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Title: The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1 (of 4)

Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Translator: Francis Plumptre Beresford Osmaston

Release date: August 11, 2017 [eBook #55334]
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
PHILOSOPHY OF FINE ART, VOLUME 1 (OF 4) ***

THE PHILOSOPHY OF
FINE ART
BY

G. W. F. HEGEL
TRANSLATED, WITH NOTES, BY

F. P. B. OSMASTON, B.A.
AUTHOR OF "THE ART AND GENIUS OF TINTORET," "AN ESSAY
ON THE FUTURE OF POETRY," AND OTHER WORKS

VOL I

LONDON

G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.

1920

contents

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].
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 writing Mr. Hastie's translation of Michelet's work
and Mr. Kedney's analysis are of very little value[5]. 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.
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[6], some of
which were little more than fragmentary notes for lectures, (ii)
supplemented further from notes[7] 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.
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.

The introductions[8] 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.
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 ordinary reader and less provocative
of hostile criticism. Translators therefore, who, following the example of
the French translator[9], 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.
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 learned 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[10], 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.
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[11], 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 work 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 well-nigh 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.
But though even sincere admiration may smile over such a description, it
does unquestionably reflect to a remarkable extent the thoroughness,
tenacity of purpose, 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 say 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, Schiller, Goethe, Schelling, and Hegel himself on the
subject[12].
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.

[1] New York, Appleton and Co.
[2] Chicago, Griggs and Co., 1885.
[3] Edinburgh, 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.
[5] Mr. Kedney's volume only amounts to about three hundred small-sized pages
altogether.
[6] The most important source were MSS. for lectures given in 1820. This
formed the basis of further lectures in 1823, 1826, and 1829.

[7] 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.
[8] 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.
[9] 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.
[10] "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.
[11] "Life of Hegel," p. 110.
[12] 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.

CONTENTS OF VOL. I

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
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 36
(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) Is 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 84
3. Irony] 90
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 99
3. Part II. The particular general types of Beauty 100
(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
(α) Painting 117
(β) Music 118
(γ) Poetry 119
5. Conclusion] 122

FIRST PART

THE IDEA OF THE BEAUTY OF ART OR THE IDEAL

I. 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) The 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

CHAPTER I

THE NOTION OF THE BEAUTIFUL IN GENERAL

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

CHAPTER II

THE BEAUTY OF NATURE

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) The 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) It is the very defects of this finite plane of reality, which stimulates
man to recover the vision of his freedom in Art] 208

CHAPTER III

THE BEAUTY OF ART OR THE IDEAL

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 215
(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. The 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. The 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 co-extensive 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
[(α) The bond of unity regarded as no positive reality, but as a
mysterious or secret connection. The relation of external Nature to the
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 adapted341
(γ) 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
INDEX

THE PHILOSOPHY OF FINE ART

INTRODUCTION

I

The present inquiry[1] 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 nomenclature 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
consequently 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[2]; 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[3], 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 independently 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 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 are 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 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 often
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 conceivable[4] 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[5]. 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 accordance with the actual process of the real world and the
manner of conceiving it as we actually find it.

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.
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 formally 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 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 arguments[6] are deduced therefrom, 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 pastime 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 fulfillment 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 mode and form through which the Divine, the profoundest
interests of mankind, and spiritual truths of widest range, art 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, between Nature and its finite reality, and the infinite
freedom of a reason which comprehends. Now it was objected that the
element[7] 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 standi[8] 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[9], 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 which 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[10], 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 reality of more exalted rank born of mind. The phenomena of
art therefore are not merely not 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
out 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. 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 reflective[11] 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, both 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 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
object of recreating such art[12], but in order to ascertain scientifically its
nature.
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 subjective[13] 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 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 assumptions, part of which relate to its content, part to
its material or conceptive[14] 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 recall with advantage the formative
principle of its necessity[15].
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[16]. 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, even though
the mode of its presentation accept for its own the phenomenal guise of
sensuous reality, permeating as it does the sensuous 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[17]; 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[18], belongs to the realm
of comprehending thought; and mind, by subjecting it[19] 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 with 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[20], 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 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.

II

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 to 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[21], 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 well-nigh 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
range, but knowledge that is highly specialized. In other words, a work of

art is associated with particular[22] 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[23], 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 their 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:
Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci
Lectorum delectando pariterque monendo—
"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 temperament; 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 significance[24] 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.
Hirt, 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 "Consummate[25] 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[26], 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 detail 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 in 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[27], so that it 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 determinant[28] of beauty[29]. 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 highest 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.
We 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 hallmarked 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 retain 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 essence[30] 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 notion[31], 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 this 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.

III

After these preliminaries we come to closer quarters with our actual
subject-matter, namely, the philosophy of Fine Art[32]; 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 science 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[33], 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[34]. 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 as a pleasure purely
personal to ourselves, due to the caprice of our senses[35]. 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 inquiry, 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[36],
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[37], we have
not as yet the idea of 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[38].
By this means our final introduction[39] 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[40].
(3) It contains an end bound up with it.

1. With regard to the first point, that a work of art is a product of 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 effect or to imitate[41],
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 complete[42] 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
unique[43] creation than ever can be 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 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 neither[44] 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[45].
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 voluntarily 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[46]. 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[47]; 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 in 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 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[48]. 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 themselves
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[49]. 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[50], or 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 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
purity[51] 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
consists 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. In Nature the medium correspondent to this
is the unconscious sensuous[52] 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 means 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
form[53] 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[54], what he is and all in fact that exists. The objects of Nature
exist exclusively in immediacy and once for all.[55] 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 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 practical 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[56].
This universal demand for artistic expression[57] 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 realized 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 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[58]; 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 possesses 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 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[59]. 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 nature 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 mere[60]
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 material to effectuate this was not as yet forthcoming—than to
promote in a general way the cultivation of such a taste[61]. Consequently
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 significance[62] 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 is[63] 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 these 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 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[64]. 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 presented 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.
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 sensuous[65] particular thing, stands in a relation of
opposition, to things in general as in the same way particulars. He does 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 transitory 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 desire[66] 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[67], 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 how 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 scientific form
just as little by art as it shared in the common table of those impulses of the
purely practical desire. 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[68], converting 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 way[69] 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 in the work 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[70], 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
theoretical[71] 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 touch come into contact with matter simply as such[72],
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[73], 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.
(β) For this reason, however, a product of art is only possible in so far as it
has received its passage through the mind, 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[74]?" 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 itself 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 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
type[75] is based in 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[76], 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[77], 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 exhausted 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 Nature[78]
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.
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 modelling 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 to 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 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 Aethiopian churches:
"These pictures will rise up in judgment against their creators on the Last
Day." There are, no doubt, no less examples of completely 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 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[79], 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[80]; 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; for 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 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 taste, 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 poetry, to
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
imaginative[81] character.
The end or object of art must therefore consist in something other than the
purely formal[82] imitation of what is given to objective sense, which
invariably can merely call into being technical legerdemain and not works
of art[83]. 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 into 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 opinion that it is the
task and object of art to bring before our sense, feeling, and power of
emulation[84] 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 through[85] 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 deficiencies, and yet from a further
point of view that the passions we share with all men[86] 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[87], 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 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.

The 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[88], 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 does not possess 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 reflection[89]
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
resurrection 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 expansion 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[90].
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[91].
Even if the man in such a case exclaims, "the passion 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 fusion[92] 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 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 old 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 confinement[93] 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 contemplative[94] 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 ramifications[95] 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, and a building to moral

completeness. For the defining role 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 of 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.[96]
(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
Et prodesse volunt et delectare poetae[97]
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 to 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 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 primary[98]
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 itself a shattered thing within that
ornament[99], 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 mind[100] 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 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.
With 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[101]; 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[102], we soon discover that its conception does not
immediately coincide with that which we describe in a general way as
virtue, respectability[103], 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
opposed 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[104]. 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 discover permanent satisfaction[105] 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 hand he lifts himself up to eternal idea's, to a realm of thought and
freedom. As Will he legislates for himself universal laws and
destinations[106], 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, and[107], 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 one
sided 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 essential nature, and in its
actual presence the at the same time accomplished and self-accomplishing.
And, in fact, this view agrees directly with unwitting[108] 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 there[109] in reconciliation.
(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 presented 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 idea[110] 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.

IV

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 to 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[111].
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 ideas, 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 conceives 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 street[112] 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 property 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[113]. In this
case the idea of the end as recognized in apartness[114] 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 separation[115] 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 other.
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 be[116] 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.
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
duty 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 limits 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 evolution[117] 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 as 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[118]. 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[119]: 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 forth 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
unification[120] 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[121]," 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 observation
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.
From this tendency, and particularly from the opinions[122] 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-
matter[123] 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[124]. 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 consequently 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[125]. 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[126], 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, nothing 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 nature[127] of all 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 saintliness[128] 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 god-like as Irony. The ironical here,
however, as genial individuality, consists in the 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[129]. 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
republican. 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[130]. 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[131], 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 to establish
again the universal and infinite within the finite and particular. Solger did
not get beyond this negativity; and unquestionably it is a phase[132] 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.

V[133]

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 abstracts 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, despite its universality, possesses both ideality[134]
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 abstraction
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[135], 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.
If, then, a sensuous form and configuration is to be 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[136], 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 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 naïve
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 highest 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[137]. 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[138].
This 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 world[139] 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[140].
Relatively to these points of view our philosophy will divided into three
fundamental parts.
First, we have a general part. It has for its content 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 the 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[141].
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 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 particular 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 be 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 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 and 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
basis of division for this sphere. For 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 in 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 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 can 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 possible 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[142]. 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[143], 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 to perception in its bodily presence. The
transmigration of souls in this respect an abstract conception[144], 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 eternal. In this latter case it is only capable of asserting and
expressing itself as intellectual being[145].
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 limitations 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[146], 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
naïve 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 person[147] is an
essence and a power with whom the inward life of soul[148] 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 content and is
able to perfectly represent in bodily shape. This elevation of mere
potentiality into self-conscious knowledge 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[149], 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 art 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[150], 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 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 idiosyncrasies 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[151], 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

every accident, in all the chance circumstance that falls into independent
shape, in all misfortune and sorrow, nay, in crime itself.
Hence it comes 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 transcendency 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 with 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[152]. 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 vision and emotion forms the centre of the entire
world of art. It is the independent, free and divine Image[153], 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 consists 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[154]. 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 co-ordinated 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 which it enters into no fusion, or has only entered so far as to establish
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 co-ordinated 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 same with its presence. In other words
the infinite[155] 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 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[156], 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.[157] 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 variety 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 soul[158] 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[159], whose union is no longer sensuous but wholly ideal.
Here for the first time God Himself is revealed as veritably Spirit—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, being[160] 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 specific emotional life. Moreover, for the

reason that the main thing here is not the untroubled repose of the God in
himself[161], 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 posited[162] 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[163].
The 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.
(c) The articulation of this third sphere of the particular arts may be fixed as
follows:
(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[164]. This
quality of visibility made essentially ideal[165] 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 compass 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[166].
(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 the negation and idealization
into the isolated unity of a single point[167], the indifferent external
collocation of space[168], 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[169], is
sound or 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 earliest[170]
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[171].
(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
merely[172] 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 and 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 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[173]. 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.
Such we may accept as the articulate totality of the particular 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—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
adequate[174] 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.
Poetry 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.

[1] The introduction begins as an introduction of lectures. But as the work is
merely based to a large extent on notes for lectures, or on a manuscript which did
not preserve the lectures as they were delivered, it will be found most convenient
to ignore this fact, and in references to regard it simply as a written treatise.
[2] Hegel, alluding no doubt to the words of the Gospel, puts it "born and born
again from mind (spirit)."
[3] It is assumed that such a fancy is seized and defined as such in separation
from other experience.
[4] The sentence is slightly ironical.
[5] Dem Scheine.
[6] Raisonnements: a disparaging expression.
[7] Hegel here means the formal character, not the material on which it is
imposed in the several arts.
[8] Hegel says, "as that which has no right to be," das Nichtseyn sollende.
[9] Erscheine as contrasted with scheine.

[10] Das An-und-Fürsichseyende. That which is explicitly to itself self-
determinate being, no less than essentially such in its substantive right.
[11] Besonnener Art. Possibly Hegel means "one more compatible with common
sense."
[12] I think by the words kunst wieder hervorzurufen Hegel rather means to call
up art as it was previously cultivated than merely to "stimulate art production."
The latter is, however, Professor Bosanquet's translation.
[13] Subjective apparently in the sense of being wholly personal to the writer or
philosopher in so far as the form of his treatise deals in classification and
arrangement peculiar to himself and so external, if not entirely arbitrary.
[14] I agree with the note of Professor Bosanquet (Trans., p. 21) that the word
element refers here to the mental constituents of art, as contrasted with the
sensuous medium.
[15] That is to say, the essential formative process involved in its necessity.
[16] There must be a misprint or oversight in Professor Bosanquet's rendering of
this passage (p. 21). As the sentence now stands it does not appear to me to make
sense.
[17] Von ihm. The pronoun, I take it, must refer here to das Andere rather than
the subject of the verb.
[18] "Makes itself an alien to itself" perhaps expresses the German better.
[19] That is, the work of art.
[20] Haltpunkte. Points of arrest in essential ideas necessary which restrain this
tendency to purely arbitrary caprice.
[21] I do not think the first part of this sentence ironical. Hegel admits that a
general knowledge is a legitimate feature of modern culture. But he points out
that people are only too ready to confuse such a general knowledge with real art
scholarship. To bring out this I have translated rather freely.
[22] Detail of historical fact and artistic observation.
[23] It is historical, first, regarded as a survey of historical condition, and,
secondly, because facts are collected whether in relation to ancient or modern art
as a historian collects his facts.
[24] Lit., the inmost or most ideal (meaning).
[25] Vollkommen. Complete or rather completely articulate and rounded in itself.
It is not easy to select the English word that exactly corresponds.
[26] Bestimmte Individualität. The definition may, as Hegel says, be more
significant, but it is for all that not very clearly expressed. Professor Bosanquet
translates the words "determinate individual modification."
[27] My view is that what Hegel means to say is that in caricature ugliness is
emphasized and made more (näher) a part of the content than belongs to the true
nature of the characteristic of which it is (in Hegel's opinion) no essential
determinant or property. The view stated in the sentence is therefore a kind of
reductio ad absurdum. Professor Bosanquet's translation appears to me to leave it
doubtful whether the view stated is a just one or not. He translates näher by

"closely," not the comparative. In my view Hegel agrees that caricature may be
characteristic, but he does not agree that it is a genuine property of the
characteristic where it is pressed to the excess of ugliness.
[28] Bestimmung.
[29] That is, in Hegel's view.
[30] Das Wahre.
[31] Den denkenden Begriff. It is possible that the "notion of thought" would
express Hegel's meaning, as it would be a less strange expression. But I have
retained the more literal translation as the reference may be to the self-evolution
of Thought in its own dialectical process, thought or the Idea thinking out itself
in the Hegelian sense. Professor Bosanquet seems to assume this, as he translates
"the thinking Idea."
[32] Kunstschönen. I have translated this by the expression "fine art" because
Hegel in the opening of the introduction makes the expression interchangeable
with schöne kunst. At the same time it must be recollected that the emphasis here
is even more on "beauty" than the fact that it is the beauty of human art. And it is
for this reason, I presume, that Professor Bosanquet translates it here "artistic
beauty." The only objection I have to make to this, apart from Hegel's words I
have referred to, is that the expression "artistic beauty" is sometimes used to
signify beauty that is capable of being expressed by art. Of course that is
excluded from Hegel's use of the term; he means the beauty of artistic work.
[33] Subjektiven.
[34] Independent, that is, of the consciousness of any particular individual. Hegel
does not necessarily mean independent of consciousness altogether. He has, no
doubt, generally in his mind the kind of scepticism which received its most
logical exposition in Hume.
[35] This appears to me the meaning of zufälliger Sinn. Professor Bosanquet
translates it "accidental sense." By that I presume he understands the meaning to
be "a sense of beauty that is entirely personal to the recipient," it may be
possessed by one man, but not by another. Hegel's illustration hardly supports
this, so it seems to me.
[36] I do not know the exact translation of lemmatisch, and by a curious slip the
sentence is omitted from Professor Bosanquet's translation. The general sense is
plain enough. Every particular science accepts its subject-matter as a datum. It
starts from the empirical fact. Whether it admits the assumption or not, it does
assume such facts. It is obvious that Hegel's adoption of this standpoint is only
relatively true.
[37] Hegel means, I presume, mainly in the introduction. After that he does in a
qualified degree discuss the profounder import of the Idea of Fine Art. His
statements are not perhaps wholly free from inconsistency, because he has
previously said that apart from an encyclopaedic consideration of all the
sciences, it was not possible to do so, and also some of His statements seem to
imply that he does not intend to do so.
[38] That is, in the first Part of the entire treatise.

