrical form belonging to intelligence brings as it were to a focus and informs the shape in which it is most at home. This is the task of sculpture. In so far as in it the inward life of Spirit, to which the art of architecture can merely point away to, makes its dwelling within the sensuous shape and its external material, and to the extent that these two sides come into plastic communion with one another in [440]such a manner that neither is predominant, sculpture receives as its fundamental type the classical art-form.

For this reason the sensuous element on its own account admits of no expression here which is not affected by spiritual affinities,² just as, conversely, sculpture can reproduce with completeness no spiritual content, which does not maintain throughout adequate presentation to perception in bodily form. What sculpture, in short, has to do is to make the presence of Spirit stand before us in its bodily shape and in immediate union therewith at rest and in blessedness; and this form has to be made vital by means of the content of spiritual individuality. The external sensuous material is consequently no longer elaborated either in conformity with its mechanical quality alone, as a mass of weight, nor in shapes of the inorganic world simply, nor in entire indifference to colour, etc. It is carried into the ideal forms of the human figure, and, we may add, in the completeness of all three spatial dimensions. In other words and relatively to such a process we must maintain for sculpture that in it the inward or ideal content of Spirit are first revealed in their eternal repose and essential self-stability. To such repose and unity with itself there can only correspond that external shape which itself persists in such unity and repose. And this condition is satisfied by configuration viewed in its abstract spatiality.³ The spirit which sculpture represents is that which is essentially sound, not broken up in the play of chance conceits and passions; and for this reason its external form also is not dissolved in the manifold 115variety of appearance, but exhibits itself under this one presentment only as the abstraction of space in the totality of its dimensions.

Assuming, then, that the art of architecture has executed its temple, and the hand of sculpture has placed therein the image of the god, we have in the third place to assume the community of the faithful as confronting the god thus presented to vision in the wide chambers of his dwelling-place. Now this community is the spiritual reflection into its own world of that sensuous presence, the subjective and inward animating life of soul, in its union with which, both for the artistic content and the external material which manifests it, the determining principle may be identified with particularization in varied shapes and qualities, individualization and the life of soul¹ which they imply. The downright and solid fact of unity the god possesses in sculpture breaks up into the multiplicity of a world of particular souls,² whose union is no longer sensuous but wholly ideal.

Here for the first time God Himself is revealed as veritably Spirit—[441]viz., the Spirit revealed in His community. Here at last He is seen apprehended as this moving to-and-fro, as this alternation between His own essential unity and His realization in the knowledge of individual persons and that separation which it involves, as also in the universal spiritual being³ and union of the many. In such a community God is disengaged from the abstraction of His unfolded self-seclusion and self-identity, no less than from the immediate absorption in bodily shape, in which He is presented by sculpture. He is, in a word, lifted into the actual sphere of spiritual existence and knowledge, into the reflected appearance, whose manifestation is essentially inward and the life of heart and soul. Thereby the higher content is now the nature of Spirit, and that in its ultimate or absolute shape. But at the same time the separation to which we have alluded displays this as particular spiritual being, a 116specific emotional life. Moreover, for the reason that the main thing here is not the untroubled repose of the God in himself,¹ but his manifestation simply, the Being which is for another, self-revealment in fact, it follows that, on the plane we have now reached, all the varied content of human subjectivity in its vital movement and activity, whether viewed as passion, action, or event, or more generally the wide realm of human feeling, volition and its discontinuance, become one and all for their own sake objects of artistic representation.

Agreeably with such a content the sensuous element of art has likewise to show itself potentially adapted to such particularization and the display of such an inward content of heart and mind. Media of this description are supplied by colour, musical tones, and finally in sound as mere sign for ideal perceptions and conceptions; and we further obtain the means of realizing with the use of such media a content of this kind in the arts of painting, music, and poetry. Throughout this sphere the sensuous medium is found to be essentially disparate in itself and throughout posited² as ideal. In this way it responds in the highest degree to the fundamentally spiritual content of art, and the coalescence of spiritual significance and sensuous material attains a more intimate union than was possible either in architecture or sculpture. At the same time such a union is necessarily more near to soul-life, leaning exclusively to the subjective side of human experience; one which, in so far as form and content are thus constrained to particularization and to posit their result as ideal, can only be actually effected at the expense of the objective universality of the content as also of the fusion with the immediately sensuous medium.³

[442]117The arts, then, which are lifted into a higher strain of ideality, abandoning as they do the symbolism of architecture and the classical Ideal of sculpture, accept their predominant type from the romantic art-form; and these are the arts most fitted to express its mode of configuration. They are, however, a totality of arts, because the romantic type is itself essentially the most concrete.

(α) The first art which comes next to sculpture is that of painting. It avails itself for a medium of its content and the plastic configuration of the same of visibility as such, to the extent that it is differentiated in its own nature, in other words is defined in the continuity of colour. No doubt the material of architecture and sculpture is likewise both visible and coloured. It is, however, not, as in painting, visibility in its pure nature, not the essentially simple light, which by its differentiating of itself in its opposition to darkness, and in association with that darkness gives rise to colour.¹ This quality of visibility made essentially ideal² and treated as such no longer either requires, as in architecture, the abstractly mechanical qualities of mass as appropriate to materials of weight, nor, as is the case with sculpture, the complete dimensuration of spatial condition, even when concentrated into organic forms. The visibility and the making apparent, which belong to painting, possess differences of quality under a more ideal mode—that is, in the specific varieties of colour—which liberates art from the objective totality of spatial condition, by being limited to a plane surface.

On the other hand the content also attains the widest 118compass of particularity. Whatever can find a place in the human heart, as emotion, idea, and purpose, whatever it is capable of actually shaping—all such diversity may form part of the varied presentations of painting. The entire world of particular existence, from the most exalted embodiment of mind to the most insignificant natural fact, finds a place here. For it is possible even for finite Nature, in its particular scenes and phenomena, to form part of such artistic display, provided only that we have some reference to conscious life which makes it akin to human thought and emotion.¹

(β) The second art which continues the further realization of the romantic type and forms a distinct contrast to painting is that of music. Its medium, albeit still sensuous, yet proceeds into still profounder subjectivity and particularization. We have here, too, the deliberate treatment of the sensuous medium as ideal, and it consists in [443]the negation and idealization into the isolated unity of a single point,² the indifferent external collocation of space,³ whose complete appearance is retained by painting and deliberately feigned in its completeness. This isolated point, viewed as this process of negation, is an essentially concrete and active process of cancellation within the determinate substance of the material medium, viewed, that is, as motion and vibration of the material object within itself and in its relation to itself. Such an inchoate ideality of matter, which no longer appears under the form of space, but as temporal ideality,⁴ is sound 119or tone. We have here the sensuous set down as negated, and its abstract visibility converted into audibility. In other words sound liberates the ideal content from its fetters in the material substance. This earliest¹ secured inwardness of matter and impregnation of it with soul-life supplies the medium for the intimacy and soul of Spirit—itself as yet indefinite—permitting, as it does, the echo and reverberation of man’s emotional world through its entire range of feelings and passions. In this way music forms the centre of the romantic arts, just as sculpture represents the midway point of arrest between architecture and the arts of the romantic subjectivity. Thus, too, it forms the point of transition between the abstract, spatial sensuousness of painting and the abstract spirituality of poetry. Music carries within itself, like architecture, and in contrast to the emotional world simply and its inward self-seclusion, a relation of quantity conformable to the principles of the understanding and their modes of co-ordinated configuration.²