[39] What Hegel means by the die letzte einleitende Betrachtung I am not quite
sure. I presume he means the introduction to the first Part. The whole of this
paragraph is not very clear.

[40] By man's sensitive life in its widest sense is, I think, intended.
[41] The German words are machen and nachmachen. We have no exact
equivalents.
[42] Lit., "to fill out (ausfüllen) in complete equipment."
[43] Individuelle.
[44] The German will admit of the interpretation that the reference is merely to
genius, but I think Hegel clearly means that neither one nor the other can be thus
conjured up.
[45] At the end of the first main division of the work.
[46] One of Meredith's correspondents has put the question with all gravity
whether he considered inspiration could be assisted by wine drinking. With equal
gravity our humourist replied that though wine might be something of a
restorative after mental effort it was not his experience that it contributed to first-
rate artistic work. He actually mentions the case of Schiller. Though I have read
somewhere that this poet used to be inspired by the smell of rotten apples I do
not recollect reading that he favoured the champagne bottle. Meredith also
mentions the case of Hoffmann, and adds that the type of his work does not
increase our respect for the precedent.
[47] Eine äusserliche Arbeit. A craftsmanship which has to deal with the outside
surface. We may translate "external craftsmanship"; but the translation in the text
gives the meaning best, I think.
[48] Keinen geistigen Stoff. Professor Bosanquet translates "spiritual content." I
imagine the emphasis to be mainly on the absence of positive ideas available to
knowledge. In any case Hegel appears to press his point of contrast too far. Men
of genius such as Mozart (who was probably in his mind) and Schubert may bear
him out. But on the other hand we have a Keats, Shelley, and Raphael. Genius
matures rapidly, but the greatest works of musical art no less than any other
imply a real maturity of mind at least, and more than is here assumed of, I should
say, a rich experience. Mozart, of course, upsets any theory, and it is
questionable even whether Mozart is really an exception. It depends on the point
of view from which we are estimating the intelligible content of music as an
expression of soul-life.
[49] The "Iphigenie" was completed in Goethe's thirty-eighth year, fourteen
years later than "Götz." The bulk of his more important works are of the same
date or later. Schiller's "Wallenstein" was completed after his thirty-fifth year.
[50] This is surely not quite accurate. The medium of painting in the sense that
speech or writing is the medium of poetry is not canvas or panel but oil or other
colour. Canvas would correspond with the blank pages of a book.
[51] Free, that is, from accidental and irrelevant matter.
[52] Professor Bosanquet translates sinnliche here as "sensitive." I am inclined to
think that Hegel here rather leaves out of sight the fact that in the process of
Nature we have sensitive organic life no less than unconscious inorganic. His
contrast is rather between the conscious life of man and unconscious nature, the
conscious life that is not self-conscious being for the object of the contrast

treated as equivalent to unconscious. He would also apparently ignore the fact
that man himself and the higher beauty which attaches to him is also from ope
point of view a part of the natural process.
[53] That is, apart from purely personal ends in its pursuit, which are accidental
to its essential notion.
[54] That is, in the medium of conscious life.
[55] Einmal. They are there, but they do not know they are there.
[56] Aus geistiger Bildung, i.e., a high level of mental culture is necessary before
the advent of civilized manners and customs in which spiritual life is reflected
with real refinement and directness.
[57] Bedürfniss zur Kunst.
[58] Lit., "In the form of the most abstract single subjectivity." That is to say, that
the main fact about it is that it is felt; but, except in respect to intensity, it cannot
be described as an object of thought with defining attributes, It is abstract
individual sensation.
[59] By the expression Kreis Hegel would mean rather an indefinite sphere than
a definite circle. The simile is perhaps not very apt. The idea, apparently, is of a
sphere of feeling, that is, such as being self-complete, but is so abstract or
indefinable that the introduction into it of positive ideas such as justice, etc., are
the mere entrance of spectral forms which vanish in such an indefinable medium,
without disclosing their nature. They are felt but not cognized for what they
really are.
[60] Blinder, blind in the sense that it is not guided by deliberate and self-
conscious reason, i.e., mere animal instinct.
[61] A difficult sentence to translate. I have followed Professor Bosanquet in
assuming that the substantive with which mangelhaft agrees must be borrowed
from the following sentence, though it seems also to be carried on in a loose kind
of way from the previous sentence (Gesckmacksinn.) The entire sentence is built,
as we have it, on the further confusion that there are two parallels which before
the sentence ends are regarded as one! That is to say, the general critical sense is
contrasted with the critique of particular works of art and further the defect of
that general sense in its neglect of universal principles is further contrasted with
the way the specific critique deals with particular works. I hardly think,
however, that my admirable predecessor is justified in ignoring the comparative
degree of bestimmteres, or in his translation of Zeug as "power." I take it to mean
the material of actual works of art. The sentence is a good example of, some of
the difficulties of Hegel translation.
[62] Die Sache. The subject-matter in its most real sense as "content."
[63] That is, the so-called "good taste."
[64] Begriff. Concrete notional Idea.
[65] That is, in his physical form.
[66] Hegel is here considering desire abstractedly, that is, on its own account (als
solche.) It may of course in its turn subserve a rational purpose, such as the

preservation of health or life. But the contrast here is between the relation of
appetite, and that of the theoretic faculty to objects.
[67] Sein Objekt. The object in which he finds himself; rather this, I think, than
that which he has created.
[68] Innerlich, i.e., in the world of mind as contrasted with that of the sensuous
vorhandene.
[69] Hegel or his editors have "in a converse way." This is obviously a mistake.
In both examples the point is that the object is preserved as against desire with
its destruction, and the contemplative intelligence with its ideal transformation.
[70] Ein ideelles. The meaning is, I think, that the materia is stamped with the
hall-mark of deliberate artistic purpose. The ideality, though relatively jejune on
such a work as the pyramids, in the higher reaches of art such as poetry and
music affects of course the medium itself, the musical chord being pure ideality.
Professor Bosanquet's translation omits this and the previous sentence, probably
by an oversight. But it is also possible that this thinker conceived the statement
as here expressed to be misleading, or at least open to misconception. In
architecture and even painting it is obvious, from a certain point of view, the
sensuous materia, if directed to an artistic end, remains none the less the material
borrowed from natural fact though the fact as natural may be modified in its
form. Painting may represent the semblance, but it employs a medium simply
sensuous. Hegel has mainly before his attention here obviously the arts of
painting, poetry, and music.
[71] They are theoretical because as applied to a work of art they imply the
presence of the contemplative faculty. In a later section of the work Hegel makes
a more complete analysis of what is implied in the sense of hearing as applied to
musical composition and in the colour sense. In both cases it is obvious the mind
contributes to the facts cognized. Hearing is, however, from Hegel's point of
view the most ideal of the two, and he conceives the position of the ears itself
points to this distinction.
[72] It may at least be questioned whether the ground given here of this
distinction, or part of it, is strictly accurate. It may be said that our sense of sight
and hearing are both in contact with the waves of the medium, the vibration of
which produces the impression we call sound or light. The most obvious
distinction then appears to be that the natural object is left as it is by hearing and
sight. This at least holds good as against taste. But at least it may be questioned, I
think, whether the sense of touch may not be the source of artistic enjoyment,
certainly in the case of the blind. And the sense of smell at least leaves objects as
they are, and some may contend that it is a source of enjoyment of the beauty of
Nature. Hegel would reply, of course, that no works of human art are enjoyed by
such means. The main ground is, however, that sight and hearing are the senses
closest to intelligence.
[73] By Anschauungen Hegel apparently has in mind all the ideas of poetry. We
should certainly rather have expected the word Vorstellungen, the word used
being rather "visible perceptions." But the three words here seem generally to
denote the subject-matter of painting, music, and poetry.
[74] Lit., "Operative in the artist viewed (i.e., the artist) as the personal energy
(Subjektivität) which creates." Professor Bosanquet's translation "as a productive

state of the person" would appear to make "the sensuous side" a subjective state
of the artist. But apart from construction, can we speak of this as a "state"? It is
modified by his energy—but it can hardly be regarded as a part of it.
[75] I find it impossible to fix any one English equivalent to Hegel's use of the
words Einbildungskraft, Phantasie, or Vorstellung, in the sense at least that
fancy, imagination, or phantasy have been used and defined by famous English
writers. Generally speaking, I should say that Phantasie, or as it is called
sometimes "artistic" or "creative" Phantasie, stands for the most intellectual
faculty, though Vorstellung is also used in much the same sense. But it is
impossible to arrive at any clear distinction such as was originally made so
profoundly by Ruskin between fancy, the instrument of poetical talent, the
surface gift, and imagination or, as he called it, penetrative imagination, which
summarizes all the powers of a genius and personality and enters into the heart
of the subject-matter by an illuminating flash which reveals reality rather than
illustrates by means of image. The present passage appears to me even more
unsatisfactory than the more carefully digested analysis at the end of Part I, when
Hegel discusses the artist. It not merely ignores the indispensable presence of
imagination in the pioneers of science, but appears to myself to confuse talent as
the natural gift of a man with the mode in which it is exercised in presenting
ideas in sensuous imagery, or at least makes the former depend on the latter.
Professor Bosanquet translates Phantasie here by "fancy." But "fancy" is, in our
way of looking at it, precisely not the faculty which distinctively belongs to "the
great mind and the big heart or soul," though other parts of the description are
more applicable. And in short, as I say, to fix definite English equivalents to
Hegel's phraseology appears to me impossible.
[76] Die Phantasie.
[77] This is, I presume, Hegel's way of putting the simple fact, that much of the
process of artistic production is unconscious. One man instinctively draws, or
picks up his notes on the piano, another cannot. I think Hegel rather refers to this
original talent than the much more important one in which genius, right into
maturity, rides over difficulties without knowing how it does so. Such happy or
even miraculous effects—such as artists sometimes playfully call them—are
obviously in part, if only in part, the result of profound artistic experience. He is
dealing almost exclusively with the natural bias, which makes one man naturally
an artist, whether creative or executant, and is absent from another. He hardly
approaches the question what constitutes the artist of genius as contrasted with
the man of natural talent.
[78] This confirms the conclusion above.
[79] Für sich. If merely admired as imitation and nothing more.
[80] Zur Ekelhaftigkeit. "Sickeningly like" is Professor Bosanquet's closer
translation. The expression "damnably like" is not unknown.
[81] I think with Professor Bosanquet that phantastischen is here not "fantastic"
but strictly derived from Phantasie in its sense of imagination. "Completely," of
course, as involving no direct imitation of Nature.
[82] Formal, i.e., implying no creative supplement from the artist, purely
mechanical.

[83] It would be both instructive and interesting to discuss if, and how far, and
by virtue of what, that distinct type of modern art known as "still life," such as a
few objects of the library, or even a shell or two and so on up to more important
organic life was excluded from this condemnation. It is quite clear that Ruskin
would have a good deal to say that would imply important qualification.
[84] Begeisterung. I think this must be the meaning. Inspiration hardly makes
sense. It is art that is inspired, not those who attend the celebration.
[85] Im Innersten is I think here obviously to be taken with the verb, not with the
substantives.
[86] Ueberhaupt.
[87] The meaning of in diesem Gebiete is, I presume, the actual world. But if so
it is simply otiose, and I have left it out.
[88] Bestimmung. The translation given appears to be the sense, though we
should rather say weaken a man from the pursuit of a definite course. Professor
Bosanquet, who translates the word "aim" a little lower down, evades the word
here.
[89] Raisonnirende here and raissonnement below have a depreciatory sense—
and signify ordinary reasoning in the first instance and the methods of the
popular secularist in the second.
[90] A sentence omitted by Professor Bosanquet, and it seems to amount to little
more than a more generalized statement of what has gone before. The end of art
both directly and indirectly concerns its subject-matter, or rather, as Hegel puts
it, the need of the notion or Idea of it carries us to a further end beyond the end
shared in common by its particular content.
[91] I follow Professor Bosanquet in his translation of the words als Allgemeines
für sich zu zuerden; but I am not sure that the more literal translation is not
simply as the words stand, the sense being not to be self-conscious of himself
(für sich) as the universal principle, to be aware of this property, but rather as
universal principle to become for himself, i.e. "independent of desire."
[92] Einheit—unity to the point of fusion, identity.
[93] Unmittelbaren Befangenheit. "Sunkenness" is Professor Bosanquet's
translation.
[94] Theoretic as a direct transcript of θεώρια, θεωρειν.
[95] Gesichtspunkte. The various points of view necessary to arrive at such a
general conclusion.
[96] Though not entirely confident I am right in accepting the words zu bringen
as a repetition of the hervorzubringen just before, the alternative of Professor
Bosanquet which takes the words wird zu bringen seyn as equivalent to gebracht
seyn sollte certainly appears to me no direct translation.
[97] "Poets aim at utility and entertainment alike."
[98] I think that Hegel in his use of erste here rather refers to the fact of past
history than a fact in the individual history of nations. "Art is, in the early days of
history, the instructress of nations," gives, I think, his meaning. It is the first
instructress in the history of nations.

[99] I venture to think if Professor Bosanquet's translation were the right one the
German would be ein in sich selbst gebrochenes. I do not think in ihm selbst can
be a German rendering of "in itself." But I admit the translation is tempting
whether Hegel had in his mind the "house divided against itself" or not.
[100] Lit., "the spiritual universal," i.e., the universal substance of its ideal
content.
[101] Precisely as Ruskin, for example, in his "Modern Painters" condemns both
Titian and Tintoret, not because they painted the Paradise or the Assunta, to
produce fine paintings, or even because they did not or did themselves believe in
the truth of their subject-matter, but because they did not paint in order to make
converts, an extraordinary lapse of judgment.
[102] Im besten Sinne des Wortes.
[103] Professor Bosanquet points out in a note on this passage (p. 101) that
Sittlichkeit here, which he translates, as I have done, "respectability," is the habit
of virtue, without the reflective aspiration after goodness as an ideal. Of course
there is no depreciation in the use of the term. It is simply the morality of
ordinary people, who do generally what their neighbours think the right thing.
The word moralität and moralisch, which I have only been able to translate by a
paraphrase, is the morality of the standpoint discussed, which is very much that
of Kant or "Duty for duty's sake" in Bradley's "Ethical Studies."
[104] That is the contingency of the world of Nature as contrasted with the
essential stability of mind or spirit.
[105] Lit., "To satisfy itself in its real or independent self (für sich)." It cannot
identify itself with either side as its wholly real self made therein explicit. It is
neither fish nor fowl.
[106] Bestimmüngen may here be a reference to man's broadest spiritual
characterizations as one of the human family, the race, the nation, and so forth,
or, as I think, a reference to his vocation, future destiny, general welfare.
[107] An und für sich Wahre.
[108] Unbefangenen, i.e., the naïve outlook of ordinary life.
[109] Professor Bosanquet merely translates are not and are in italic as in the
text, which of course, except that he adds a comma after are, is a literal
translation. But the sense, as I understand it, is that the writer says it is not in the
sense that these two contradictories do not exist at all (i.e., as relative reality),
but rather in the sense that in philosophical thought which grasps their essence
they are not only present but present as reconciled factors of one truth. Professor
Bosanquet's translation appears to me to amount to this: that all Hegel maintains
is that the sense he means is not that such contradictory elements are not
reconciled, but in the sense that they are reconciled. Perhaps this is his view. But
if so, I fail to see the importance of the antithesis, which appears to me between
gar nicht sind and in Versöhnung sind. Hegel before had expressly said that such
contradictory sides were reconciled in philosophy, so I do not see why he should
so emphatically repeat himself. The comma, of course, may be a misprint.
[110] Begriff. Notion, or concrete Idea of it.
[111] Of that world in its opposition to reason.