(γ) We must look for our third and most spiritual type of artistic presentation among the romantic arts in that of poetry. The supreme characteristic of poetry consists in the power with which it brings into vassalage of the mind and its conceptions the sensuous element from which music and painting began to liberate art. For sound, the only remaining external material retained by poetry, is in it no longer the feeling of the sonorous itself, but is a mere sign without independent significance. And it is, moreover, a sign of idea which has become essentially concrete, and not merely³ of indefinite feeling and its subtle modes and gradations. And this is how sound develops into the Word, as essentially articulate voice, whose intention it is to indicate ideas and thoughts. The purely negative moment to which music advanced now asserts itself as the wholly concrete point, the point which is mind itself, the self-conscious individual, which produces from itself the infinite expansion of its ideas 120and unites the same with the temporal condition of sound. Yet this sensuous element, which was still in music immediately united to emotion, is in poetry separated from [444]the content of consciousness. Mind, in short, here determines this content for its own sake and apart from all else into the content of idea; to express such idea it no doubt avails itself of sound, but employs it merely as a sign without independent worth or substance. Thus viewed, the sound here may be just as well reproduced by the mere letter, for the audible, like the visible, is here reduced to a mere indication of mind.¹ For this reason, the true medium of poetical representation is the poetical imagination and the intellectual presentation itself; and inasmuch as this element is common to all types of art it follows that poetry is a common thread through them all, and is developed independently in each. Poetry is, in short, the universal art of the mind, which has become essentially free, and which is not fettered in its realization to an externally sensuous material, but which is creatively active in the space and time belonging to the inner world of ideas and emotion. Yet it is precisely in this its highest phase, that art terminates, by transcending itself; it is just here that it deserts the medium of a harmonious presentation of mind in sensuous shape and passes from the poetry of imaginative idea into the prose of thought.

[5.] Such we may accept as the articulate totality of the par121ticular arts; they are the external art of architecture, the objective art of sculpture and the subjective arts of painting, music, and poetry. Many other classifications than these have been attempted, for a work of art presents such a wealth of aspects, that it is quite possible, as has frequently been the case, to make first one and then another the basis of division. For instance, you may take the sensuous medium simply. Architecture may then be viewed as a kind of crystallization; sculpture, as the organic configuration of material in its sensuous and spatial totality; painting as the coloured surface and line, while in music, space, as such, passes over into the point or moment of time replete with content in itself, until we come finally to poetry, where the external medium is wholly suppressed into insignificance. Or, again, these differences have been viewed with reference to their purely abstract conditions of space and time. Such abstract divisions of works of art may, as their medium also may be consequentially traced in their characteristic features. They cannot, however, be worked out as the final and fundamental principle, because such aspects themselves derive their origins from a higher principle, and must therefore fall into subordination thereto.

This higher principle we have discovered in the types of art-[445]symbolic, classical, and romantic—which are the universal stages or phases of the Idea of beauty itself.

Their relation to the individual arts in their concrete manifestation as embodiment is of a kind that these arts constitute the real and positive existence of these general art-types. For symbolic art attains its most adequate realization and most pertinent application in architecture, in which it expatiates in the full import of its notion, and is not as yet depreciated, as it were, into the merely inorganic nature dealt with by some other art. The classical type of art finds its unfettered realization, on the other hand, in sculpture, treating architecture merely as the enclosure which surrounds it, and being unable to elaborate painting and music into the wholly adequate¹ forms of its content. Finally, the romantic art-type is supreme in the products of painting and music, and likewise in poetical composition, as their preeminent and unconditionally adequate modes of expression. 122Poetry is, however, conformable to all types of the beautiful, and its embrace reaches them all for the reason that the poetic imagination is its own proper medium, and imagination is essential to every creation of beauty, whatever its type may be.

To sum up, then, what the particular arts realize in particular works of art, are according to their fundamental conception, simply the universal types which constitute the self-unfolding Idea of beauty. It is as the external realization of this Idea that the wide Pantheon of art is being raised; and the architect and builder thereof is the spirit of beauty as it gradually comes to self-cognition, and to complete which the history of the world will require its evolution of centuries.

THE conclusion of the introduction brings within sight the more methodical exposition of our subject. It will in the first place be useful as a point of departure for a true philosophy of the beautiful to sum up shortly the position of Fine Art in its general relation to the Real, no less than to emphasize the salient features which distinguish the philosophy of Fine Art from other philosophical inquiries.

(a) With this object in view we will first enumerate the diverse attempts which have been made to apprehend the beautiful in thought, placing each in the order which will best assist a critical verdict. We have already contributed something to this in our introduction. And, moreover, we may add that the mere inquiry what others have contributed either rightly or wrongly to our subject, at least with the hope of ascertaining something really instructive to an exposition which claims to be wholly scientific, will not assist us much. So far from this being so we must preface our remarks with the admission that, in the opinion of many, the beautiful, for the very reason that it is the beautiful, does not admit of such intellectual apprehension, is, in short, no object intelligible to human thought. To such a thesis we must for the present—in our response to those who at this time of day contend that all Truth is ultimately incomprehensible, and only the finiteness of the phenomenal and the contingent matters of temporal existence is within our mental grasp—reply that it is precisely Truth, and Truth alone, which is to be thus comprehended, and for this reason that it possesses the absolute notion, or, more succinctly, the Idea for its basic support. Now beauty is no other than a par126ticular determination under which the True is expressed and revealed to us; and it lies open to the fullest comprehension of thought in so far as such can equip it with the armoury of the concrete notion. It is quite true that no idea has suffered more severely in our own time from misconceptions than this which we call the notion in its fullest explication. One is only too often misunderstood to mean a determination which is abstract and onesided, or at least a conception of the analytical understanding. As thus understood neither the totality of Truth nor the idea of beauty as a concrete whole can be brought home to a thinking consciousness. But the idea of beauty, as we have already observed, and shall seek to make more intelligible as we proceed, is no such abstraction of the mind: rather it may be defined as the absolute notion in its self-evolved concreteness, or still more specifically defined, the absolute Idea.