[112] Der Mensch als er geht und steht. The man in ordinary conditions—-the
average man, however, rather than the natural man, which carries slightly
different associations.
[113] The difference between a material instrument, which is a mere means to an
end conceived by the craftsman, such as a plough for ploughing, a rake for
raking, and a purpose inseparable from the organic whole as a mouth for eating,
for without life the organism collapses.
[114] Für sich.
[115] In his history of Aesthetic in Germany Lötze disputes this. It seems to
some extent a question of definition. In Hegel's view a dead body is not a human
body in the full sense, but the corpse of a man. A hand separated from the body,
whether we call it a hand or not, is no longer, whatever it may be, a living
member, its essential significance as a hand has disappeared. It was only a hand
in its coherence as part of a larger whole. It may still for a time preserve the
semblance of its life, but it is cut off as the withered leaf. These are facts at least
that are undeniable, and the objection appears to me based on a
misunderstanding. A hand is only an und für sich human when it is part of a
living man. What is the organic reality in the complete sense is the man as a
whole. The hand is merely the extremity of one of his arms. You may call a dead
hand a hand if you like. The point is what was implied in the fact that you called
it a hand at all whether alive or dead.
[116] That is, by Kant, of course.
[117] By Verwicklung I understand the general evolution of ideal philosophy
which the defects of the Kantian Critique stimulated. Professor Bosanquet
apparently limits it to a perplexity personal to Schiller. I doubt whether the word
will bear this.
[118] That is, the concrete idea of humanity as a collective aggregate.
[119] That is, intelligence as asserted by a society of human beings as public
opinion, etc.
[120] Die Ineinsbildung.
[121] "Grace and Dignity."
[122] Gesinnungen. "Sentimental views" is probably what is implied.
[123] Alle Sache.
[124] Professor Bosanquet is clearly right in his view that the order of the words
here should be reversed. The words an und für sich are obviously the wider
explication of in sick selbst, the auxiliary, as not unfrequently in Hegel, being
almost equivalent to nämlich. Whether a misprint or an oversight I have
translated subject to this correction.
[125] I presume the revelation is not merely that of visible shape or even mainly.
[126] Das alles aus sich setzende und auflösende Ich. The three points
emphasized by Hegel in Fichte's "Philosophy" are: (a) The Ego is abstract; (b)
Everything is a show for it; (c) Its own acts are a semblance.
[127] Hegel uses the word Eitelkeit and eitle in their double sense of empty-
nothingness—futility and vain or conceited. This cannot be readily reproduced in

English.
[128] Schönseligkeit. Borrowed no doubt from Goethe's notion of a "fair soul."
[129] Like the "vaulting ambition" of Shakespeare which falls on the other side,
is über sich selbst.
[130] Haltung. Professor Bosanquet translates this "conduct." I rather think it
refers to "bearing, demeanour." They are, as we say, "featureless, flaccid
figures."
[131] Läppische. I am not quite sure what is exactly meant. Professor Bosanquet
translates it "grotesque." But the word is a provincial form of Schlaff apparently
—loose, flaccid and so childish, trifling.
[132] Moment. A phase in an evolutionary, or, as it is here, a dialectical process.
A momentary feature of it.
[133] This final section is called the Division of the Subject.
[134] Subjektivität. That is, the ideality of consciousness, or thought.
[135] Professor Bosanquet, in his note on this passage, expresses the opinion that
Hegel when he writes thus is referring "To the self-consciousness of individual
human beings as constituting, and reflecting on, an ideal unity between them."
This no doubt, as he suggests, does put a somewhat unnatural meaning on the
word "person" or "subjekt." No doubt there is a sense in which we can ascribe
personality to a state, or nation, in the concrete unity of its life. But while
admitting that unity such as this, which is not sensuous but ideal, can be
"effective and actual," I find it difficult to conclude that Hegel did himself hold
that the unity of the Divine Being was merely identical with the unity or totality
of concrete human life as reflected upon by single individuals. How far is human
life as a whole on this Earth a unity or totality at all? That question has been
discussed by Professor Bradley and others with very different conclusions. Nay,
how far does human existence itself exhaust the actually present realization or
self-realization of self-conscious Spirit or Intelligence? Whatever maybe the
wisest answer to such and other questions I can hardly think that Hegel would
have accepted Professor Bosanquet's interpretation as completely adequate.
[136] Fackeldistel. "Torch thistle," a plant of the genus Cereus.
[137] Or, "as mind and in mind."
[138] That is to say, presents to itself to conscious grasp of itself as such Art-
spirit (als künstlerischer.)
[139] The two evolutions here alluded to are (i) that of a particular way of
regarding Nature, man, and God in a particular age and nation such as the
Egyptian, Greek, and Christian viewed in express relation to art; (ii) The several
arts—sculpture, music, poetry, etc., each on their own foundation and viewed
relatively to the former evolution.
[140] The point, of course, is that the different media of the several arts are
inherently, and in virtue of the fact that we have not here mere matter as opposed
to that which is intellectual rather than sensuous, but matter in which the notional
concept is already essentially present or pregnant (sound is, for instance, more

ideal than the spatial matter of architecture), adapted to the particular arts in
which they serve as the medium of expression.
[141] Professor Bosanquet explains these "plastic forms" (Gestaltungs formen)
as the various modifications of the subject-matter of art (Trans., p. 140 note). I
am not quite sure of the meaning here intended. It would apparently identify the
term with the Gebilde referred to in the third division. I should myself rather
incline to think that Hegel had mainly in his mind the specific general types, that
is, the three relations of the Idea itself to its external configuration, viewed as a
historical evolution, which Hegel calls symbolic, classical, and romantic.
Perhaps this is what Professor Bosanquet means. But in that case it does not
appear to me so much the subject-matter as the generic forms in the shaping of
that matter.
[142] Das wahrhaft Innere. That is, the inward of the truth of conscious life.
[143] Means apparently the notion in its absolute sense.
[144] Because it represents spirit as independent of an appropriate bodily form.
[145] What appears to be denoted by Geistigkeit is the generic term of
intelligence—that activity of conscious life which does not necessarily make us
think of a single individual—the common nature of all spirit.
[146] By Innerlichkeit, which might also be rendered as pure ideality, what is
signified is that in a mental state there are no parts outside of each other.
[147] Subjekt, i.e., the individual Ego of self-consciousness.
[148] Das subjective Innere, lit., the subjective inner state.
[149] Geistigkeit. Professor Bosanquet translates it here "intellectual being."
[150] The distinction between a percipient and an external object falls away. The
content displayed is part of the soul-life itself.
[151] Professor Bosanquet apparently assumes a negative has slipped out. But
the text probably is correct in the rather awkward form in which it stands.
[152] Thus poetry is primarily a romantic art, but in the Epic it is affiliated with
the objective character of classical art, or we may say that there is a romantic and
classical type of architecture, though the art is primarily symbolic.
[153] Gestalt. Plastic power is perhaps a better translation.
[154] He means that in architecture the building is merely a shrine or
environment of the image of the god.
[155] Infinite, of course, in the concrete sense of rounded in itself, as the circle,
or, still more, the living organism.
[156] Lit., "which is not also that of the spiritual sphere."
[157] That is, an object limited only in space.
[158] Subjektivität. The particularization in romantic art implies the presence of
an ideal element imported by the soul of the artist, which appeals directly to the
soul in its emotional life. Compare a picture by an Italian master with a Greek
statue.
[159] Lit., "A multiplicity of isolated examples of inwardness."

[160] That is, in the life shared by all as one community actuated by a common
purpose.
[161] As in sculpture.
[162] Professor Bosanquet's note is here (Trans., p. 166) "Posited or laid down to
be ideal. This almost is equal to made to be in the sense of not being. In other
words musical sound is "ideal" as existing, quâ work of art, in memory only, the
moment in which it is actually heard being fugitive. A picture is equally so in
respect of the third dimension, which has to be read into it. Poetry is almost
wholly ideal, uses hardly any sensuous element, and appeals almost wholly to
what exists in the mind."
[163] By particularization is meant the variety in the material of colours, musical
tones, and ideas, which latter are really quite as much the medium of poetry as
written language. The sensuous medium is here an abstract sign and, as Hegel
would contend, nothing more than this.
[164] Reference, of course, to Hegel's unfortunate acceptance of Goethe's theory
of colour.
[165] The colour of art is not merely ideal as applied to only two dimensions of
space, but also is "subjective" in the artistic treatment of it under a definite
"scheme." It is not clear whether Hegel alludes also to this; apparently not,
though it is the most important feature. In fact, even assuming his theory of light
to be correct, it is difficult entirely to follow his distinction between the
appearance of colour on a flat or a round surface. As natural colour the one
would be as ideal as the other. Only regarded as a composition would painting
present distinction.
[166] It is obvious that the reference here is mainly to an intentional appeal to
the human soul through the content of the composition. But the appeal may also
be made through the technique and artistic treatment of the medium itself.
[167] The parts of a chord are not in space, but are ideally cognized. Hegel
describes this by saying that music idealizes space and concentrates it to a point.
It would perhaps be more intelligible to say that it transmutes the positive effects
of a material substance in motion into the positive and more ideal condition of
time. The point which is continually negated is at least quâ music the point, or
rather, moment, of a temporal process.
[168] By the indifferent externality of space is signified the fact that the parts of
space, though external to each other, are not qualitatively distinguishable.
[169] Succession in time is "more ideal" than coexistence in space because it
exists only as continuity in a conscious subject.
[170] Painting no doubt introduces ideal elements into the artistic composition of
colour, but the colour still remains the appearance of a material thing or
superficies.
[171] That is to say, music or harmony is based on a solid conformity to law on
the part of its tones in their conjunction and succession, their structure and
resolution.
[172] As in painting.

[173] The views here propounded suggest considerable criticism. It appears to
me that the stress here laid upon the intelligible content of poetry as contrasted
with the sensuous qualities of its form as modulated speech is certainly
untenable. What we call the music of verse may unquestionably be most
intimately associated with the ideal content expressed; but apart from the artistic
collocation of language as sound no less than symbol we certainly do not get the
art of poetry. Even where Hegel deals directly with rhythm and rhyme in the
body of the treatise I think it is clear he underrates all that is implied in the
difference between the musical expression of poetry as contrasted even with the
sonorous language of mere prose. A further question upon which more doubt is
permissible is how far the actual script in written or printed letters is not entitled
to be regarded as at least in part the sensuous medium. No doubt the poem is not
dependent upon it as a painting is upon colour, or the canvas which supports it,
for it may be recited. But at least it is practically dependent upon it for its
preservation. The point may very possibly appear, however, as nugatory or
entirely unimportant, beside the question whether the medium of the art is not
really imaginative idea rather than articulate speech.
[174] Absolute Formen. Adequate in the sense of being unconditionally so.

FIRST PART

THE IDEA OF FINE ART, OR THE IDEAL

I. THE POSITION OF ART RELATIVELY TO FINITE REALITY,
RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY

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 particular 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 one sided, 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[175], 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. In
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 our-elves 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[176], 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[177]. We find here, as we have pointed out
was 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 which it becomes for itself absolute
object of the knowledge of itself. It is now absolute mind within the ideal
community[178] which belongs to it, the actual Absolute of itself in the form
of Mind and knowledge[179].
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 temporal 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 spheres[180] 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, the 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[181]. 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 of 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[182]. 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[183], that is, not
merely what is inward, but 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 individual 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 before. 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 retain 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 sphere 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, truth, 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[184], 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 object 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 presence[185] 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
understanding[186] 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 most 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[187]. 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 is 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 in 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 spirituality 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
himself 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.
With 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.

[175] The German word here is Geist. I have translated it as best seems to suit
the particular context in which the German word occurs.
[176] Unendliche Negativität.
[177] This is the "Ought" of practical feeling. As such just as in the case of the
analytical sciences, what it lacks is objective determination (see "Phil. of Mind,"
trans. of W. Wallace, p. 94).
[178] In seiner Gemeinde. We should rather expect in seiner Gebiete.
[179] The reference here appears to be to the three attitudes of thought to the
objective world which may be generally indicated as that of ordinary
consciousness, that of empiricism and that of speculative Philosophy. In the
paragraph which follows, however, Hegel mainly refers to the logical process of
dialectic and the Idea of Nature (die natürliche Idee.) The latter may, however,
refer to both the previous divisions, i.e., the commonsense point of view and the
scientific.
[180] The spheres of art and social life are first perceived as merely independent
circles of activity.
[181] That is to say, nations have not only found in Art the best means of
expressing their religious consciousness, but, even where religion has been
raised to a higher power, have found in it the most adequate form in which to
express the ideality of their general spiritual life.
[182] Welche sick durch alles hindurchzieht, i.e., which permeates all experience.
[183] In this metaphysical passage Hegel appears to be contrasting his own
philosophical standpoint, absolute idealism, with that of critical or empirical
philosophy, those at least who conceive reality either as a thing-in-itself, or the
materia supplied to sense-perception from a world outside the human
consciousness. The entire content of the Real is, on the contrary, all included
under the form of self-conscious thought.
[184] He means, I think, province of the universal, rather than "universal
expansion of horizon."
[185] The words of Hegel are "innerhalb derselben im endlichen Geiste die
Erinnerung des Wesens aller Dinge." He no doubt has in his mind the derivation
of the word Erinnerung. It is the inwardization or idealization of such substance.
[186] Anschauung, that is to say, it is the object of man's receptive senses.
[187] The punctuation is clearly wrong. It is also very possible that derselben is a
misprint for dieselbe. But in any case there should be comma rather than
semicolon.

SUBDIVISION OF SUBJECT

IDEA OF THE BEAUTY OF ART, OTHERWISE, FINE 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.
1. The first is concerned with the notion of the beautiful generally.
2. The second is that of natural beauty, the defects of which will
demonstrate the necessity of the Ideal as Fine Art.
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.

CHAPTER I

THE NOTION OF THE BEAUTIFUL IN ITS GENERAL
SIGNIFICANCE

We have defined beauty to be the Idea of the beautiful.
1. The Idea. By this definition is implied that we have to conceive the
beautiful as Idea, and, moreover, as Idea in a determinate shape, as Ideal.
Idea, as thus posited, is just this, the conceptive notion, the realization of the
same, and the unity of both. The notion, as such, is not yet the Idea,
although the terms notion and idea are often loosely interchanged. Idea is
the notion only as presented in, and brought into coalescence with, its
objective reality. This unity, however, is by no means to be regarded as the
mere neutralization of notion and reality, so that the individual character
and quality of either is absorbed; as, for example, where we find that in a
chemical compound salt-potash and acid tend to neutralize each other in so
far as they have weakened their opposition. In this unity, on the contrary,
the notion is retained as the commanding factor. It is already implicitly, in
virtue of its own nature, this very identity. Out of its own wealth it evolves
the reality as part of itself, by means of a process which, being no other than
that of development, surrenders nothing of its own nature, but brings into
more concrete actuality the riches of the notion, and for this reason
continues in unity with itself and its objective realization. Such a unity of
the notional concept and its realization is the Idea defined in abstract terms.

The word idea is, of course, frequently used by authors of works dealing
with the theory of art. It must, however, be admitted that many connoisseurs
of high standing are particularly severe upon its employment. The latest and
most interesting example of this polemical attitude is to be found in Herr
von Rumohr's "Italian investigations." This work is based on the practical
interest that the arts excite, and is wholly unconcerned with that which for
brevity we may call the Idea. The truth is that this writer, who appears to
have no knowledge of the development of philosophy in modern times,
freely confuses the expression as above defined with the undetermined
conceptions of the phantasy, or the abstract and characterless Ideal of well-
known art theories or schools of art, ideas which present a lean contrast to
the clearly defined and richly caparisoned objects of Nature in their truth,
and which this writer opposes to the idea and empty Ideal, which the artist
himself evolves from his own consciousness. We have, of course, no more
right to suppose that creative work can be the result of such poverty, than
we can with justice assume that a thinker can think with conceptions wholly
indeterminate, and persist in his thought with a content destitute of all
defined relation. Such an objection, however, does not apply in any respect
to the Idea in the sense we use the expression. This Idea is through and
through concrete; a whole which consists of relations and is simply
beautiful from being in direct union with the objective form adequate to its
expression.
Herr von Rumohr has placed on record in this very book (Book I, pp. 145-
46) the following assertion, that "beauty in the most comprehensive
meaning of the term, and as it is understood by intelligent people of our
day, includes every quality of an object, which may either stir the sense of
sight with satisfaction, or through that sense attune the soul and delight the
mind."
These qualities are then further subdivided into three classes as follows:
"First, there is all that is perceptible through the eye; secondly, that which is
apprehended by means of the peculiar, presumably innate sense of mankind
for spatial relations; and thirdly, all that in the first instance works upon the
understanding, and only indirectly through cognition on the emotions." This
third and most important determination rests apparently on forms "which
quite independently of all pleasure to the sense and the beauty of extended
shape arouse in us a specific delight which is ethical or spiritual in its

quality, which in part to all appearance proceeds from the enjoyment we
derive from the images excited (I presume he means ethical or spiritual
ones)[188], and in part from the pleasure which the mere activity of an
intelligent appreciation infallibly brings with it."
Such are the principal factors according to which this undoubted
connoisseur of art defines his subject relatively to the beautiful. It may very
possibly pass muster with a certain type of uncritical reader. It is, however,
very unsatisfactory regarded from the philosophical standpoint. For what
does it at bottom amount to but this, namely, that the sense of vision or
spiritual sense, we may add the understanding itself, are moved pleasurably,
or excite a feeling which results in awakened pleasure. The entire argument
hinges on this one aspect of awakened gratification. This reduction,
however, of the activity of the beautiful to terms of feeling—that which
pleases and charms us—has been disposed of once for all by Kant. His
exposition has already left far behind the feeling for the beautiful.
We will direct our attention now from this polemical tractate to a further
consideration of the Idea its hostility has failed to weaken. In this, as
already stated, is comprehended the concrete unity of the notion and its
objective realization.
(a) Now, first, we will observe, in directing our attention more closely to
the essential nature of the notion, that it is no purely abstract unity opposed
to the differences of phenomenal reality; rather, as the notion, it is already
the unity that integrates those relations, and by doing so is concrete totality.
The abstract conceptions such as man, the quality blueness, and their like,
are not notions as such at all, but rather should be called abstract general
concepts, which are only raised to the dignity of the notion, when we have
demonstrated that they contain opposing factors in unity, and, in such a
way, that this self-related nexus of unity constitutes their notional truth. For
instance, the concept "blueness" as a colour receives such a notional value
when it is grasped as the unity, and, indeed, the specific unity of light and
darkness[189]. In the same way the concept "man" contains within it the
opposing factors of sense, life, and reason, body and mind (spirit); but a
particular man is not to be regarded as a whole consisting in some way of
these two aspects of his personality placed in a relation of indifference side
by side as constituents of the same. Rather, in virtue of the notion, such a