(b) And, further, we cannot more succinctly define the absolute Idea, in the above use of the expression, than by saying it is mind (Spirit): and we may add that the mind thus referred to is not mind regarded as finite, that is, subject to the conditions and limitations of sense-perception, but the universal and absolute Intelligence,¹ which, out of its own free activity, determines Truth in the profoundest signification of the term. To the ordinary consciousness of everyday life the object of perception, no doubt, breaks away from mind, as though our thought stood in opposition to Nature, which receives from us a validity equal at least to the consciousness which perceives it. But in this way of looking at Nature and the conscious subject as two neighbours set over against one another in territories equally self-subsistent it is only the finite and limited mind, not that which it is as an infinite substance and in its notional truth, which is apprehended. Nature is not thus to be set over against absolute Mind, either as conjoint with a sphere of the Real of equal worth, or as an independent boundary thereto. Rather the aspect which Nature appears to hold in this respect is that which mind or spirit itself sets up, and of which it becomes the product as a Nature in which limit and boundary are themselves determining constituents. 127In fact, Mind in its absolute or infinite substance can only be apprehended as this free activity, which is manifested in self-development through differentiation. This object, this other, through which such differentiation proceeds, is regarded in such opposition as Nature, but as the object of intelligence it is quite as much indebted to Mind for the free gift and fulness of its own essential substance. We must therefore conceive Nature as herself containing in potency the absolute Idea. She is that Idea in apparent shape, which mind, in its synthetic power, posits as the object opposed to itself. She is so far a product, a creation. The truth of Nature therefore is simply the determination by mind of its own substance, its ideality and power of determination, through a process which no doubt begins with a separation of itself into two factors which apparently negate each other, but which, by the very activity of such negation and separation, passes beyond the contradiction it implies to a unity which heals the fracture. Instead of finding ourelves opposed to a limit and a barrier we have a totality in which the parts which opposed each other are fused together by the free universality of mind. This ideality, in other words this infinite power of determination,¹ is that which constitutes the profound notion of Mind’s subjectivity. As subjectivity mind is, in the first instance, merely Nature, Mind, or Spirit that is not explicitly unfolded, mind which has not arrived at the grasp of its true notion. Nature is here set up in opposition to Mind, not as an object which itself has created, but as one whose limits it fails to overcome, an object, moreover, which, as assumed to be already subsisting in independence, Mind remains alongside of in the internal seclusion of knowledge and volition, and is only able to constitute the other side of Nature. The finiteness of scientific theory, no less than that of practical life, is to be found in this limited mode of consciousness, where intelligence is restricted to the use of finite categories and the formal “ought” in the realization of ethical perfection.² We find here, as we have pointed out 128was the case with Nature, that the phenomenal is not adequate to the essential truth of that which appears; what we receive is still the confusing medley of abilities, passions, intentions, opinions, and talents, which no sooner make themselves felt than they are displaced, working at cross purposes as often against as on the side of each other, in a strife between volition, opinion, and reflection, which brings to the surface every phase of fortuitous experience in all its confusing variety. It is the standpoint of the entirely finite, temporal, contradictory, and for that reason transitory, unsatisfied, and unreconciled spirit. For the satisfactions which obtain in such a consciousness, through the finiteness which inseparably clings to its entire outlook, itself so limited and confused, are of a purely relative and isolated validity. It is inevitable that consciousness, volition, and thought should make an effort to rise above this condition and seek for the universality, unity, and satisfaction which it eventually finds in the infinite substance of Spirit and its Truth. This unity and satisfaction, to which mind is carried forward by the impulse of its own ideal activity, transmuting the raw material of its finite conditions, constitutes the first revelation of that which the world of appearances is under a more notional grasp of it. Mind grasps its finiteness as the negation of its own essential substance, and is aware of its infinity. And this essential truth of the finite mind is the absolute Mind or Spirit. In this form of self-consciousness mind is merely actualized as absolute negativity. The element of finitude which it confronts is apprehended as such and annulled. In this, the highest sphere of its activity, mind becomes the object of volition. The Absolute itself becomes the object of mind. Spirit, as self-consciousness, differentiates itself as the knowing subject from the absolute Spirit as the object of knowledge. Mind in this latter sense, in contradistinction from mind which has not overcome the conditions of finite perception, may therefore be defined as a finite mind in possession of the principle of differentiation from its true object. In the higher and more speculative consideration of truth, however, it is the absolute mind itself which, in order to unfold explicitly the knowledge of itself, essentially becomes a principle of differentiation to itself, and thereby posits the finitude of mind, within 129which it becomes for itself absolute object of the knowledge of itself. It is now absolute mind within the ideal community¹ which belongs to it, the actual Absolute of itself in the form of Mind and knowledge.²

This is, in fact, the starting-point of the Philosophy of Fine Art. For the idea of Fine Art is neither the logical Idea, absolute Thought, that is, which develops itself in the medium of its freest activity, nor is it the Idea of Nature apprehended under more finite categories. Its province is rather that of Mind untrammelled by either the judgments or the actions of the finite spirit.

(c) The realm of Fine Art is the realm of absolute Spirit. We can but briefly indicate the reason why this is so. A fully philosophical proof belongs rather to treatises which immediately deal with those questions of philosophy we have noticed already, by which we mean those which treat of Logic, whose content, as above explained, is that of the absolute Idea, or the philosophy of Nature, or lastly, the philosophy of Mind in its determinate spheres of finitude. For in these sciences the object is to show not merely how the logical Idea presupposes the objective particularity of Nature as a vehicle to its determinate existence, but also how it is capable of passing from such externality to mind, and, finally, of freeing itself from all the finitude that clings to it and of attaining to Spirit in its eternal concreteness and truth.

From such a point of view, which is also applicable to art when regarded in all the fulness of worth it in truth implies, we are justified in associating it with the self-same province which belongs to religion and speculative philosophy. In every direction in which Mind or Spirit becomes identical with the absolute Mind it frees itself from the restricting limits of its positive existence, and, while liberating itself from the contingent relations, which pertain to it in its 130temporal existence, and the finite content of its objects and interests, is made aware of and discloses the entire wealth of reality it contains.

It may be of service here to expand more completely the position which Art thus occupies in its relation respectively to the life of Nature and Spirit.

A survey of the entire field of human existence presents to the ordinary consciousness of mankind the widest variety of interests and means of satisfaction. There is, in the first instance, the complex system of purely physical necessities, to the satisfaction of which the whole economy of industrial enterprise, through all its complicated tissue of commerce, merchandize, and technical crafts, is actively pursued. If we raise the level of our review to a more spiritual range, we are confronted with the world where rights are established and enforced, the world of legislative enactment, family life, division of social classes, in a word, the concrete living organism of the State. And more than this, there is the religious want, which asserts itself in the hearts of particular men and women, and finds its satisfaction in the life of a church. Finally, there is the many-sided and intricately specialized activity of scientific research, the organized effort to integrate all knowledge, and the comprehension which that knowledge implies, in one all-embracing system. Within this latter are comprised the activities of the fine arts, the interest, that is to say, in beauty, and which derives its spiritual nutriment in the realization of that beauty in plastic shapes.