whole contains these constituents in concrete and mediated[190] union. Add
to this that the notion is so completely the absolute bond and unity of its
differences, that independently they cease to exist, they are unable to assert
the particularity, in virtue of which they might escape from such a union.
For this reason the notion includes all its determining constituents in the
form of its own ideal unity and universality, which constitute its subjective
character in contradistinction from the real as the object of sense-
perception. For example, gold is, as a particular object, of specific weight,
definite colour, and placed in a certain relation to specific acids. Such are
varied characteristics of gold, and yet are invariably found in a unified
whole. The smallest speck contains them all in inseparable union. By
analysis or abstraction we indeed separate them, but in their notion they are
inseparably one. The inability of the differences, which the notion in its
truth essentially possesses, to stand alone in their isolated self-identity is of
a similar nature. A still more apposite illustration is presented by the unique
concept of the self-conscious Ego in its universality. For that which we call
soul, or more appositely the Ego, is the notion itself in its free existence.
The Ego contains a congeries of most distinct concepts and thoughts in
itself; it is a world of ideas; yet none the less this infinitely complex
content, in so far as it lies within the Ego, remains without a vestige of
substantiality or materiality packed within this ideal unity, as the pure and
throughout fluid transparency of the Ego itself reflected to itself. And this is
precisely the way in which the notion retains its varied determinations in
ideal unity.
The determinants of the notion which are most cognate to the notion as such
are the universal, the particular, and the single. Every one of these
determinate qualities taken by itself is a mere abstraction. As thus regarded,
however, abstract, that is to say, from one another, they are not present in
the notion: that is rather their ideal unity. The notion is therefore the
universal, which, on the one hand, negates itself to a condition of relativity
and particularization, but, on the other, this riving asunder, in so far as it is
negation of the universal, is itself again annulled. For the universal as
present in the particular, which itself is only the particular aspects of the
universal itself is present in no particular absolutely, but rather in that very
particular reaffirms once more its essential unity as universal. In this return
upon itself the notion is infinite negation; negation, I mean, not as against
another, but self-determination, in which alone it subsists in its positive and

correlative unity. In this way it is singularity in its truth; it is the universal
nexus which shuts itself up with itself in its particulars. As the highest
example of this property of the notion we would refer back to what we have
already, if in a summary way, said about the essential activity of Spirit.
Through this infinite capacity of return upon itself the notion is already, by
virtue of its intrinsic wealth, totality. It finds the unity of itself in the being
of another, and for this reason possesses a free activity, being, however,
negation as self-determination, not as the alien limitation of its own
substance through something other than itself. But regarded as such totality
the notion is already in potential possession of all phenomenal reality, and is
that which mediates and restores the unity of the Idea. And whoever
ventures to think that in the Idea we have presented to us something totally
different and apart from the notion, has as little knowledge of the nature of
the Idea as he has of the notion. At the same time there is, no doubt, a
difference between the notion and the Idea, and it is this: in the former the
particularization is only an abstract particularization, for this reason that in
the notion the determinate relations are alone coherent in its transparent
medium, that is to say, in its unity and ideal universality. The notion,
therefore, itself remains subject to the one-sidedness of its particular
material, and is hampered with the defect that although in its own nature it
is a totality, yet it is only in the aspect of it as unity and universality that it is
entitled to free self-development. But inasmuch as this defect in its
completeness is foreign to its own essential form, the process of its activity
is to remove it. It negates itself as this very ideal unity and universality and
allows that which is enclosed in the barren chamber of ideal subjectivity to
flow forth freely into real and substantive objectivity. In other words, the
notion through its own activity posits itself as objective reality.
(b) Objectivity is therefore, truly apprehended, the real existence of the
notion. It is, however, the notion under the mode of self-substantive
particularization and of a differentiation of all antithetical phases[191] of
reality, whose ideal unity the notion in its subjective capacity constituted.
But inasmuch as it is the notion, and only the notion, whose function it is to
endow objectivity with its determinate existence and reality, so too it is only
through objectivity that the notion is unveiled in its actuality. The notion is,
however, the mediating and ideal unity of all its particular antitheses.
Within its differentiated reality this ideal unity, effective throughout

particularity in modes adequate to the notion, has to establish itself in them,
precisely in a way similar to that in which the realized particularity of their
unity, as thus mediated to the point of ideality, has also to exist in them[192].
This is the might of the notion, which refuses to surrender or forfeit its
universality among the disjecta membra of the objective world, but rather
reveals its essential unity through such reality and within it. For it is nothing
less than the very life of the notion to preserve its unity in the material
which is offered it. Only by so doing is it real and veritable totality.
(c) This totality is the Idea. The Idea is not simply the ideal unity and
subjectivity of the notion. It is quite as much its true and objective reality; it
is, however, an objectivity which does not confront the notion as an
opposing factor, but is rather that in which the notion itself is self-
determined. In whichever aspect we contemplate the notion, whether as
subjective to our apprehension, or as objectively real, the Idea it manifests
is a totality. But it is more than this. It is the unity which for ever is
mediating between and bringing into more perfected harmony the two
totalities. Only as thus apprehended is the Idea truth and indeed all truth.
2. All that exists, then, has only truth in so far as it is a definite existence of
the Idea. For the Idea is alone the truly real. The truth of the phenomenal is
not derived from the fact that its particular existence is of an inward or
external character, and as such is in a general sense reality; it is so wholly in
virtue of the fact that such reality is adequate to the notion. Then alone is
determinate existence real and true. And the truth, to which we here refer, is
not a subjective interpretation of it, namely, that a particular existence is
accordant with my own conception of it. It is truth in the objective sense
that the reality of the Ego, or of any external object, action, or circumstance
actually contributes to the realization of the notion. If this identity is not
established the existence remains purely phenomenal. Instead of the
objectification of the notion in its completeness what obtains is purely a
detached aspect of it; and with regard to this, whatever self-subsistence it
may appear to have in opposition to the unity and universality of the notion,
such can only work to its final confusion by setting it in hostility to the true
notion itself. Our conclusion, therefore, is that only the reality which
adequately expresses the notion is truly reality, and the reason it is so is that
therein the Idea manifests itself as existence.

3. We have maintained that beauty is Idea. It follows that beauty and truth
are, in one aspect of them, identical. In other words, beauty must itself in its
intrinsic being be true. A closer investigation will further show to us that
truth must be distinguished from beauty.
The idea is true in the sense that it is so by virtue of its essential being and
according to its fundamental principle[193], and as such truth it is
thought[194]. It is not its sensuous and external existence, but the universal
Idea of thought as present in this. At the same time the Idea is driven to seek
its realization in external and objectively determined existence, both in the
sphere of Nature and that of Mind. The true, in the absolute sense, also
exists. And in so far as, in this its external existence, it is immediately
apprehended by consciousness, and the notion rests in immediate unity with
its external appearance, the Idea is not only true, but is also beautiful. The
beautiful may therefore be defined as the sensuous semblance[195] of the
Idea. For the sensuous condition and the objective world generally maintain
no real self-subsistence in beauty, but have merely to surrender the
immediacy of their being. In beauty such are posited simply as the
determinate existence and externality of the notion, and as a form of reality,
which itself manifests the notion in unity with its external appearance in
this its particular objective existence. For this reason it can only pass as the
semblance of the notion.
(a) Accordantly with this it is impossible for the understanding[196] alone to
grasp the significance of beauty. For inasmuch as objective reality is
apprehended by this faculty as something at least quite other than ideality,
sensuous perception, as something very different from the notion, the
external object as something that is anywhere rather than within world of
the conscious self, to that extent it cannot fail to emphasize the
contradictions implied in such separation, rather than penetrate to the ideal
unity we have above described. The understanding remains rooted in the
finite, the incomplete and untrue abstraction. The beautiful is on the
contrary itself essentially infinite and free.
For although the content of beauty is stamped with particularity and to that
extent limited, such content is essentially in its mode of environment a
totality that is infinite[197] and a free existence; and it is both for the reason
that it is the notion, which does not pass beyond this its objective

semblance, and so fall into finite and one sided abstraction with it, but
rather is immersed as a blossom with this its objectification and through the
imminent unity and perfection of such inclusion is revealed as essentially
infinite. With equal truth we may affirm that the notion in sealing, as it
were, with a soul the real existence, in which it is part of the objective
world, is itself by itself freely manifest in that world. For the notion will not
suffer that external existence in the sphere of beauty to follow, as it would
otherwise, the laws that therein are paramount: rather it determines out of
its own riches the articulation and form of its appearance therein; and it is
precisely this harmony of the notion with the mode of its external existence
which constitutes the essential life of beauty. And the bond which braces all
together, no less than the power behind it, is self-conscious life, unity, soul,
and artistic personality.
(b) We conclude, then, that if we consider beauty in its relation to conscious
life, on the subjective side that is, it is neither to be adequately apprehended
by an intelligence that persists in the unfree medium of purely finite
existence, nor is it the object of the finite Will. We will enlarge a little on
both points.
As finite intelligence we are aware in feeling of the inner no less than the
outer objects of consciousness; we observe them, perceive them to be true
to our senses, allow them to form part of the content of our perceptions,
concepts, and finally, no doubt, to become the abstractions which our
understanding presents to us, reflecting on their appearance, and endowing
them with the abstract form of universality.
Now the finiteness and absence of freedom inseparable from this mental
attitude consists in the assumption that the things perceived are self-
subsistent. We direct our attention to these objects, suffer them to impress
us, form our ideas of them, possessed with the faith in their material
existence as objects, and convinced that all we have to do is to perceive
them as they appear to our passive reception, to preserve, in short, the
formal side of our attention intact, holding such unfettered by our fancies,
opinions, and prejudices. In thus accepting this one-sided freedom of
objects we posit at the same time the want of freedom in their mental
apprehension. To such the content is one wholly given from outside; and
instead of a true self-determination through difference we have nothing but
the reception and acceptance of what is presented as a part of the objective

thing. We would arrive at truth by the suppression of all that belongs to
ourselves[198].
A criticism of like nature, though the defect is here just at the other extreme,
may be applied to the finite Will. In this theory interests, objects, intentions,
and conclusions are all relegated to the subject, whose will it is to enforce
them as against the existence and properties of the material thing. This it
can only do by the annihilation of the object itself, or at least, in so far as it
can modify or change its form and energies, by transmuting its qualities, or
permitting them to exercise such a change on each other, as water may
exercise on fire, fire on iron, iron on wood, and so forth. We now find that it
is the particular things, which the subject has enrolled in its service, as
things to be regarded and treated as useful, which in their turn have been
deprived of their self-subsistence. In other words, they have come to be
regarded as objects, whose notion and meaning is not their own, but derived
from the reflecting consciousness, so that what is most essential to them is
precisely this relation of service in which they stand to the subjective
purpose, that is, our own intelligence. The values of either side of the
relation are thus completely reversed. The objective thing has lost freedom
and the conscious subject secured it. As a matter of fact, the freedom on
both aspects of the relation is, owing to the finitude and abstraction it
implies under such a view, a purely supposititious one.
In the sphere of theory here it is the assumed independence of the objective
world which creates the finitude and bondage of the conscious Ego. In that
of the practical world this dependence is due to its one-sidedness, the
conflict and contradiction of its aims within and the impulses and passions
which press from without, no less than to the unreconciled opposition of a
world of objects. For the separation and opposition of these two aspects of
one whole, that is, objects and relating self-conscious life, is presupposed
in, and indeed is an accurate definition of, this point of view.
And, similarly, with reference to the lack of freedom in the object. Here,
too, in the sphere of intelligible conception, the independence of the object
is assumed, but the freedom assumed is only apparent. For it is only posited
as bare objectivity without securing the presence of its notion, as the unity
and universality of the conscious subject, within such objectivity. It still
remains outside it. Every object thus placed external to the notion merely
exists as particularity, which comes back to us in external guise together

with its manifold, and is, in all the unlimited scope of its relations, through
its contact with other objects, subject to the conditions of its origin, change,
opposing force and final overthrow. In the practical world the dependence
of the object is expressly, in this view, assumed, and the opposition of the
thing is posited in definite relation to volition without possessing in itself
the power of ultimate self-subsistency permitted to the latter.
(c) The apprehension of the object as beautiful unites these two abstract
points of view. It in fact annuls the one-sidedness of both whether relatively
to the subject of consciousness or its object, and by doing so cancels the
finitude and lack of freedom which characterize them.
Philosophically regarded[199], the reason is this, that the object is not
apprehended in its existence as an isolated thing whose notion as the object
of human thought is removed from the objectivity which belongs to it as
something outside it, and which in its particular reality extends and is
dissipated in every conceivable direction as a manifold content of
intelligible relations. An object which is beautiful suffers its own notion to
appear as realized in its objective presence, and reveals in that appearance
the unity and life inseparable from the conscious subject. For this reason the
object may be conceived as sweeping back into the curve of its unity that
impulse of continuous externality, cancelling its dependence on other
objects, and transmuting to our vision its unfree finitude into free infinity.
Furthermore, the Ego in its relation to the object of beauty ceases to be
merely the abstract attention or sensuous perception, and the floating away
of such perceptions into equally abstract reflections. Rather, it is itself
concretely realized in this object, being at once the unity and reality of its
notional idea, and uniting for itself in its rounded concreteness that which
has hitherto remained, as abstractly perceived, apart in the Ego of the
subject of perception and the thing perceived.
Coming now to the practical import of this relation as it applies to the
object of beauty, we have already drawn attention to the fact at some length,
that in the contemplation of it the element of sensuous passion drops away.
All personal impulse that the individual may feel toward the object is done
away with through that very aesthetic contemplation, which regards it as
self-subsistent in itself, in other words, its own object. For this reason, the
purely finite relation of the object also disappears, the relation, that is, in

which it subserved, as a means for their realization, aims which were
foreign to it, and towards the fulfilment of which it was either presented as
unfree or was compelled to take up, however strange, into its own
existence. At the same time that relation of the Ego in the practical world
which we found to be unfree disappears, inasmuch as it differentiates itself
no longer in subjective motives and their means or material, remaining
fixed in the finite relation of the formal "ought" for the carrying out of its
subjective ends in the object, but is here confronted with the notion and its
aim completely realized.
We may say, then, that the aesthetic contemplation of the beautiful is a
liberal education, a portrayal of the object in its free and infinite being, with
no detracting consideration of its use or employment for finite wants and
purposes. Further, the object as a thing of beauty is neither under force or
compulsion at our hands, nor is it in conflict with and overcome by other
things outside it. It is of the essence of beauty that the notion, end and soul
thereof, no less than its existent form, and variety generally, manifest
themselves out of their own intrinsic wealth rather than through the energy
of something outside them. The reason of this lies in the fact, already
insisted upon, that their truth consists solely in the unity and harmony of
their notion with their objective existence. And inasmuch as the notion is
itself concrete totality, its objective reality also appears as a manifestation
of the same, homogeneous in all its parts, which, as thus imbedded in the
notion, appear to fall into such ideal unity and animation. For this harmony
of the notion and its envisagement is nothing less than perfected
suffusion[200]. Accordingly the exterior form and shape is manifested, not as
such by its separation from other material, or as an impression mechanically
related to aims which are foreign to it, but as the form of reality wherein the
notion accommodates itself out of its own stuff and substance. Finally,
however much the particular aspects, parts or articulations of the beautiful
object are presented in the ideal unity of the notion and its unified
envisagement, that harmony must be so rendered visible to sense, that in
relation to one another they preserve the semblance of self-subsistent
freedom; in other words they must not only possess the ideal unity of the
notion as such, but must reflect back the side of a reality which is
substantially objective also. Both aspects, in short, must be present in
beautiful objects; for these are, on the one hand, the necessity posited
through the notion and discovered in the harmonious conclusion of these

particular aspects, and on the other, the envisagement of their freedom as
essentially one with the whole, and not merely that of the unity which exists
between the parts. Necessity in its full definition means the just relation of
the two aspects, which coalesce so completely that to posit one is to posit
the other. Such a necessity must unquestionably be present in beautiful
objects. It is not, however, under the mode of necessity that it appears;
rather it should conceal itself beneath the semblance of unintentional
accident. Otherwise the particular parts of such a real presence lose the
position they should occupy according to their own real existence, and only
appear in the service of their ideal unity, to which they therefore remain in
abstract subordination.
In virtue of the freedom and infinitude above analysed, which is inherent in
the notion of beauty, whether we view it in its objective presence as a thing
of beauty, or under its aesthetic contemplation, we disengage the province
of the beautiful from the relations of finite condition, to exalt it into that of
the Idea and its truth.