(d) The question becomes inevitable how far a spiritual want of this kind is bound up as a necessary element in the life of man and his world-history. In the first instance these two spheres¹ appear simply as immediate factors of our entire survey. It is, however, the requirement of philosophy to probe more deeply into that which binds them as essential and necessarily interacting constituents of one organic whole. For on closer inspection it will be found that they do not stand in relation to one another on the mere basis of utility; rather we shall discover that only through the one we shall fully comprehend the other. In other words, 131the one circle overlaps the other, in the sense that the higher forms of its activity are found to be a part of the other; and that which is of less value in its own province is lifted into a finer atmosphere; and what had failed to free itself from its original bounds is now enlarged to liberty through the profounder satisfaction it receives in the widening of the range of its interests.¹ And it is this which makes clear the necessity of the ideal bond.

We will recall now for a moment the analysis we established of the notion of the beautiful and that of art generally. Two opposed aspects come under notice. In the first place we have a content, an end, a significance; and in addition to that we get the artistic expression of the same, the appearance and realization of such content; and, thirdly, these two aspects of the artistic product so pass into each other that the rationality or particularity is nothing short of the expression of the artistic purpose, nothing more or less is given us than the essential expression of the entire content. What we designate as content, “significance,” is just this simplicity of idea, the work of art resolved into its simplest yet most comprehensive determinants, as it exists for mind in contrast with the actual work executed. As an example we may summarize the content of a book from a few words or sentences the book contains, and nothing may be necessary to expound the content of that book sufficiently in its general import. This simple idea, the thesis or main problem of our book, which forms the fundamental basis on which the entire structure is built, is the abstract significance. It is only the detailed exposition which gives us the concrete totality.

Both sides, however, of this opposition do not stand in an indifferent or purely external relation one to the other, as, for instance, is the case when we contrast with it the particular content of an abstract mathematical figure, such as a triangle or an ellipse, to which the external particularity of its size or figure is related without affecting its significance. Rather in the former case we shall find that the content 132of its form, taken in abstraction in itself, possesses a determinate impulse in the direction of realization and thereby concreteness. There is in it essentially the “should” of purpose. However strongly form is here posited in independence, we are unable to rest satisfied with such abstraction, and ask for something more. This is at first apprehended merely as an unsatisfied want, a desire in the conscious subject, which strives to annul itself and secure satisfaction. From such a standpoint all we can say is that the content is purely self-contained, or subjective, over against which the objective other-than-itself is placed in opposition in such a way as to emphasize the desire to make the subjective content objective. Such a conflict between the subjective content and the objective reality which confronts it, no less than the mere impulse to transcend the opposition, is a universal characteristic of the determination of all self-conscious life.¹ Even that aspect of human life which we call physical, and still more that world of man’s spiritual aims and interests depends on this necessity to carry forward that which is at first purely subjective and ideal into the objective world, that a fuller satisfaction in its essential substance may be realized. But so long as the content of aims and interests is merely and at first apprehended in the one-sided form of subjective consciousness, and that one-sidedness is apprehended as a mere limit, this loss makes itself simply felt as unrest or pain. It is a negative something which is bound to resolve itself as such negativity, and, in order to remove the sense of defect, exerts an impulse to transcend the barrier itself, already an object of consciousness and thought. And, moreover, this transcendency does not merely amount to this, that the objective “other” ceases to be an opposed factor to the general subjective consciousness: rather in the more determinate connection, this defect of subjective thought is itself and within itself a defect and negation which involves an impulse to negate and pass beyond. In other words the conscious subject is implicitly and according to its essential notion the complete whole,² that is, not merely what is inward, 133but the realization no less of that which is inward or ideal in and through what is without. If we assume that it exists only abstractly in one form we have to face the contradiction that whereas it is, according to its concrete notion the whole, yet according to its mode of existence it remains merely one side of that totality. It is only through the entire resolution of such a contradiction that life becomes affirmative. To pass through each phase of this opposition, contradiction and its final abrogation is the higher and legitimate demand of conscious life. That which remains always affirmative, is, and remains, without life. Life is built upon negation and pain. It is only by crushing out such contradictions in the crucible of fuller life and knowledge that it remains in its affirmative substance. If it anchor wholly on contradiction without such a possibility of resolution it must be infallibly wrecked thereon.

Such, then, is the nature of these determinations of thought regarded in their abstraction to which it was necessary to draw attention at the present stage.

The most exalted content which lies within the grasp of self-conscious life may be concisely called freedom. Freedom is the highest determination of Spirit. In its formal aspect freedom, in its first instance, consists in this, that the subject thereof ceases to find a limit or barrier in the material which is set over against it; this is no longer an element foreign to it, but one in which it finds itself again. Even under this formal definition of it all necessity and misfortune disappears; the individual consciousness is reconciled with the world, finds satisfaction in such reconciliation, and all opposition and contradiction is thereby dissolved.

But over and above this, on closer inspection, we find that it is universally the rational—that is to say ethical relations in practical life, truth in thought—which constitutes the content of freedom. But, furthermore, inasmuch as freedom itself is in the first instance only subjective, not wholly carried into effect, there must remain for the indi134vidual an element of unfreedom, a somewhat purely objective opposed to it as a necessity of Nature; and it is accompanied likewise with the demand to secure a reconciliation of this opposition. From the reverse point of view a similar contradiction is apparent in the internal domain of the subjective consciousness itself. We have, on the one hand, that which is universal and self-subsistent in its own right, in other words the universal dictates or principles of justice, goodness, and truth. On the other there are the various impulses of mankind, all the emotions, preferences, and passions which exercise their power over the heart of each man and woman individually. This opposition no less than the other excites conflict and contradiction, and in this strife man becomes subject to every conceivable longing, the profoundest grief, and, in a word, to every kind of worry and discontent. It is the prerogative of the spiritual life of mankind to be a veil severed and broken asunder, tossed as it must be on the waves of contradiction. The animal creation lives at peace with itself and its environment. Man is unable to find a complete refuge in that which is exclusively inward, the soul as such, pure thought, in the world of legal obligation and its universality. He is dependent also upon his sensuous existence, his emotions, and all that appeals to his heart and soul. It is the part of philosophy to give expression to this contradiction in thought, as it extends throughout its all-embracing compass, and to overcome the same with a reconciliation equally comprehensive.

In the immediacy of everyday life, however, man seeks to secure an immediate satisfaction. Perhaps the most obvious example of such a resolution is to be found in the domain of animal wants and their satisfaction.

The states of hunger, thirst, fatigue on the one hand, and feeding, drinking, sleep on the other, with all such similar states, illustrate the contradictions and resolutions to which we here refer.