[188] This is, of course, a note of Hegel himself.
[189] This, of course, has reference to Hegel's unfortunate belief in Goethe's
theory of colour.
[190] Mediated (vermittelt), because the concrete is first apprehended through its
differences, and only after reflection do we arrive at the notional unity which
transcends and unites them.
[191] Momente. Phases asserted and reconciled in the evolved notional unity,
organic or otherwise. The notion is subjective because it is an ideal unity.
[192] The text is clearly corrupt. The full-stop after herzustellen should be a
comma, and auch would be preferably changed to als die.
[193] As essentially reason.
[194] Not the substantive, but past participle.
[195] Das sinnliche Scheinen.
[196] Verstand in the technical sense of Kant's philosophy; that is, the faculty of
scientific observation or ordinary perception—analytical, in contrast to reason
(Vernunft), the synthetic faculty.
[197] Infinite, that is to say, as human freedom is infinite, as mind is infinite, an
ideal totality, a whole complete in itself, not an endless progress, which is a
contradiction.
[198] Or, as Hegel says, "by suppressing the subjective principle altogether."
[199] Theoretischen here used in sense of true philosophical theory, not one-
sided views as above.
[200] Vollendete Durchdringung, i.e., a penetration through all parts.

CHAPTER II

THE BEAUTY OF NATURE

Beauty is the Idea as the immediate unity of the notion and its objective
reality, yet is only the Idea in so far as its unity is immediately present in
shape apprehensible to the senses and as semblance of the real. The most
elementary form of existence, which the Idea take to itself is Nature, and
the first form of beauty is that of Nature.

A. THE BEAUTY OF NATURE AS SUCH

1. In the world of Nature we must distinguish between the modes according
to which the notion becomes existent reality in order to be part of the Idea.
(a) In the first place the notion is absorbed so immediately in pure
objectivity, that, in its character of subjective and ideal unity, it wholly fails
to assert itself, and passes over instead as a thing without a soul into the raw
materia presented to sense. The purely mechanical or physical bodies in
their isolated singularity are of this order. A particular metal is, for example,
essentially no doubt a manifold of mechanical and physical qualities; every
part of it, however, has such qualities equally in itself. Such a body not
merely fails to possess any entire articulation of its parts in the sense that
every one of its different parts receives for itself a particular material
existence, but even the negative ideal unity of such differentiation is absent,
which might assert itself as animating principle[201]. The difference here is a
purely abstract multiplicity, and the unity posited the indifferent equilibrium
of identical qualities.
This is the first mode of the existence of the notion. The differences here
receive no independent existence, and the ideal unity is not found as
ideality. For this reason such isolated bodies are essentially defective and
abstract existences.
(b) Natural objects of a higher order suffer the differences asserted by the
notion to appear as free, so that each one as external to another is itself
independently existent. Here we have for the first time the true character of
objectivity. Objectivity is just this independent assertion of the segregated
differences determined by the notion. On this plane of existence the notion
asserts itself in such a way that it is at least a totality of its differences,
which is truly realized, in so far as the particular bodies, while they each
severally possess independent existence for themselves, are at the same
time members of one inclusive system. Of such a character is the solar
system. In one aspect of them the sun, comets, moon, and planets appear as
independent heavenly bodies apart from one another; in another, however,
they derive their definite character from being parts of one system of such
material bodies. Not only their specific modes of motion, but also their
physical qualities, are only to be deduced from their relation to this system.
This nexus which binds them together constitutes that inward unity which
relates these particular existences together in one whole.

But further than this, in this conception of system the operation of the
notion is not exhausted in the existent unity of independent bodies as
essential parts of it. For just as the differences are real the unity which
relates them to the totality has to assert itself as real. This unity, in other
words, differentiates itself from the multifold particularity of those
objective bodies of which it is the integrating principle. And on this plane of
existence it is differentiated therefore itself against such a particularity as
real, independent and objective existence. In the solar system the sun exists
over against all particularity related to that system, as such a unity of the
system.
Such a material existence of the ideal unity of the notion is still very
defective; for whereas on the one hand we have this unity posited in its
reality only as the relation or material connection between the severally
independent bodies, on the other we have it posited as a body which
belongs to that system, whose unity, in opposition to its real differences, it
essentially represents. The sun, in short, which we take to be[202] the soul of
the system, has itself an independent entity apart from the members which
form the explicit content of this soul. It is itself only one particular mode or
phase of the notion, that, namely, of unity in its difference from the actual
separation of the several parts, a unity which remains outside itself, and is
consequently abstract. For however much the sun by virtue of its physical
quality is plainly a principle of unity, the illuminating body as such, this is
after all merely an abstract identity. For light is simple, undifferentiated
appearance and nothing more. We find therefore in the solar system the
unity of the notion indeed objective, and the totality of its differences
explicitly realized, each body making visible one particular phase[203] of the
notion; but here, too, it lies absorbed in its objective reality, and it fails to
assert itself in such material as is truly inherent and explicit ideality. The
form of its existence which here prevails remains the independent
segregation of its particular phasal units[204].
It is, however, essential to the true existence of the notion, that the
differences of the objectively real, the reality, that is to say, of the separate
independent parts and the equally independent unity that is therein
objectively realized, should as such be together brought back into unity.
Only thus such a totality of innate differences can make wholly explicit
either the notion as the realized differentiation of its characteristics, or at the

same time release each particular that belongs to it from the element of
isolated independence which it cancels by enabling the ideality, in which
these differences recover their subjective unity, to assert itself fully as the
universal principle of their animated being. In that case they become no
longer parts hanging loosely to one another by a bond that still leaves their
particularity unaffected, but genuine members of one body. They no longer
possess an existence in their isolated singularity, but retain such truly in the
ideal unity which binds them together. Only in such an organic articulation
the ideal unity of the notion is present to the parts thus integrated. It is at
once their support and immanent soul; here for the first time the notion is
not overwhelmed in objective reality, but passes over into actual existence
as the inward identity and universality, which it essentially is.
(c) But this third mode of Nature's manifestation is a determinate existence
of the Idea, and the Idea as thus manifested in Nature is Life. Dead or
inorganic nature is not adequate to express the Idea; only the organic life of
Nature unfolds its reality. For in life we shall find, first, that the objective
reality of the notion as differentiated is presented as such reality; secondly,
however, that the negation of such differences is entirely one of distinction
in that reality[205], the ideal subjectivity of the notion overcoming to itself
this very reality; thirdly, the unifying principle of animation is now the
positive appearance of the notion in the form of its bodily substance, that is
to say, the form of infinity, which is sufficiently powerful to assert itself
thus formally in its content.
(α) If we ask ordinary consciousness[206] for a definition of Life, we have
two determinations presented, either the imaginative conception of it as
bodily life, or as soul-life. In the same view we distinguish these two
determinations with qualities peculiarly belonging to each. This contrast we
set up between soul and body is also of great importance in the more
philosophical consideration of our subject. And it is no less part of our
inquiry to investigate it. At the same time we would point out that the
philosophical interest concentrates itself quite as much on the unity which
exists between soul and body, a part of this inquiry which a really adequate
survey of the subject has at all times found beset with the greatest
difficulties. It is, however, precisely in virtue of this unity that Life is the
first genuine appearance of the Idea in Nature. We must consequently
apprehend the identity of soul and body as no fortuitous connection[207], but

a union of profounder significance. In other words, we must recognize the
body and its members as the objective existence of the notion itself in
systematic articulation, which in the members of the living organism,
secures an objective existence for its determinate features, analogously no
doubt, if on a higher plane, to the facts presented by the solar system.
Within this real existence the notion asserts itself in like manner as the ideal
unity of all these determinate parts. This ideal unity is the soul. The soul is
the substantive unity and interfused universality which is no less a simple
relation of self-determining than it is ideal Being-for-itself or self-coherent
totality. This is the higher view of the union between soul and body. To put
it in other words both are not merely distinct aspects set side by side; they
are one and the same totality of identical determinants. Just as the Idea
generally can only be grasped in its explicit reality as the notion evolving
itself as such[208], in which conception the differentiation and unity of both
sides, that is both the notion and its objective reality, are inseparably
present, in the same way Life must be conceived as the unity of both soul
and body.
And further, the subjective no less than substantive unity of soul within the
body is presented us and exemplified in Feeling. The feeling of a living
organism is, that is to say, not merely an independent product of a particular
member, but it is also this ideal and simple unity of the entire organism. It is
carried through every member of the body is felt throughout in more than a
hundred places at once; and indeed, to put it shortly, rather than saying there
are many thousand sensitive points[209] in a single organism we should
more justly say there is but one, namely, the subject of consciousness. And
inasmuch as the animating principle of organic Nature includes in itself this
distinction between the real existence of the organic members, and the
abstract or simple self-coherence within such parts, which we call the
growing soul, mediating between them both by virtue of its inherent unity,
such a principle of Life stands on a higher plane than that of inorganic
Nature. Only with Life is the Idea existent, and only thus is the Idea truth.
No doubt even in the organic world this truth can be extinguished. We find
the body unable to perfect its essential ideality and animating energy. Such
is the case in disease. Here we find the notion deprived of its controlling
sovereignty, and other powers are potent with it. Such a life is, however,
defective and crippled: it merely continues, because the inadequacy of

reality to the notion has not reached the point of absolute contradiction; it is
still only relatively valid. Once assume that all harmony between the two
sides is broken, that all genuine articulation of the members of the body and
their true identity has dropped away, and life is dissolved in death. The
several members are now mere appendages to each other, with no principle
of Life to hold them in unsevered unity.
(β) We must add that when we stated the soul is the totality of the notion
regarded as the subjective and ideal unity, the body on the other hand, as
distinguished by its members, is the same totality but rather in its material
aspect as the juxtaposition and sensuous accretion of all the several parts,
affirming at the same time that both soul and body are posited as one in the
living organism, there is no doubt something contradictory in the statement.
For the ideal unity, so far from being this material juxtaposition of parts, in
which each particularity possesses its independent consistency and
exclusive character, is rather in direct antithesis to such external reality.
That what is diametrically opposed should nevertheless be identical is
obviously a contradiction in terms. The man, however, who declares the
non-existence of anything from the fact that it carries in our notion of it a
contradiction which implies the identity of opposed antitheses, simply
excludes Life itself from the idea of existence. For the force of Life and still
more the power of Spirit (mind) consists in this very movement, namely, to
assert the law of contradiction inherent within them, to bear the burden
thereof and to overcome it. This affirmation and resolution of the
contradiction which obtains between the ideal unity and material
juxtaposition of the members, constitutes the appointed process of life
itself. And Life is simply process. And this process of life includes an
activity which has two distinct functions. On the one hand it has continually
to affirm the material existence of the physical distinctions[210] among the
members of the organism thus determined; on the other, just in proportion
as such distinctions grow obdurate in their independent particularity, and
tend to remain fixed in absolute separation from each other, it has to make
good once more that universal ideality, which is the principle of their life.
This is the idealism of Life's process. Philosophy is not the only idealism;
far from it. Nature herself in her domain of actuality creates in the life-
process just that which the philosophy of idealism completes in the world of
contemplative thought. Only where we have these two aspects of one
activity, that is, the constant realization of the corporeal definition of the

organism no less than the synthetic affirmation of such material
presentment in the ideal unity, which it is as one with the notion[211], then
and only then we have the completed process of Life, whose more primitive
forms[212], however, this is not the place to discuss. Through this unity of
Life's energy in both its branches all the members of the organism are up
held in their integrity, and continually flushed anew with the ideality of
their life. This ideality is furthermore declared by the organic parts in the
fundamental law of their being, that this unity of Life is not so much an
accidental quality as, on the contrary, the substance of it. In this alone they
are able to preserve their specific character. This it is which precisely
constitutes the difference between the part of a mere conglomerate and the
member of an organism. The particular parts of a house, for example, the
stones, windows, and so forth, remain just what they are, whether they form
part of the structure of a house, or whether they do not. Their relationship to
one another is quite indifferent, and the conceptual notion remains in their
case a purely external form, which possesses no life in these parts raising
them to the ideality of a subjective unity.
The members of an organism have, it is true, an external reality, but for all
that it is the notion of Life which constitutes the inward, nay, the
characteristic being of such reality, a reality which is not expressed through
one external form uniting them, but in the ideal coherence of their parts in
one living whole. For this reason the limbs have no such reality as belongs
to the stones of a building, or the planets, moon, and comets in the solar
system. Their reality is one wholly within the content of the organism, and
all appearance to the contrary is, as such, ideally imposed on them. Dissever
the hand from the body and it loses its independent existence as a member
of the organism which made it what it was. Its activity, form, and colour, all
that constitutes it, is at once changed; it enters the process of corruption,
and ultimately ceases to exist[213]. Consistent character it only possesses as
a limb of organic life, reality only in constant reunion with that ideal unity
which sustains it. And that is just the superior mode of reality which the
living organism possesses in itself. The real or positive is for ever being set
up as both the negation of itself and withal the ideal resumption of itself,
such ideality constituting, in fact, both the maintenance and specific
character of the mode under which each of the separate parts of the bodily
presence are associated together.

(γ) The reality, then, which the Idea wins for itself in the life of Nature is
reality as a phenomenal process. Such an appearance stated in its simplest
terms is this, that a reality exists, but its potential being[214] is not
immediately in its possession, rather it is at the same time negatively
affirmed[215] in the particular form that belongs to it. The negation of the
immediately external and particular members of a body is not only a
negative relative relation as the activity of the inherent idealization[216], but
is as such a positive realization[217].
Hitherto we have considered the particular objects of the real as positive in
their self-exclusive particularity. This independence, however, is negated in
the living object, and the ideal unity asserted within the bodily organism is
alone found to assert over itself the full force of positive determination.
Such a positive ideality in the principle of negation it asserts is the soul. On
the appearance of the soul in the body we have at once such an affirmative
presence as the one indicated. The soul not merely asserts itself as a power
against the subdivision of the bodily members, it is their plastic creator[218],
which preserves as inward and ideal that which is externally minted in the
shape of physical members. And consequently it is this very positive and
ideal inward[219] which appears in the outer structure; in other words, the
external, so far as it is a mere external, is a mere abstraction, a mere aspect
that is untrue for the whole. In organic life the external we are confronted
with is an externality through which the inward is made visible. The
outward, that is to say, declares itself in its potential nature as that inward,
which is its notion. Further to this notion appertains the reality in which it
as notion is made visible. Inasmuch, however, as in the objective world the
notion, strictly as such, is the principle of subjective life and self-
determined life becoming explicit in its own objective reality[220], life exists
only as a living thing, an individual subject. It is only with life thus
concentrated to a point that we find this negating centrum of unity. And it is
negative in this sense that the ideal explicitly self-unified totality[221] can
only now stand forth in its reality by virtue of this principle of ideality
being asserted through the differentiation of its positive presence, together
with which the ideal unity of such totality is at the same time incorporated.
It is of the greatest importance to make clear this aspect of the principle of
subjectivity. It is only as the single living thing thus unified by such a
principle that life is actually present.

If we inquire further in what manner the Idea is manifested within the actual
life of such living individuals our survey will be as follows: first, this
principle of Life will be realized as the totality of an organism possessing
bodily shape; secondly, this physical shape is not presented as a rigid
product[222], but as a continous process of ideal generation, in which a
living soul asserts itself. Thirdly, the changes and determinations through
which this totality passes are not imposed externally to it, but are changes
of form which are evolved from its inherent nature, imposed on itself and
for itself, in a process wherein it stands self-determined as the subjective
unity no less than the ultimate end of its being.
This free self-subsistence of the subjective principle of life is especially
exemplified in the spontaneous motion of a living organism. The inanimate
bodies of inorganic Nature are fettered to the conditions of Space, which
limits them to one place, or they are only moved from it by external forces.
The motion, in short, does not originate in themselves; and, when it is
visible upon them, it appears as an energy which is foreign to them, to
remove which the only force they exert is that of reaction. And if the motion
of the planets with similar phenomena appear to be otherwise produced,
such are at least wholly fettered by natural laws and their abstract necessity.
The living animal, on the contrary, in its freedom of motion, negatives this
enforced limitation to one spot by virtue of its own activity. It is through
such self-determination the continuous liberation of itself from the material
isolation. And for the same reason it is in this freedom of motion, if only in
a subordinate degree, the release of itself from the former abstractness
referable to the particular modes of motion, their direction and their speed.
Under a yet closer view, moreover, the animal, regarded by itself in its
organism, presents the same sensuous matter that is moved; and here, too,
life is as before a freedom of motion within this organic reality, evidenced
in the flow of blood and the movement of the limbs.
Motion, however, is not the only expression of animated life. The free tones
of the voice of animals, which are unknown in the inorganic world, where
bodies merely roar and clatter through the blow of objects external to them,
these already present to us the higher expression of animated subjectivity.
The most intimate and vital expression of such ideal activity is, however,
brought before us when we find the living individual able to concentrate
itself as individuality over against the objective world, while at the same

time it appropriates and transfigures that world for its own. And this is
accomplished in part through observation by means of vision, and partly for
practical purposes, in so far as such an individual brings the outer world
into subjection to himself, utilizes the same, assimilates it as a means of
nourishment, and in this manner continually reproduces his individuality in
that objective alterum. Such a process, of course, as it ascends through
stronger organisms, assumes more and more emphatic degrees of
unsatisfied desire, assimilation, satisfaction, or satiety.
Such, then, are the activities, in which the notion of animated life makes
itself apparent. Moreover, the principle of Ideality thus rendered visible is
not merely the result of our reflection; it is objectively real itself in the
living subject, whose existence consequently we may go so far as to call an
objective idealism. And it is the soul, as before stated, which, as this ideal
energy, brings about its own manifestation[223], always reducing the purely
external reality of the body to an appearance, and thereby affirming itself as
objective totality in that very bodily shape.
2. Now it is as the Idea made objectively visible to the senses that the
animated life of Nature is beautiful; in so far, that is to say, as the truth or
the Idea, presented in the form of Nature, where under it first appears, in
other words life, is immediately given in the particular shape of reality
adequate to it. Owing, however, to its sensuous immediacy the living beauty
of Nature is neither beautiful for itself nor is the beauty strictly that which is
the outcome of itself, a product, that is, of its purely objective appearance.
The beauty of Nature is only beautiful for another, that is for us, the
consciousness that apprehends its beauty. The question therefore arises in
what way and by virtue of what characteristics the principle of life appears
to us beautiful in its immediate existence.
(a) If we look at the practical way in which a living object becomes visible
and preserves itself, the first thing which rivets our attention is spontaneous
motion. This motion, regarded simply as motion, is nothing more than the
entirely abstract freedom of motion from place to place and from time to
time, which we find exemplified in the spontaneous, but entirely haphazard
movements of animal life. In music and the dance we have, it is true,
motion in its generic significance; but here motion is not merely a matter of
chance and impulse, but it exhibits the laws which regulate it; it is defined,
complete in itself and subject to measure; and it is all this, though we still

abstract from it the significance whereof it is the beautiful expression. If we
again interpret the motion of animals as the realization of an aim originating
within themselves, this excited impulse is still entirely accidental, an end of
most restricted import. If we further extend our survey and conceive such
motion as the activity and working together of all parts of the animal
organism towards a definite purpose, we shall merely find that such a
conception is rendered possible by our own effort of imagination[224]. The
case is just the same if we reflect upon the way in which an animal gratifies
its physical wants, obtains nourishment through the organs which grasp it,
consume it, digest it, and generally is a subject of the process which
preserves its life. For in this case also we have either only before us single
desires and their spontaneous and haphazard gratification, in which the
inward activity[225] of the organism is not present at all, or at least all these
activities and their means of expression have become the subject of our
imaginative reflection, which is at pains to understand such a process by
relating it to definite ends, and to establish a harmony between aims
assumed to belong to the animal itself and the organs which fulfill them.
We shall rather find that neither the sensuous perception of single
haphazard appetites, arbitrary movements and efforts towards self-
satisfaction, nor the fanciful consideration of the animal organism as one
directed by purpose will present to us purely animal life as a part of the
beauty of Nature. The beauty consists in the appearance of individual form,
both in repose and motion, quite apart from the relation of its self-
gratification to any purpose thus subserved, as it is apart from the entirely
isolated contingency of self-imposed movement[226]. Such beauty is related
to the form alone, because it is only as such that it is the external
appearance, in which the objective idealism of the principle of life makes
itself known to us as a thing perceived and contemplated upon through the
senses. Thought apprehends this "objective idealism" in the medium of its
notion, appropriating the same in the element of universality which belongs
to it, albeit the contemplation of its beauty is inseparably bound with its
phenomenal reality. And this reality is the external form of the articulated
organism, which is, in our view of it, quite as much determinate
particularity as it is a semblance, namely, that of the physical manifold of
the separate members, which can only form part of the concrete totality of
the living form under the guise of phenomenal appearance.

(b) From the explanation of the notion of life already given we may deduce
more narrowly the form of this appearance as follows. The form is one of
spatial extension, limitation, and configuration, distinguished through its
various shape, colour, and motion, being, in fact, a manifold of such
distinctions. If, however, the organism which manifests these differences is
a living organism, it will inevitably appear that the organism does not
derive its true existence from such a manifold and its physical
configurations. This is brought about by the fact that the different parts,
which are apprehended by us through the senses, are at the same time
conjoined together in one totality; they appear consequently as the members
of one individual existence, which is a unity of such differences, and which
not merely possesses them in their difference, but as parts of one
homogeneous whole.
(α) In the first place, however, this unity will assert itself as the purposeless
identity of such differences, that is to say with no abstract relation to any
causal end whatever. The parts in such a case are not rendered visible to
sense merely as a means to or in the service of some defined purpose, nor
are they able to fix the determinate relation of form and structure which
they occupy one over against the other.
(β) Rather the contrary is the case, for, in the second place, the bodily
members have for our sense-perception the appearance of being quite
accidental in their form; in other words the determination of one appears to
be quite indifferent to that of another. In other words, we can never
conclude because one has a certain form another will have the same, as
would be the case if a material uniformity was clear between them. Where
uniformity is the rule an abstract determination of some kind of form, size,
or whatever it may be, is the property of all parts. The windows of a
building, for example, are all of one size, or at least are placed together in
one row. Or we may illustrate the same similarity with the uniform worn by
all soldiers belonging to one regiment. We have various parts of such
clothing differing in colour, texture and the rest, but their formal opposition
is no matter of chance; each has its causal connection with some other; it is
there because the other is there. Neither is there here any complete
distinction of form, nor any unique independence wholly asserted. With the
individual organism of life the case is entirely otherwise. Here every part is
absolutely distinguished; the nose from the forehead, the mouth from the

cheek, the breast from the neck, the arms from the legs, and so on.
Inasmuch as for our sense-perception every member possesses its unique
form rather than one which belongs to another, or one which is determined
by that of another, the members appear as self-subsistent parts, and for this
reason free and spontaneous[227]. For the material juxtaposition of the parts
alone throws no light upon their particular form.
(γ) Thirdly, it is obvious there must be for our imaginative perception a
more inward bond of connection present in the self-subsistence of the
organism, if the unity is not offered us in its rational, spatial, temporal, or
quantitative relations such as are presented in the examples of uniformity
referred to, which, as we have seen, the unique particularity of the parts can
extinguish. This identity is not sensuous and immediately present to
perception in the way the distinction between the members is presented; it
is rather a secret and inward bond of necessity and harmonious relation
between the members and their form. If it were only inward, quite out of
reach of our vision, such a necessary unity would be apprehended only in
thought, removed from our sense-perception altogether. In such a case,
however, it would fail to enter into the beautiful object of our vision, and
what we found as such in the living, object would cease to be the Idea in its
own objective and phenomenal reality. Such a unity must consequently
enter into what is externally perceived, although it is, as the ideal principle
of life within it, not entirely apparent to sense or confined in spatial
dimensions. It appears in fact in the individual totality as the universal
ideality of its members, constituting thus the fundamental basis which
supports and holds them together, the subject of the living subject. And this
subjective unity in organic life finds its first direct expression in feeling. In
the emotional life the Soul finds its true expression as Soul. For soul the
mere juxtaposition of limbs have no real truth, and in the presence of its
subjective ideality the purely spatial multiplicity of external configuration
ceases to exist. Such a manifold, with its unique differentiations, its organic
articulation of parts[228] is no doubt presupposed; but when and in so far as
the soul expresses itself through such in feeling the more inward unity ever-
present to life asserts itself equally as the dissolution of all absolute
independence between the physical parts, which reveal now not merely
their materia, but also that wave of animation which fuses all in their soul.

(c) To start with, however, we must observe that the emotional expression
of soul-life neither offers us the visual impression of any necessary inter-
dependence between the separate members, nor indeed the perception of an
identity which is necessary between such physical articulation and the
subjective unity conferred on it by simple feeling. We will investigate this
more narrowly.
(α) If indeed the form and only the form renders in some way visible this
inward harmony and its necessity, it may be because we look upon this
juxtaposition as the habitual relation of such members, a connection which
brings to our view some specific type and the oft-repeated formal
exemplifications of such a type. But the necessity of custom is after all only
a subjective necessity.[229] According to such a principle we may find
certain animals ugly for no other reason than that we find in them an
organism which differs from our ordinary experience, or runs contrary to it.
For this reason we call the organisms of certain animals bizarre in so far as
the way in which their organs are related together is foreign to what is more
common to our experience or entirely contradicts it. Fishes whose bodies
are in size out of all proportion to their length of tail, or those in which we
find eyes together on one side of the head only, are an example. In the
world of plants we are already prepared to find many such strange
departures from type, although the cactus with its spines, and the more
rectilinear shaping of its angular junctures[230] may still arouse our wonder.
The more a man is educated, however, in all branches of natural history, the
more able he will be to recognize in their truth the subordination of all parts
of organic life, and carry in the memory the greatest variety of types in their
proper classification, and the less anything he may observe will surprise
him.
(β) A profounder penetration into this correlation of the parts will, however,
in the second place, tend to give us that truer insight competent to
determine from one of the parts the entire form to which it must belong.
Cuvier is a famous example of such aptitude: a man of science, who by the
examination of a single bone, whether fossil or otherwise, was able to
specify at once by its characteristics the kind of animal to which it
belonged. An excellent illustration this of ex ungue leonem. So from a claw
or a thigh bone we may discover the conformation of the teeth, or vice versa
from the teeth that of the hip-bone, or that of the vertebral column. Such a

profound synthesis of the type and the knowledge it implies carries us,
however, beyond habitual experience only. We must assume, to render it
possible, previous thought and the systematic arrangement of the isolated
facts of science. Our example Cuvier had no doubt secured from previous
experience a determinate content and some specific quality which prevailed
in each generic conception, and asserted itself as a unity of principle in all
particulars however distinct, and so enabled him to recognize their affinity.
Such a specific quality is that of flesh-eating, which is then the
determinating principle of the form of the other members of the organism to
which it belongs. A flesh-eating animal requires teeth and jaws of
exceptional vigour; when hunting it will require claws to seize its prey,
mere hoofs are insufficient. Here in short is a quality which necessarily
determines for us the form and principle of affinity among all the organic
members. A conception of such a typical character is the ordinary one we
form of the strength of an eagle or a lion. We may no doubt find something
both beautiful and instructive[231] in this way of regarding the animal world,
in so far as we derive from it some unified idea of its configuration, which
is not a mere repetition of that unity in all the parts, but gives full value to
the distinctions they possess. For all that it must be remembered the
dominant factor of this survey is not the perception of our senses, but the
generic thought of our minds with which it is made to conform. Reviewed
in this light we ought not to say that we find the object as such beautiful,
but rather attribute that beauty to the reflection of our own minds upon it.
And if we examine these reflections more closely we shall find they are
after all a deduction of our principle of unity from a limited aspect of the
organic whole. We concentrate our attention, for example, on the mode in
which it is nourished, i.e., whether such an animal is carnivorous or
herbivorous. Through such a limited determination we are still removed
from a vision of the coalescent unity of the whole we identified with the
notion, the soul itself.
(γ) The truth is we can only, in this sphere, bring before our consciousness
the entire unity of life by means of our thought and grasp of reason. In the
natural world the soul, in its full activity, is not found; that is to say, the
subjective unity, in its pure ideality, does not exist there for a self-
consciousness.

If, however, by means of thought, we endeavour to grasp the nature of soul-
life according to its essential notion we shall find two aspects under which
we may regard it; first, as the form subject to such a principle of animation;
secondly, as the notion of soul for thought in all that the conception implies.
Such a complete grasp of its true nature is not possible in the sensuous
perception of the objects of beauty. Such must neither pass before us as
thought, nor must we allow the interest of Thought as such to form a barrier
of difference or opposition between itself and the vision revealed to us. We
are left, then, with no alternative but to consider, under this point of view,
the object as wholly presented to sense; we must assume that in the sphere
of Nature a sensuous perception of the natural form is our genuine mode of
contemplating the beautiful. "Sense," that is the master-key[232] to the
position; a word which in itself is interpreted in two opposed senses. In the
first place we may indicate thereby the organs of immediate[233] perception,
secondly, by the "sense of a thing" we may refer to the significance, or the
element of thought and the universal within it. In this way "Sense" is related
on one side to the immediate externality of existence, and on the other to its
inward or essential nature. A sensuous perception of that existence in fact
preserves both sides in unity, or rather in one direction so presents the
aspect that is opposed to it in the immediate sense vision as to include
therein both the essence and notion of the object. But for the reason that it
combines these opposed determinations in unfractured unity, the notion is
not presented as such to consciousness, but is rather to be dimly
foreshadowed there[234]. We accept, for example, as a determinate fact the
existence of three realms of Nature, which we define as that of the mineral
world, that of plants, and finally that of animals; we can conclude from this,
as already foreshadowed by its truth regarded as a process rising from plane
to plane, that there is an inward necessity inherent in the notional
articulation of its divisions, and do not confine ourselves only to the purely
imaginative conception of it as a world conforming on its exterior side only
to a final end. In the same way when confronted with the variety of the
external presentment in each of these realms, the sense-perception surmises
a controlling unity intelligible to mind, a progress subject to laws of
thought, visible no less in the formation of mountain ranges than in the
orderly succession of plant-life and of the animal races. The same tendency
is presupposed when, after an examination of the form of any particular
animal organism, an insect's, for example, as subdivided into head, body,

abdomen, and extremities, we conclude the correlation of such parts to be
based on a rational principle, and are confident that though, at first blush, it
may appear quite accidental that we are in possession of five senses, we
shall discover a true bond of relation between that number and the notion
therein asserted. Of just this type is Goethe's method of observing and
accounting for the innate reason of Nature and her phenomena. With an
extraordinary intuitive sense he directed his attention directly to[235] the
objects of experience, entirely convinced of the ideal bond of unity which
explained their interconnection. History may be written with a like object.
The narration of facts and individual lives is given in such a way as
indirectly to throw a light on the essential significance which such events or
persons contributed to the period in which they are necessarily bound
together in one organic whole.
3. Consequently we may affirm that Nature generally, regarded as the
sensuous manifestation of the concrete notion and the Idea, is to be
considered an object of beauty in so far as by such a sensuous perception of
natural forms some kind of foreshadowing of the notional unity consonant
to them is surmised, and we are able through the channels of sense to
discover not merely their form, but somewhat of the inner necessity which
binds together all their parts. Further than this incomplete surmise of the
notion the sensuous contemplation of Nature as beautiful is not carried. This
way of comprehending things, for which the separate parts, despite their
appearance of independent freedom among themselves, nevertheless reveal
to the sight the harmony that exists there either in the characteristics of their
form, or detached portions of it or their motion and so forth, remains for all
that indefinite and abstract. The inward unity is not open to external sense,
nor can it appear in its ideal and concrete form to such perception[236],
whether imaginative or no; such at most acquiesces generally in the
universality of a law of connection inherent in every living thing.
(a) It is, then, in the first instance only in this bond of union which reveals
itself as a necessary adjunct of vitality from the objectivity of Nature, in so
far as the same is presented in forms adequate to the notion, that we have
before us the beauty of Nature. With this coalescence the materia is wholly
identical; the form is immediately at home in the matter, as its true essence
and its conforming energy[237]. This description may in fact stand for us, so
far as beauty at this stage is concerned, as a general definition of it. We

admire, for example, the natural form of a crystal on account of the law of
uniformity it manifests, a law which through no mere action of forces
external to it, but by virtue of its own specific definition and free activity,
free in all its aspects as itself an object, is manifested there. For although an
activity external to it could as such equally be free, yet in crystals the
conformative activity is not extraneous to the object; rather it is a form
operative as belonging to the mineral's innate character. We may define it as
the free force of its substance, which out of its own resources informs itself
and is not merely passively receptive of its environment. Consequently we
find here the constituent material in its realized form as a free and
independent creation. In still higher and more concrete mode the immanent
form projects itself through the living organism and all its parts, in the
articulate form and, above all, in its motion and its vital expression as
feeling. For in this last case we have the inward vitality pregnant itself as
living.
(b) It is moreover through this indeterminacy of the beauty of Nature,
originating in its inward principle of animation that (α) both in virtue of the
conception of life and the intuition of its true notion no less than of the
habitual types conformable to its adequate presentment, we are able to
distinguish between animals which are beautiful and those which are ugly.
Animals incapable of vitality, such as the sloth, which creeps about with
difficulty, and whose entire mode of life is suggestive of incapacity for
motion or activity, offend our aesthetic sense for this very reason[238].
Activity and mobility are precisely the qualities which assert the higher
ideality of life. For the same reason we condemn forms of amphibious life,
certain species of fishes, crocodiles, toads, and many kinds of insects; an
additional reason will influence our similar attitude to hybrid species, where
confusion of form marks the passage from one determinate type to another;
the ornithorhyncus is an example[239], an animal which with its mixture of
bird and four-footed beast may indeed astonish us, but at the same time is
repulsive to our sense of beauty. Such feelings of repulsion can no doubt be
traced entirely to our habitual prepossessions which have moulded for the
imagination a fixed type of animal species consonant to experience. But
even so there is already actively present the intuitive surmise that the
configuration of a bird, for example, is related in its parts by a necessary
principle of unity, and cannot as such graft upon itself forms which belong