In this sphere of human existence, which is fundamentally the same as purely animal life, the content of such satisfaction is, however, of a finite and limited range. Such satiety carries with it no permanence, but moves forward without rest to a renewed sense of want. Men eat, drink, and sleep, and on the morrow are as hungry and weary as 135before. Man is compelled, therefore, to strive for a freedom more lasting in that element of the spiritual life which he appropriates in knowledge and volition, the sciences and his social activities. The ignorant man is unfree because he faces a world which is foreign to himself; a world which tosses hither and thither aimlessly, to which he is joined as an appendage, unable to unite that foreign world to itself, and to feel itself at home there as in its own demesne. The merest impulse of curiosity, the awakening of the love of knowledge, the lowest phase of animate unrest, and the highest grasp of philosophical insight are ultimately derived from the same source, namely, the desire to overcome every condition that is unfavourable to freedom, and to bring the world of everyday life, and that of the subject which reflects upon it, into one harmonious unity. If we consider the world of action the result is the same; freedom in human action is the attempt to make positive or real the reason of the Will. Reason is realized by voluntary action through the life of the State. In a State that is differentiated through itself on any rational principle, all the laws and social institutions which belong to it are simply a realization of freedom according to their own essential determinants. This being so, the reason that belongs to any citizen discovers in such institutions its own essential life: and, so long as such is not in revolt from those laws, proceeds with them as with its own kith and kin rather than a foreign adversary. We not infrequently find licence identified with freedom. But the freedom of licence is irrational; it depends upon a choice and self-determination which has nothing to do with a rational will, but is rather the product of accidental impulses and their dependence on the world of sense and physical Nature.

We may conclude, then, that the physical needs of man, no less than his knowledge and power of volition, receive in fact, each in its own sphere, a satisfaction in the world, and deliberately break up the contradiction between the subjective and objective, that is to say, between the freedom of consciousness and the external necessity of things with which it is confronted. The content, however, of such a freedom and the satisfaction which is therein experienced is still subject to limitations, and for this reason both still 136retain an element of finitude. And wherever we find such an element supervening it is inevitable that the original contradiction should again reassert itself, and the self-satisfaction only maintain a relative significance. For example, in the sphere of jurisprudence and its realization in the State it is true enough that the rationality of each citizen, his will and his freedom are recognized; he is a person and as such is respected; he is the owner of property, and if that property is in danger the courts of law reassert his rights in their integrity. This recognition, however, and the freedom it establishes are confined to single relations and isolated objects, such as a particular house, a sum of money, some particular right or law, in fine some particular transaction in the practical world. What the consciousness has at any one time before it are particular things, which no doubt are related to one another, and in fact form a nucleus of such relations; but, on the other hand, they are appropriate to categories of purely relative validity, are subject to various conditions of tenure, which make the satisfaction only immediately experienced when their predominance is reasserted, or at any rate fail to establish any degree of permanence. And further than this the life of the State in its organic entirety, as a related whole of monarch, government, courts of justice, military control, and general grouping of all the various societies which compose it, no less than the obligations and duties which such arrangements presuppose, the aims and satisfaction to which they are directed, the entire scope of its civic and commercial activities already referred to, in one word the complete organism of a nation’s life, is indeed in a genuine State complete in itself, and in a sense rounded off as a real totality. At the same time we must observe that the fundamental principle, for the realization of which the State exists, and wherein the individual man finds his satisfaction as a citizen, is, despite all the variety of that life, all the manifold differentiation of class within itself and as related to the world without, still a whole that is one-sided and in a real sense abstract. It is only the rational freedom of the will made explicit in a particular totality. It is, in short, only the national life, and further the life of a particular nation; a life, moreover, in which freedom is realized in a particular 137sphere of existence as individualized reality. And on this account it is that we are necessarily conscious, that rights and obligations in the mere bounds of civic existence, on the plane, that is to say, of merely this world’s or temporal existence, do not discover the absolute satisfaction we are seeking. We require as rational beings a higher realization of their objective truth as private individuals, a fuller sanction of their imperative validity than they themselves, in such a sphere, can offer us. What mankind, pressed on all sides by the boundaries of his purely terrestrial life, in fact requires is that region of more essential reality, in which every opposition and contradiction is overcome, and freedom can finally claim to be wholly at peace with itself. And this is, of course, nothing other than absolute Truth itself, no merely relative truth. In the Truth, according to its highest notion, all must be brought home to one unity. In it there can be no more opposition between freedom and necessity, Spirit and Nature, knowledge and the object of knowledge, law and impulse, between whatever form, in fact, the opposition of these contradictory phenomena of human experience may assume.

It is in virtue of such truth that proof is possible that neither a freedom which is essentially subjective and disparate from every element of necessity is true in the absolute sense; nor, on the other hand, is it admissible to predicate truth of a necessity conceived in absolute isolation from consciousness. Our ordinary conscious life fails to overcome this contradiction, and either plunges desperately into the same, or thrusts it on one side and makes its escape from it in some other way. Philosophy will, however, so address itself to the two determinating factors of the contradiction as to show that they are apprehended as isolate from each other in abstraction, not according to their concrete notion; and by the grasp of this latter it will demonstrate the one-sidedness in its relative character, placing these opposing aspects in the fuller union and harmony which is truth. It is the function of philosophy to grasp and formulate this notion of truth. Unquestionably philosophy recognizes the concrete notion throughout; and it is in virtue of this that it is Thought with full grasp of truth. But what we call the notion is something other than this, 138truth, that is, in its essential verity together with the existence which is either adequate to it or is not so. In all finite reality the determinations, which are essential to ideal truth, appear separable from each other, dividing the veil of that which in its absolute Truth is a complete totality. Take the case of a living being. Under such finite categories we are forced to regard it as a subject in opposition to the inorganic Nature which environs it. Both the points of view are no doubt present in the notion, but they are there reconciled. Finite existence, however, thrusts them apart. It is, in short, an existence or reality which is unequal to the unity of the notion. We may therefore say that the notion is valid in every sphere of actuality. At the same time the main point to be determined is whether the notion in its ideal concreteness is actually completed in the particular unity, presented, wherein the two aspects posited in opposition persist in no ultimate self-subsistence and coherence over against each other, but are rather ideal phases which tend to pass into a higher unity which cancels such opposition. And the reality of this highest mode of union is only reached when we enter the sphere of truth, freedom, and the satisfaction which they create. The higher life which belongs to this sphere, this supreme enjoyment of truth, which as feeling is called “blessedness,” and, as conscious thought “contemplation,” we may describe generically as the life known to religion. For religion is just this universal domain,¹ in virtue of which the one concrete totality of the World comes to each man in union with himself as his essential substance, while it remains no less for consciousness the essential truth of Nature. And it is this profounder truth of the Real which alone proves itself invincible over all that is merely particular and finite, being as it is the one absolute harmony wherein all that is otherwise discordant and opposed is finally resolved. Now it is through its direct concern in the true, regarded as the absolute object of consciousness, that Art belongs to the supreme sphere of Spirit, and it is to be placed, in respect to its content, if in a more specific sense, on the same basis as religion and philosophy. I connect these two last for the reason that philosophy has no other 139object than God. In its substance it is in fact rational theology, and in its service of the truth a continual service of God.

(e) Accepting, then, this fundamental similarity of content these three spheres of absolute Spirit only differ in the forms under which they present their object, that is, the Absolute, to human consciousness. The differences which are perceptible in these modes of presentment are due to the notion of the absolute Spirit (Mind) itself. Spirit, in its truth, is essential substance brought home to itself. It is, therefore, no essence which lies outside and in abstract relation to objectivity, but rather is, within the compass of that objectivity, the re-collected presence¹ of the substance of all objects within finite spirit. It is the finite which grasps its own essential universality, and, in doing so, grasps essential Being in the absolute sense. The first mode of this comprehension is an immediate one that is to say, it is a sensuous cognition, a cognition in the form and semblance of the object of sense-perception, in which the Absolute is presented directly to the understanding² and feeling. The second form is that of the conceptive or imaginative consciousness. Last of all, we have the free thought of absolute Spirit. The form of sensuous perception is appropriate to art in the sense that it is art which presents truth to consciousness in its sensuous semblance; but it is a semblance which, under the mode of its appearance, possesses a higher and profounder meaning and significance, although it is not its function to render the universality of the notion wholly intelligible through the medium of sense. It is indeed rather the unity to which art attains with that of the particular appearance which constitutes the essence of the beautiful, the essence of the artistic product. This union is perfected in art not entirely through sensuous objectification, but also through the medium of imaginative conception. This is exceptionally so in the art of poetry. At the same time, even in this, the 140most intellectual or ideal art, the union between significance and the individual mode of its presentation is present with the same, although it is displayed to the imaginative consciousness, and every part of its content is conceived in its immediacy and visualized for the imagination.¹ And generally we must accept the fact that art, possessing as it does truth or Spirit for its object, is unable to reproduce the same by merely copying particular objects of Nature, such as the sun, moon, earth, and stars. Such are, no doubt, objects of sensuous perception; but, simply as such, they are isolated and can offer no reflection of what iså spiritual. In thus attributing to art this absolute significance as a manifestation of Spirit we have expressly set on one side the conception of art which finds its content of too various a nature, or too much occupied with interests foreign to it, to merit such a view. And at the other extreme religion, no doubt, frequently summons art to her service, in order to bring the truths of religion more near to the emotion, or to clothe the same in imaginative form. In both cases unquestionably art is rendering a service to a province not, in strictness, its own. At the same time where art is found in most exalted perfection, in that case no doubt it unfolds in plastic guise the mode of exposition most adequate and essentially necessary to the content of the truth accepted. Among the Greeks, for example, Art was the highest medium under which the community conceived its gods, and became conscious of truth. For this reason we may justly say that the poets and artists of Greece created the gods of their people. In other words, they defined for the imagination of their people the active life and energy of the Divine Presence, giving them the definite content of a religion. And this statement must not merely be taken to imply that all Greek artists did was to clothe in imagery or embellish with the beauty of poesy vague conceptions and hearsays which, as general religious maxims or isolated determinations of conscious life, were already present before the era of such poetic creations. The truth of this artistic production is rather to be found in this, that art and poetry were the exclusive forms 141in which these creative artists could bring to life and expression the ideas which fermented in themselves. In other phases of that consciousness, where we find the content less completely represented by the plastic imagery of art, the scope of Art as the handmaid of religion is of less importance.

We have thus indicated what was, at any rate, once the true position of Art in its relation to the highest interests of man’s spiritual life.

But inasmuch as art is preceded in Nature and the finite processes of life by a kind of antenatal history, so too there is a history that follows its culmination, which in other terms passes over and beyond its purely conceptive or plastic grasp of the Infinite. For art carries in the notion that gives it life a limit; and it is from this boundary that the human consciousness passes beyond into forms more adequate to its spiritual import. It is this inherent shortness of the mark that fixes the subordinate position we are only too ready to assign to art in our daily life nowadays. For us European art is no longer the highest means in which the actuality of truth is possessed. Speaking generally, thought has long ago pronounced a verdict upon art when it defined it as the portrayal of the Divine by concepts which appeal to sense-perception. This was the judgment passed on it by the Jews and the followers of Mohammed. Nay, we find it present among the Greeks themselves, as the strong opposition of Plato and Homer and Hesiod to the popular conception of the gods proves clearly. There is a period in the education of every civilized nation, when art becomes a sign-post, as it were, to that which stands beyond her border. The evolution of Christendom is itself an illustration. The historical features of that religion, the resurrection of Christ, His life and death, have doubtless offered to the art of painting a mighty field on which to exercise its imaginative bounty; and the Church has either surrounded such art with its magnificent protection, or suffered it simply to work on unheeded. But as the love of knowledge and scientific research, and yet more the felt want of a more intimate and personal spirituality necessitated the Reformation, the religious imagination was called away from the sensuous medium which enwrapped it, and centred once for all upon the inward 142spirituality of emotional life and conscious thought. In this way there grew up, so to speak, that posterior twilight of Art’s history I referred to, where the want has found a dwelling in man to rest satisfied alone with the pure medium of the soul as the ultimate form of truth. In the earliest beginnings of art we shall find mystery still present, a secret strain and longing which persists because Art’s imaginative powers are unable to envisage to sense the complete truth of its content. When once, however, the mind of man has succeeded in endowing such content with perfect outward shape in art, it is driven inevitably away from this objective realization to its own free spiritual activity as from something repellent to it. A period such as this is our own. We may, indeed, express the hope that art will rise to yet higher grades of technical perfection; but in any case Art in its specific form has ceased to meet the highest requirements of spiritual life. We may still wonder at the unrivalled excellence of the statues of the gods of Hellas, and imagine that God the Father, Christ, and the Virgin Mary have received ideal representation at the hands of more recent painters. But it is of no use. Our knees no longer bow to them.

The sphere of conscious life nearest to that of art is that of religion. The form which belongs to the religious consciousness is that of the imaginative concept. The Absolute is here removed from the externality of artistic production, and received in a more spiritual way by the imagination, so that the heart and emotions, the inner life of the individual that is to say, become its vehicle. This progress in spiritual insight from art to religion may be further defined by the statement that art is only one aspect of the religious consciousness. In other words, when a work of art objectifies the truth or mind for sense-perfection, and apprehends this form of the Absolute as the one appropriate to its vision, religion blends with the same the devotional attitude that flows from the inner life confronted with the absolute reality as thus presented. Devotion is a type of emotional existence which is, strictly speaking, outside the province of art. It originates in the fact that the individual suffers that object which art has rendered visible to sense to penetrate the arcana of his emotional life, and so completely identifies 143himself with it that this inward presence, which the imagination and the inherent might of feeling has rendered possible, becomes an essential phase in the manifestation of absolute reality. Devotion is this cultus of the community in its purest, most intimate, and subjective form; a culture, in which the principle of objectivity is at the same time consumed and absorbed, and the content thereof is transmuted without such objectivity into the possession of heart and soul.