to other species without being thereby transformed into a hybrid variety.
Such abnormal deviations from type appear to us both strange and
contradictory. Neither the one sided narrowness of organization, which is so
defective and mean in its manifestation, that it exercises no activity over the
straitened conditions of its environment, nor confusions and passages of
type, which, albeit they are not so enclosed within themselves, are unable to
hold fast the distinctive features of their type, belong strictly to the sphere
of natural beauty.
(β) There is another sense in which we attribute beauty to Nature, namely,
when we have the collective picture of a landscape before us rather than
observe the living form of a simple object. Here we have no organic
articulation of parts such as is derived from their notion and is presented to
us as such ideal unity in spontaneous life. We have instead a rich variety of
objects both organic and inorganic, which are united together on one or
more planes of vision in their distinctive features, contour of mountains,
winding outlines of rivers, groups of trees, huts, dwellings, palaces, and
cities of mankind, ships, roadways, heaven and sea, valley and rock-cleft.
We find, in addition to this variety and proceeding therefrom, a delightful or
imposing harmony which appeals to our sense and interests us.
It is lastly a peculiar characteristic of the beauty of Nature that it should
excite or exercise a harmonious influence over our emotional life. A mood
of this kind is aroused by the stillness of moonlight, the peace of a valley,
through which some brook or other meanders, the sublimity of the
immeasurable storm-tossed sea, the tranquil depth of the star-strewn
heavens. But the significant factor in this case is not so much to be found in
the objects as in the peculiar moods they arouse in our feelings and
affections. On analogous grounds we attribute beauty to animals, when the
expression of their life directly suggests human qualities, such as courage,
strength, cunning, good nature, and the rest. Such, no doubt, in one aspect
of it, truly expresses the nature of the animals themselves; but there is also
our own conception of its affinity to ourselves, and the mood in which we
receive it.
(c) However much animal life, as the culminating point of natural beauty,
unfolds its freest expression as a living principle, it is comparatively narrow
in its range and subject to very limited qualities. The circle of such
existence is a strait one; and in this the predominant interests are those of

the satisfaction of natural instincts such as hunger and sex-attraction. Soul-
life, regarded as the inward principle expressed through external figure, is
poor, abstract, and empty of content. Add to this the consideration that this
inward is not manifested at all as inward. The soul in its essential substance
is not revealed by the life of Nature; it is, in fact, the determining
characteristic of Nature that its soul remains shut in itself, does not, in other
words, proclaim itself in its ideality. As already pointed out, the soul of an
animal is not this ideal unity self-acknowledged. If it were otherwise we
should have the manifestation of such personality brought home to others.
Only in the self-conscious Ego do we find the ideal in its simplest terms,
which is itself an ideal medium to itself, knows itself as this simple unity,
and thereby endows itself with a reality, which is not limited to bodily and
sensuous form, but is itself of an ideal character. Here, for the first time,
reality is in possession of a form adequate to the notion; or rather the notion
sets itself up as its own opposite, makes itself objectively real and finds its
own realization in that objectivity. The animal life, on the contrary, is only
potentially such a unity as that in which reality as bodily form is other than
the ideal unity of soul. In self-consciousness we have this unity realized,
whose opposing factors are constituent elements of one transparent ideality.
And it is as this concrete totality of self-consciousness that the Ego is
manifested to others. The forms of animal life merely enable us through
imaginative perception to divine the soul's existence. Such only possess the
troubled semblance of a soul, betrayed to us through the breath or
exhalement which permeates the whole, gives some unity to all the
members, and reveals in the entire instinctive life the first germs of an
independent character. Herein lies the primary defect of the beauty of
Nature, even when taken at its point of culminating form: and it is precisely
this defect which will introduce us to the necessity of the Ideal as the
beauty of art. But before we consider at length the nature of this Ideal, there
are two determinations involved as the most immediate result of this
inherent defect in natural beauty, which invite our attention.
We have stated that in the animal form the soul appears as the bond of
connection within the organism and the unified point of animation only
under a cloud[240] and destitute of any fully realized content. We only find
there a quite indeterminate and restricted mode of soul-life. We will now
consider the abstract limitations of this mode more closely.

B. THE EXTERNAL BEAUTY OF ABSTRACT FORM REGARDED AS UNIFORMITY,
SYMMETRY, CONFORMITY TO RULE AND HARMONY AND REALITY IN THE SENSE
OF ABSTRACT UNITY OF THE PHYSICAL MATERIAL.

There is in Nature an external reality which is, of course, visible and
definitely objective, but the inward unity of which, instead of presenting
itself in the concrete inwardness referable to the unity of soul-life, only goes
to the point of indeterminacy and abstraction. In other words, it stops short
of the inwardness self-actualized in an ideal form and as the particular
existence conformable to its ideal content. Its appearance is that of the
defining principle on the face of external reality. Now the specific
characteristics of inwardness in all its concreteness should be these. First,
the principle of soul-life is asserted for itself no less than is potentially
replete with content. Secondly, external reality interpenetrates this ideal
arcanum, and by so doing fully reveals its true form as such external reality.
A concrete unity of this nature is not reached by mere natural beauty: it lies
beyond as the Ideal. On this plane of existence we cannot say that such a
concrete unity enters into the manifestation of form. We have to deduce it
through analysis, examining in their separation and singularity the
distinguishing features which the unity supports. The form that informs here
and the sensuous external reality fall apart from one another; or rather we
have two distinct aspects which we are compelled to consider separately. By
virtue of this fact, which we may either regard as a division of the material
of sense or as a review of certain facts taken in abstraction, the inward
unity, which is one aspect of the external reality, itself falls outside it; that is
to say, it is not itself asserted in that rational reality as the wholly immanent
form of the entire notion which constitutes it, but rather as an Ideality and
determinacy imposed externally.
Such are the points of view thus presented us which we will now consider
more closely.
First, then, we have to discuss
1. THE BEAUTY OF ABSTRACT FORM

The form of natural beauty in its abstraction is a form which is determinate
and thus of limited range; in a further aspect of it it is focussed in a unity of
abstract relation to itself[241]. On closer inspection we shall, however, find
that the external manifold controls this form of abstract beauty by reason of

its own determinacy and unity. We must not, however, imply in these latter
any immanent inwardness or form of vital ideality, but regard them as
purely material definitions and unity of the external medium. Forms of such
a character are uniformity, symmetry, or conformity to rule, and finally
harmony.
(a) Uniformity
Uniformity is, speaking generally, equality in external presentment, or,
more specifically, the unbroken repetition of one and the same definite
form, supplied by the determining unity to the form of objects. Such a unity,
in virtue of its initial abstraction, is at the furthest extreme removed from
the rational totality of the concrete notion. Its beauty is therefore a beauty
which is referable to the faculty of the analytical understanding. The
fundamental process of that faculty is to perceive objects in their
abstraction, not in their self-determined completeness and identity. For
example, among all lines the straight line is that which is most uniform,
because it alone manifests one abstract and undeviating direction. For the
same reason the cube is a figure dominated by regularity of content. All its
sides are of the same size, the same length of line and the same angles,
which, on account of their being rectangular, however much their size is
changed, manifest no change in the form of their angles as is the case with
angles which are obtuse or acute.
With this characteristic of uniformity we must closely connect that of
symmetry. Form is unable long to rest in that barest abstraction of its
determination, namely, undifferentiated equality. A diverse relation is sure
to assert itself, breaking into the empty form of identity. In this way we
obtain symmetry, which consists in no mere identical repetition of one form,
but in a combination with some such form analogous to it, identical, that is
to say, in its self-determination, and yet manifesting a distinct contrast with
it. Through such a combination we obtain another kind of equality and
unity, whose determination is more extensive and more varied. If, for
example, on one side of a house we meet with three windows of the same
size separated at equal intervals of distance, then three or four more of
loftier size than the first-mentioned standing at more extended or closer
intervals in relation to them, and again three more precisely similar in size
and distance to our original ones, we have then before us a symmetrical
arrangement. Mere uniformity and repetition of the same distinctions will

never produce this result. We may find such distinguishing features in size,
position, form, colour, tones, and many others like them, which, however, to
produce symmetry must be harmoniously related to similar forms of
construction. When we find a combination which presents to us an
arrangement of such distinguishing characteristics according to some
clearly uniform principle that then is symmetry.
Both these attributes, uniformity and symmetry, being the determinations of
the form and unity of external appearance, are mainly applicable to
distinctions in size. For it stands to reason that what is expressly posited as
external rather than truly immanent determination is generally a
quantitative[242] determination, whereas the qualitative fixes the inherent
character of anything. Consequently that which is assumed only to affect
the external appearance cannot be concerned with the changes which are
found in the qualitative aspect. Size, on the other hand, and its alteration
regarded merely as size, is for the qualitative determination, when it is
unable to assert itself in terms of measure, an indifferent determination.
That is to say, measure is quantity, precisely in so far as it can give to itself
an aspect which qualifies it, and thereby a qualitative determination is
united to the purely quantitative one. As thus explained[243] uniformity and
symmetry are merely restricted to the determinations of size and their
uniform appearance or arrangement of differences in symmetrical order.
Further inquiry will show us that this due co-ordination of size is as
applicable to the forms of organic life as it is to those of inorganic Nature.
The human organism is, for example, at least in a certain degree both
uniform and symmetrical. We have two eyes, two arms, two legs, similar
hip-joints, shoulder-blades, and so on. Of other portions of the body the
reverse is the case. We find no conspicuous uniformity in the heart, lungs,
bowels, or liver. The question arises what precisely constitutes the
difference here. The side on which uniformity, whether of size, form, or
position mainly asserts itself, is obviously the aspect of the organism
viewed from the outside. The uniform and symmetrical determination, in
complete conformity with what we should expect, is most apparent where
the fact as objectively determined is itself the external envisagement itself,
and carries with it the least impression of inherent life. The reality, which is
most constant to this pure externality, rests satisfied with the abstract unity
congenial to it. Within the organism, on the contrary, where we find the

heart of the life-process, and still more openly in the medium of
untrammelled reason uniformity gives way before the subjective unity of
life. Nature is, no doubt, in its opposition to mind, a determinate existence
external and independent; but even in her we find that uniformity only pre-
eminently asserts itself where externality is the predominant principle.
(α) Reviewing, then, shortly the prominent classifications of natural objects,
we observe, in the first place, that minerals, taking the crystal for an
example, as structures destitute of the principle of life, are characterized in
their fundamental form by uniformity and symmetry. As already remarked,
their form, it is true, is one appropriate to themselves, is not merely the
determination of external forces. Through an unseen energy the form that
makes them what they are as products of Nature creates their configuration
both within and without. This activity, however, is not yet the completed
energy of the concrete notion as an ideal principle, which directs the
independent consistency of the positive reality, subsuming them under an
ideal totality such as is present in animal life. The unity and definition of
their form persists in purely abstract one-sidedness, and we have as the
characteristics of a unity which is wholly on the outside the bare forms of
uniformity and symmetry, the determinating factor in each case being an
abstraction.
(β) Plant life is, of course, many degrees above the order of crystals. From
the very commencement its evolution is marked by a harmonious
articulation, and consumes material in a constantly active process of self-
nourishment. But plant-life also is not yet really the living whole[244].
Although organically divided into parts, its activity is still one that consists
wholly in assimilation[245]. It is rooted in the earth with no independent
power of motion from place to place; its growth is continuous, and such
energy of assimilation and self-nourishment as it possesses is not the
tranquil self-subsistence of a completely individualized organic existence,
but rather a continuous extension of its growth as an external object. An
animal grows just as a plant grows, but at a determinate point that growth in
its external size ceases, and that which reproduces itself in self-subsistence
is one and the same individual. Plant-life, however, enlarges without
intermission, and only its decease renders the further increase of its boughs
and leaves impossible. And, moreover, all that it separately produces in this
process is for ever the repeated pattern of the same organism in its entirety.

For every bough is a new plant, and not, as in the case with the animal
organism, only an isolated member. On account of this persistent
enlargement of itself through all the separate plant formations whereof it
consists plant-life is without the subjective animation peculiar to sensation
and the ideal unity which belongs to it. And, generally speaking, we may
say that plant-life, however much the digestive process is an inward one, in
which we find nourishment is assimilated and the organism determines the
form which is impressed on its substance out of itself by virtue of the
increasing freedom of the notional type working through that substance,
nevertheless substantially, through the entire process of its life, it remains
rooted to externality without either a true independence or unity, and such
self-subsistence as it possesses is continuous without a break. And it is on
account of this characteristic of plant-growth, namely, that it is for ever
asserted on the side of externality, that we find uniformity and symmetry to
be the fundamental unity of its self-expression as it is a predominant
principle of its structure. No doubt uniformity is not so regnant here as we
observed it to be in the formation of minerals, and it is not expressed in the
same extreme degree through the abstract straight line and right angle: but it
prevails here notwithstanding. The stem for the most part runs on a straight
line; the rings of plants of higher type form themselves in circles; leaves
closely approach the configuration of crystals; and, at least as the basis of
their type, we find that the blossoms themselves in the number of their
leaves, their position and form are determined with uniformity and
symmetry.
(γ) Finally, in the living organism of animals a difference is asserted in the
reduplicated structure of the members. In the bodies of animals, more
particularly if we examine the higher species, the organism is a more
inward, self-contained and self-determined totality; like a sphere, it returns,
so to speak, on itself, while still remaining an external organism. It is an
external process, and yet, as a process, asserted against externality. The
more important organs are those within, such as heart, lungs, and liver, and
in these the life is bound up. Such are not determined under the simple
characteristics of uniformity. In those members, however, even of the
animal organism, which are fixed in direct relation to the outside world,
symmetrical arrangement prevails. Among such must be reckoned the
members and organs which assert the subjective principle externally no less
than those which are the instruments of the active life. The sense-organs,

such as sight and hearing, belong to the former; all that we see and hear is
left as we found it. The organs of smell and taste already mark the point of
union with an activity exercised externally. We only smell that which is
already assimilated[246] by the organ of sense, and we only exercise our
taste through an act of destruction. We have, it is true, but one nose, but it is
subdivided into two sections, each of which is uniform in structure. The
same description is applicable to the lips and teeth and other organs like
them. Further than this the eyes and ears, and the limbs employed in motion
from place to place, or for direct control over external objects, in other
words, legs and arms, are entirely uniform in position, form, and other
qualities. We find, therefore, that in the organic world no less than in the
inorganic uniformity asserts a very real predominance, qualified, however,
by the fact that its presence is limited to those members which are the
instruments of the organism in its direct relation to the external world. On
those through which the life-process returns on itself by virtue of its own
subjective principle there is no such impression of uniformity.
Such, then, are the leading characteristics of the forms of uniformity and
symmetry, and the manner in which they are asserted in the configuration of
natural phenomena.
(b) Conformity to Rule
We now propose to distinguish the more generic conception of conformity
to law[247], so far as it appears on a higher plane of organic evolution than
that already adverted to, and marks the passage of the same to the freedom
of natural no less than spiritual life, from the more abstract forms discussed
above. Taken by itself, no doubt, conformity to rule is not alone sufficient to
give us the subjective unity and freedom of totality; but we do find in the
configuration to which it corresponds a totality of essentially distinguished
characteristics, such as do not merely emerge in difference and opposition,
but betray both unity and determinate connection in such totality. A unity
thus controlled, albeit still only positively asserted in quantitative substance,
is no longer referable to essentially exterior distinctions of mere size
numerically ascertainable, but already introduces to our notice a qualitative
relation of consistency between these contrasted determinations. In other
words we have here neither the abstract repetition of one and the same
determinant[248], nor a uniform interchange of similarity and