The third and last form or phase in the evolution of absolute mind (spirit) is philosophy. In the boundaries of the religious sphere, where God is apprehended in the first instance perforce as an external object, and men are taught that there is a God, and how He has revealed Himself and still is revealed to mankind, the subjective consciousness is indeed made the vehicle of such knowledge, and the religious sense imparted stirs and fills the heart of the community; but the inwardness of devotion which is born of the emotions and the imagination is not the highest form of inwardness. We are bound to recognize that the purest form of knowledge is conscious thought in its freest activity. In this alone the content of knowledge is adequate to the demands of that which is consciously apprehended: here alone we are in the presence of that most intelligent form of cultus, which seeks wholly to appropriate to itself, and to grasp in concrete thought what is otherwise only the evanescent content of feeling or the imagination. In the purview of such a philosophy art and religion, as two aspects of one truth, become related under a unifying conception. On the one hand, though philosophy, by its surrender of all sensuous externality, has lost the objective presentation of art, yet it has exchanged it for the highest form under which concrete reality is objectively apprehended and redeemed, in other words that of speculative reason. It has, on the other, lost the emotional subjectivity of the religious consciousness in the same pure medium. For while human thought is the most inward and appropriate vehicle of subjective life, such thought, in its fullest grasp of truth, the Idea, is actuality in the most objective and universal sense of the term, and is only to be apprehended by pure thought in the medium native to itself.

144With this adumbration of the difference between the spheres of art, religion, and philosophy we must on the present occasion rest content.

The sensuous mode of consciousness is that which first appears in the history of mankind. The earliest stages of religion are for this reason indistinguishable from a religion of art and its sensuous manner of presentation. In the religion of Spirit for the first time is God as Spirit cognized also on a higher plane, and one more adequate to thought, wherein it likewise follows as a corollary, that the presentation of truth in sensuous shape is not truly adequate to Spirit.

Now that we know something of the position which art occupies in the field of spiritual activity, and that which belongs to the philosophy of art among the several philosophical sciences, we will proceed in this introductory portion of our work in the first place to investigate the general idea of the beauty of art.

TO arrive at the Idea of Fine Art in all its concreteness it will be necessary for us to consider it under three phases.

3. In the third of these aspects the subject of our investigation will be the Ideal in its positive realization, in other words as the artistic display of this Ideal in particular works of art.

1.	The Idea		147
	[(a)	The Idea is concrete, not abstract	149
	(b)	Objectivity is the real existence of the notion, and the means whereby it is actualized	152
	(c)	The Idea is the harmonized totality of the two aspects]	152
2.	The Determinate Existence of the Idea		153
3.	The Idea of the Beautiful		153
	[(a)	Not apprehended alone by the faculty of the understanding, or the finite categories	154
	(b)	The nature of finite or abstract apprehension and practical volition considered	155
	(c)	The object of beauty resolves and the one-sidedness of both standpoints in a free and infinite totality]	157

A.	The Beauty of Nature as such			160
	1.	The Idea as Life		160
		[(a)	The first mode under which the notion is in Nature asserted as objectivity is that of physical matter, the ideal unity whereof is not found as ideality	160
		(b)	A further step is the integration of natural objects under a unified system, as the solar system	161
		(c)	The third mode is that of organic Life. This alone is a determinate existence of the Idea]	163
	2.	The animated life of Nature as Beauty		171
		[(a)	The motion of life considered in relation to the conception of beauty	171
		(b)	xviiiThe nature of organic unity, and the degree it contributes to the beauty of an object	173
		(c)	The inward unity of soul-life and the degree it contributes to the correlation of parts of an organism, or is asserted in external form to our senses rather than our reflection]	175
	3.	Modes under which the beauty of Nature is investigated		179
		[(a)	Where the form is immediately in the materia as its essence or conformative energy, as in crystals, or more concretely as the informing soul through the living organism	180
		(b)	Mobility in animals as a test of their apparent beauty	180
		(c)	Self-conscious life the culminating mode]	182
B.	The external Beauty of abstract Form viewed as Uniformity, Symmetry, Conformity to Rule, and Harmony. Also Beauty regarded generally as abstract unity of the Sensuous Material			184
C.	The Defective Aspects of the Beauty of Nature			196
	1.	The Inward principle in its immediacy as merely such inwardness		199
		[(a)	Immediate singularity as conserved in the purely animal organism	199
		(b)	Of the nature of the contrast between the above and the human body	200
		(c)	Social organizations viewed in such particularized immediacy, and the defects they betray as such external totalities]	201
	2.	The Dependence of particular existence as viewed in its immediate singularity		202
		[(a)	The dependence of animal life upon its natural environment	203
		(b)	The nature of a similar dependence in the case of the human organism	203
		(c)	The dependence of human souls, or spiritual interests, on the prose-life of ordinary existence]	204
	3.	The limitations implied by such conditions		205
		[(a)	The restriction of species in the animal world, and of the social condition as it affects human individuality	205
		(b)	The limitation of racial division, or of particular families, or particular professions, and the effect of such upon the aspect of beauty	206
		(c)	xixIt is the very defects of this finite plane of reality, which stimulates man to recover the vision of his freedom in Art]	208

A.	The Ideal as such					209
	1.	Individuality which partakes of Beauty				209
		[(a)	The nature of the conditions under which Art can express a profound and infinite spiritual content			210
		(b)	What Art rejects from natural embodiment in order to effect this revelation, which is also a purification			212
		(c)	This “referring back” of external form to spirituality, or inwardness, issuing in harmonious individuality, is the very nature of the Ideal			213
			(α)	The blythe serenity of antique art		214
			(β)	The treatment of emotion by romantic art		255
			(γ)	Irony]		217
	2.	The Ideal relatively to Nature				218
		[(a)	The formal ideality of a work of art, i.e., the element of poetry therein			220
		(b)	The creative faculty contrasted with Nature in its power to grasp ideal significance, with illustrations of this power			222
		(c)	The nature of this spiritual recreation of natural fact by Art originating in the energy of mind. Illustration with the example of Dutch art in its genre painting, also with that of portraiture and classical art]			227
B.	The Determinate Character of the Ideal					236
	I.	Ideal determinacy as such				237
		1.	Thought apart from the plastic material can only comprehend the Divine in its universality and unity. Mohammedan and Hebrew art			237
		2.	The polytheistic aspect of Hellenic art considered, as also Christian art			237
		3.	The relation of the arts of painting and sculpture to the latter. The transition from the principle of spiritual repose to that of development and conflict			238
	II.	xxThe Action				240
		1.	The universal World-condition			241
			[(a)	(α)	The self-subsistency of such a condition as a necessary prius of the embodiment of the Ideal	242
				(β)	The nature of the reality adapted to artistic treatment as contrasted with what is not so adapted. The fixed order of the State as contrasted with conditions most favourable to free individuality	245
				(γ)	Further examination of contrast in relation to judicial functions and the ideas of punishment or revenge as we find it in the heroic age. The reappearance of an analogous condition in the Middle Ages	248
			(b)	Modern prosaic life the condition most favourable to the private or personal life as an object of interest		258
			(c)	Resistance by individual poets to this process of social change. The permanent demand for the heroic]		260
		2.	The Situation			263
			(a)	The situation that is devoid of situation		267
			(b)	The situation as defined in its harmlessness or absence of further conflict		268
				[(α)	The movement from pure tranquillity to movement or expression. Illustrations from classical art	269
				(β)	Movement as related to externality. The initial stage of action. Greek sculpture	269
				(γ)	Situation in movement presented as an opportunity to further expression. Illustrations from poetry]	271
			(c)	The Collision		272
				[(α)	Collisions which arise from wholly material conditions. Only of artistic interest as a consequence of natural misfortune. Illustrations	274
				(β)	Spiritual collisions dependent on natural conditions. Classified and illustrated	276
				(γ)	The above only form the starting-point of the collision of the essential forces of spiritual life. The third and most important type is the collision caused by the disruption of Spirit alone. Illustrations]	283
		3.	xxiThe Action			289
			(a)	The universal forces operative in the action.
				[(α)	These forces are the eternally paramount religious and ethical modes of relationship, such as family, fatherland, church, friendship, status, honour, and love. They are children of the one absolute Idea. Illustration of their contention	292
				(β)	They must not act in discord with the main action. The position of evil powers as confronting them, and its treatment by classic and modern poetry	293
				(γ)	Such forces must appear in Art as embodied in particular personalities. Contrast between ancient and modern art in this respect]	296
			(b)	The individuals concerned in the action		299
				[(α)	The relations between gods and men in classical art, and that between the Divine and the human in Christian art	300
				(β)	Pathos considered in its relation to various modes of art]	302
			(c)	Character		313
				[(α)	Viewed as coextensive or self-coherent individuality, relatively, that is, to the intrinsic wealth it connotes. Illustrations	315
				(β)	Viewed relatively to the particular form under which it is bound to appear	317
				(γ)	Viewed as a concrete unity coalescing wholly with its determinate form and as assured character. Illustrations classified in their stability and lack of such]	320
	III.	The External Determination of the Ideal				325
		1.	The abstract Externality as such			329
			[(a)	Spatiality, Uniformity, Figure, Time, and Colour		330
				(α)	How far such contribute to artistic production	336
				(β)	The necessity of clear articulation of form and tone considered]	337
		2.	The Coalescence of the concrete Ideal with its external Reality			339
			[(a)	The bond of unity regarded as no positive reality, but as a mysterious or secret connection. The relation of external Nature to xxiithe work of art. The Homeric poems contrasted with the “Niebelungenlied” in this respect		340
			(b)	Where the unity is expressly due to human activity and human adaptation of means to ends		340
				[(α)	The use made by man of ornament or of anything used for mere show, e.g., precious metals for statuary	340
				(β)	The question how far objects used for practical purposes are suited for art. The idyllic, civilized and heroic condition compared in the degree they are thus adapted	345
			(c)	The spiritual environment itself in social institutions, etc., regarded in its relation to ideal character]		355
		3.	The Externality of a work of Art in relation to a Public			355
			[(a)	What is implied in the assertion by the artist of the particular culture of his own times?		358
			(b)	What may be regarded as truth when the reference is to a Past, either in an exclusive or objective sense?		363
			(c)	What may still be regarded as valid in truth though the matter be appropriated from a time and nationality foreign to the artist? All three questions discussed and illustrated]		365
C.	The Artist					379
	1.	Imagination, Genius, and Inspiration				380
	2.	The objective character of the artistic presentation				392
	3.	Manner, Style, and Originality				394

					PAGE
Translator’s Preface					v
Introduction					1
I.	The Limits of Aesthetic defined, and certain Objections against the Philosophy of Art refuted				1
	[(a)	Aesthetic confined to Beauty of Art			2
	(b)	Is Art unworthy of scientific consideration?			4
	(c)	Or at least is it incapable of truly philosophical exposition? Negative answer to both these questions]			6
II.	Scientific Methods which apply to the Beautiful and Art				17
	[1.	The Empirical Method			18
	2.	Abstract Reflection			27
	3.	The Philosophical Idea of artistic Beauty, that is, the notional concept thereof, provisionally defined]			28
III.	The Notion of the Beauty of Art				29
		Observations upon the ordinary ideas about Art			29
	1.	The art-work is a creation of human activity			33
		[(a)	Theory of imitation of Art by rule		33
		(b)	Art as direct inspiration		35
		(c)	The rank of Art relatively to Nature		38
		(d)	The nature of the human Art-impulse]		40
	2.	The art-work is addressed to human sense			43
		[(a)	Theory that its object is to excite feeling		43
		(b)	The nature of artistic taste		45
		(c)	The nature of art-scholarship as contrasted with artistic taste		46
		(d)	The more philosophical consequences of the fact that Art appeals to sense and requires a sensuous medium for its expression		47
	3.	The End or Interest of Art			57
		[(a)	Is it imitation of Nature?		57
		(b)	xviIs the end or content identical with the dictum, “Humani nihil a me alienum,” etc.		63
		(c)	How far it is a mitigation or purification of the passions		65
		[(d)	The higher object of Art which consists in its revelation of truth in itself]		76
IV.	Historical Deduction of the true Notion of Art				77
	1.	The philosophy of Kant			78
		[(a)	Feeling of aesthetic satisfaction not appetitive		80
		(b)	Beauty an object of universal satisfaction		80
		(c)	Teleological aspect of the Beautiful		81
		(d)	Pleasure in the Beautiful necessary, though felt]		82
	2.	Schiller, Winckelmann, and Schelling			83
	3.	Irony			88
V.	Division of the Subject				95
	[1.	Inquiry as to the mode under which the divisions of the subject arise from the notional concept of Beauty			95
	2.	Part I. The Ideal			100
	3.	Part II. The particular general types of Beauty			102
		(a)	The Symbolic type of Art		103
		(b)	The Classical type of Art		104
		(c)	The Romantic type of Art		106
	4.	Part III. The specific arts			110
		(a)	Architecture		112
		(b)	Sculpture		113
		(c)	Romantic art, which includes		117
			(α)	Painting	117
			(β)	Music	118
			(γ)	Poetry	119
	5.	Conclusion]			120

1.	The Position of Art relatively to finite Reality, Religion, and Philosophy		125
	[(a)	Theory that the Beautiful is no intelligible object of thought	125
	(b)	The relation of the human reason to Nature both empirically and speculatively	126
	(c)	xviiThe realm of Fine Art that of the Absolute Spirit	129
	(d)	How far Art responds to a genuine spiritual want in man	130
	(e)	The truth which forms the content of art, religion, and philosophy differs only in the modes under which it is presented]	139