dissimilarity[249], but the contemporaneous association of aspects
essentially distinct from one another. We find, in fact, our sense of sight
gratified by the association of these distinguishing features in their
completeness. And it is the principle of reason which affords us such
satisfaction, gratifying our sense only through the totality, or rather through
the very totality of differences the nature of the fact requires. Such a
connection, however, still remains an unexplained nexus, which sense-
perception arrives at partly on account of its persistent repetition, and in
part through an intuition of deeper source.
A few examples will make clear the process of definition from uniformity
to conformity with law. Parallel lines of equal length are abstractly uniform.
A further step is taken when we compare geometrical figures of the same
form, triangles, for example, but assume their size to be unequal. Here the
angles subtended by the corners of each and the relation of line to line is the
same, but we find such similarity in different quanta. Take again the circle,
it does not possess the uniformity of the straight line, but at the same time
the determination of abstract equality strictly applies to it, for all its radii
are of equal length. The circle is consequently still but a curved line that
awakes no particular interest[250].
On the other hand, there is still less uniformity in the ellipse and the
parabola, and they are only understood through the law of their form. In
other words the radii vectores of the ellipse are both unequal and in
conformity with rule, and the same qualification applies to the greater and
lesser axis of their lines of differentiation[251]; moreover, their foci are not
central as is the case with the circle. We find in these examples, therefore, a
qualitative relation of difference assert itself in the law applicable to such
lines and constructive of their interconnection. If, however, we divide the
ellipse by means of its greater and lesser axes we obtain four equal sections;
regarded as a whole, therefore, we still find the principle of uniformity
paramount in this figure. Of a higher degree of freedom in its conformity to
law is the oval. We know there is such a law, though mathematicians have
been unable to express its formula. This figure is not an ellipse, but the
higher curve differs from that below it. Still we find that even in this
example of freer eccentricity in Nature, if we divide it through its greater
axis, we have still two equal halves. The final expression of mere
uniformity in conformity to law is shown in lines, which, as in the example

of the oval, when divided through the smaller[252] axis, give us unequal
sections, neither section being a mere repetition of the other. The so-called
undulatory line is an example of this, in the sense Hogarth describes it as
the line of beauty. Thus the inclination of the arms as they fall on either side
of the human body is opposed. Here we have conformity to rule without
uniformity pure and simple. Such a kind of conformity especially
characterises with its variety the conformation of the nobler living
organisms.
Conformity to law is, then, an attribute of substantiality, binding together
both its differences and its unity; but it remains still abstract on the side of
its controlling form, unable to supply individuality with the freedom of
motion, or rather by virtue of that form is entirely without the higher
freedom of subjectivity, and quite incapable of revealing the vitality and
ideality proper to it.
(c) Harmony
On a higher plane in the sphere of abstract beauty must be placed harmony.
In harmony we find qualitative distinctions are held together, and further
held together in a totality of differentiation, such as is based on the essential
nature of the fact itself. This consistency of support is derived from
conformity to law, in so far as that form unfolds what is essentially
uniformity, and thereby passes beyond the mere characteristics of equality
and repetition. But in doing this the distinctions of quality assert themselves
not only in their difference of opposition and contradiction, but in aspects of
a unity that rivets them together, a unity in which all distinguishing features,
it is true, are maintained in their proper place, but still only as belonging to
one single whole. This unity of accordance is what constitutes harmony. We
may either regard it as a totality of aspects essentially distinct, or as the
resolution of the element of mere contradiction asserted by them, revealing
their more vital interconnection and ideal solidarity. In this sense we refer to
the harmony of form, or colour, or musical tone. As an example, we have
blue, yellow, green, and red as the fundamentally necessary differentiation
of colour[253].
In these irresolvable data of the spectrum we have not merely the inequality
we found in symmetry, but contradictory opposites, such as yellow and
blue, their neutralization and withal concrete identity. The beauty of their

harmony is revealed in the avoidance of their crude opposition, which is
softened thereby in such a way as to put before us the concordance hidden
beneath their difference. They do, in fact, emanate from one source, namely
colour, which is not an abstract conception[254], but an essential totality. So
far, indeed, can the compulsive force of such totality carry us, that we can,
as Goethe has pointed out, when we have but one colour presented to us,
still subjectively recognize another at the same time. In the same way the
tonic, mediant, and dominant are essential distinctions among musical
tones, which the unity of harmony associates through their difference in one
whole. We may submit the harmony of form, which is differentiated
through the varied aspects of position, repose, and motion to a similar
analysis. If we suffer any one of the subordinate distinctions to assume an
exclusive predominance the unity which relates them will be destroyed.
Harmony, however, is not to be confused with free ideal subjectivity and
soul-life. In the latter the unity manifested is not merely an interconnection
and concordance, but a positive negation of difference, which, for the first
time, reveals their concrete and ideal unity. A concrete unity such as this is
not the result of harmony. Such concrete unity is, for example, that which
we find in the actually melodious thing[255], which no doubt possesses
harmony as its fundamental form, but at the same time possesses the higher
characteristic of free subjectivity, and by means of song gives expression to
that. Harmony alone has nothing to do with the appearance of subjective
life, as such, nor of that of mind, although it is the highest manifestation of
abstract form, and stands in close affinity to free subjectivity. Such, then, is
our determination of abstract unity as we find it brought before us in the
specific modes of abstract form.
2. BEAUTY AS ABSTRACT UNITY OF THE MATERIAL MEDIUM

The side of abstract unity which we have now to consider is not that
directly related to form, but to the sensuous material simply in which it is
asserted. The unity is manifested on this side as the entirely undifferentiated
concordance of the particular sensuous material. It is the one form of unity,
which the material of sense, in its purely objective aspect, is capable of
receiving. On this plane and under the above noted relation[256] the abstract
purity of the materia in its form, colour, or tone constitutes what is most
essential to it. Entirely straight drawn lines, which run without a shadow of
difference in their straightness or strength, bare superficies and similar

examples please us by virtue of their persistent regularity and their uniform
homogeneousness. The purity of the heavens, the translucence of the
atmosphere, a mirror-like lake the smoothness of the ocean's face, all give
pleasure by virtue of this unity. We find the same truth brought home to us
by purity of tone. The voice when purely produced, though taken quite by
itself, possesses an attraction for us inexpressibly delightful; vocal notes
which are not thus pure on the contrary, by permitting us to hear the organ
of production along with them, disturb or weaken the pure resonance and
definition of their music. In much the same way human speech possesses
pure tones in its vowels, a, e, i, o, u, and its compound vowels, ae, ü, and ö.
Popular dialects are particularly characterized by impurity of vocalization
and mediate tones such as oa. Purity of tones consists further in this that the
vowels are associated with consonants, whose sound does not tend to blurr
the sonority of the vowel tones, as is too frequently the case with our
northern languages, when contrasted with the way in which their purity is
preserved by the Italian, a characteristic which makes that language so
adaptable to singing. We experience an enjoyment of similar nature through
the sight of colour in its simplest purity of tint, an absolutely pure red or
blue for example, not by any means a common occurrence, such pristine
colours being often weakened through the addition to them of yellow or
tints of each other[257]. Violet can no doubt appear to us as a pure colour,
but only in an external object, not, that is to say, as a compounded
colour[258], for it is not itself an elementary colour belonging to colour's
essential differentiation. It is these elementary or cardinal colours, easily
recognized by sense in their purity, which, on account of their crude
opposition, are most difficult to unite together in harmony. Colours, on the
contrary, which are blurred in their transparency by many other tints,
although not so antagonistic to general harmony, fail to give us such direct
enjoyment from the very fact that the energy of opposition in them is
weakened. Green, for instance, is a compound of blue and yellow, but it is
the neutralization of these cardinal colours, and for that reason less
attractive to us in its own purity than blue and yellow in their secure[259]
opposition. Such are the points of most importance we have to remark upon
in dealing with the abstract unity of form no less than the simplicity and
purity of the sensuous material. In whichever aspect we regard our subject-
matter we have to review that which is by virtue of its abstract character
destitute of life, and a unity with no true actuality. Ideal subjectivity is

inseparable from this, and such is entirely absent from the beauty of Nature
even at the highest potency of its manifestation. This essential defect points
us imperatively forward to the Ideal, which Nature is unable to reveal to us,
and in contrast with which the beauty of Nature appears as a subordinate
mode.

C. DEFECTIVE ASPECTS OF THE BEAUTY OF NATURE

The true object of our inquiry is the beauty of art viewed as the only reality
adequate to the Idea of beauty. We have hitherto treated the beauty of
Nature as the first mode of the existence of the beautiful. We have now to
inquire more closely into that which distinguishes natural beauty from that
of art.
As an abstract proposition we may affirm that the Ideal is beauty in its
rounded completeness. Nature, on the contrary, brings before us beauty in
its incompleteness. Such abstract predicates do not, however, help us much,
for our real problem is rather to explain exactly what it is which makes the
difference between the completeness of the one from the incompleteness of
the other. Our inquiry therefore hinges on the question how it comes about
that Nature is necessarily incomplete as a mode of beauty and how this
incompleteness is asserted. When we have answered that we shall be in a
better position to deduce both the necessity and essential significance of the
Ideal.
We have already in following the process of Nature up to its culminating
manifestation in animal life drawn attention to the modes of beauty revealed
in that process. It is now of the first importance that we fix our attention
more definitely on the culminating phase of that evolution where we find
subjectivity and individuality presented to us in the living organism.
We have already referred to the beautiful as the Idea in a manner identical
to that we employ when we speak of the good and true as the Idea, in the
sense, that is to say, where we characterize the Idea as the wholly
substantial and universal, the absolute substance—with no sensuous
material therewith—of reality, in short, the consistency of the world.
Determined more strictly, however, as already pointed out, the Idea is not
merely substantiality and universality, but the unity of the notion and its
reality, just that, the notion revealed to us as notion in its coincident

objectivity. It was Plato who, as we have remarked in our introduction,
posited the Idea as that which was alone true and universal, and, indeed, as
the one concrete Universal. The Platonic Idea is, however, not itself as yet
the concrete real, for apprehended under the notion and its universality it is
already coincident with the real. Apprehended, however, only in its
universality[260], it is not realized, realized, that is to say, as Truth in its self-
determinate realization. It is still only the potency of such self-realization.
But just as the notion is not the notion of real existence without its full
objectivity, in the same way the Idea without its realization in the objective
world is not the Idea in its Truth as existent reality. The Idea must proceed
to such realization, which is only present itself for the first time in a really
existent subjectivity adequate to the notion, and its ideal unity and self-
determination. In the generic species we find its reality first manifested as
free and concrete individuality. Life only exists as a living thing; goodness
is only realized in particular men; and all truth is simply the consciousness
of knowledge—Spirit which has come to its own vital inheritance. Only the
concrete singularity is both true and really existent, mere abstract
universality and particularity is not so. This self-subsistent actuality, this
subjectivity is the point on which everything turns, and which we must fully
grasp in its significance. Subjectivity may be defined as ideal determination
by virtue of a principle of ideal unity which asserts itself through negation
of the differences presented to it as consistent parts of one objective
reality[261]. The unity of the Idea and its realization is the negative unity of
the Idea as such and its reality; it is at once and at the same time the
subsumption and deposition in a unified content of the difference asserted
on either side. Only in this active process is the unity of the Idea
affirmatively determined in its full activity, a unity and subjectivity whose
process of self-determination is infinite. We have consequently to
apprehend the Idea of the beautiful in its realized mode of existence as
essentially concrete subjectivity and, moreover, as individual substantiality,
by virtue of which it is the Idea really existent, possessing the form of its
reality in concrete and individual singularity.
But here we must distinguish between two distinct modes of singularity or
individuality, namely, that which is immediately presented us by Nature and
that which is predicated of mind (spirit). In both forms it is given
determinate existence, and consequently is in both substantive content, the

Idea in short, and in the particular sphere of our inquiry for both forms the
Idea as beauty. Viewed in this way we may affirm if we please that the
beautiful of Nature has a similar content with that of the Ideal. In
contradistinction, however, to such a point of view we must not fail to
observe that the difference of form, in which the Idea herein attains reality,
that is to say the difference between the individuality which prevails in the
spheres of Nature and Spirit, the difference asserted in its respective
appearance, this it is which constitutes an essential distinction. As we shall
see, the real point of our inquiry is this, namely, which of these two forms is
really the one most adequate to the Idea, for it is obvious that it is only in
the entirely adequate form that the totality of the Idea is in its full content
explicitly realized. This is the more immediate point we have now to
examine in so far as the difference between natural beauty and the Ideal
falls into line with the formal differentiation of singularity.
Immediate singularity is no doubt primarily found in the domain of Spirit
no less than in Nature as such. For, in the first place, Spirit is possessed of
an external existence in bodily form; secondly, even in spiritual relations,
Spirit, in the first instance, only exists in its union with immediate reality.
Subdividing our inquiry in conformity with such facts, we will consider the
nature of immediate singularity from three different points of view.
1. (a) We have already seen that the animal organism preserves its
determinate existence through a persistent evolutionary process of its own
in opposition to an environing inorganic Nature, which it assimilates by
means of consumption and digestion, compelling thereby what is external to
submit to that process, and asserting its own independent existence by so
doing. We found at the same time that this living process is a system of
activities, which is realized in a system of organs, whose functional action
consists in those very activities. The one and single aim of this
homogeneous system is the self-preservation of the living totality thereof
through such a process. The animal life consists, therefore, in a life of
sensuous impulses, whose general course and satisfaction is realized in the
above-mentioned organic system. The living organism is for this reason
articulated in its parts under a teleological principle, and the principle or
end subserved is self-preservation. Life is immanent in every member; they
are united to life, and life is one with them. And the net result of this
animate process is that the animal is maintained as a thing conscious of

itself as an individual subject of feeling, life and the self-enjoyment its
singularity procures for it. We have only to compare animal life with plant
life to see the difference implied in the absence of such a sense-
consciousness. The plant simply brings to the birth new specimens of its
species, without even being able to concentrate any single one on that point
of negation, which constitutes self-singularity. We must, however, add that
even in the animal organism and its life we never have actually before our
eyes the true manifestation of this centre of unity, but rather simply the
manifold of its members. Life is still too deficient on the side of freedom
and in opposition to the mere caprice of sense-life to manifest such a
subjective individuality as is capable of breaking through the external
envisagement of its organic parts. The vital centre of such activities in the
animal organism still remains veiled from vision, and all that we see are the
mere outlines of the figure, and this for the most part concealed from our
view by feathers, scales, hair, fur, or spines. There can be no question that
coverings of this nature, though characteristic of the animal world, are
coverings which partake of the form of the vegetable world. And it is
precisely at this point that the beauty of animal life declares its essential
insufficiency. That which the organism makes most visible to us is not the
soul-principle. That which is directed outward and throughout appears is
not the life within, but rather formations accepted from a lower plane of
existence than the essential embodiment of life. The animal is only fully
alive beneath that outer crust, and consequently for this very reason that its
inwardness[262] is not wholly made real in a form adequate to reveal it, we
are unable to see the principle of Life everywhere shine freely through it; it
remains only an inwardness, and the shell is external only unpermeated by
the vital principle.
(b) The human body, in virtue of its more exalted station, presents us with a
striking contrast. In this we are everywhere reminded that man is in
possession of a unity of feeling, a soul. The human skin is not covered over
plant-like with an apparently lifeless sheath; the pulsation of the blood is
visible throughout the entire surface; the beating heart of life is everywhere
at the same time apparent; and we have in this outward manifestation, as it
were, the real fount Of life made visible, the turgor vitae as it streams from
its centre. In the same way the human skin, sensitive throughout in its
minutest parts, reveals to us the morbidezza of its colouring, those tints of
flesh-colour and vein-colour which are the despair of an artist. On the other

hand, however much the human body presents, as the apparent mirror of
Life, a contrast with that of animals, it undoubtedly expresses also the
natural process of self-preservation in the subdivision of the skin, and the
indentations, wrinkles, pores, small hairs and veins which we find attach
thereto. In fact the skin itself, though permitting the inner life to shine
through it, is none the less an external protection of that life, a means
obviously intended for such self-preservation. The supreme significance,
however, of the contrast here presented is traceable in this extraordinary
sensitiveness of the human cuticle, which, although not absolutely the seat
of feeling itself, alone renders such feeling possible. But at the same time
even in this direction we are made conscious of the defect, that this
sensitiveness does not penetrate as a vital impulse of concentrated emphasis
equally through all the members. We find in the human body itself certain
organs whose form is entirely appropriate to mere animal functions, while
others give a more adequate expression to the entire soul-life, its feelings
and passions. Regarded in this way it is obvious that even in the human
body the inner life of soul has not found its complete reflection in all parts
of its external realization.
(c) The same defect is apparent on the higher plane of the spiritual world
and its organizations, if we consider such under the aspect of life as
immediately presented. The more extensive and the richer their
configurations are, the more we shall find that the fundamental object of the
inner life of such totalities requires other means co-operative with such
externality for its adequate expression. Such organizations no doubt appear
in immediate reality as organic wholes in which definite purpose is realized,
and the realization of such purpose is manifested by the mediation of
voluntary effort. Every centre of such a spiritual organism, such as the State
or the family, that is to say each individual organic totality, is in possession
of a will capable of such exercise, and appears in unity with the other
members of the same organism; but the one inner soul of this nexus, the
freedom and reason of the aim of all is not visible in external reality as such
in the absolute freedom of its subjective and universal principle of life, nor
is it thus manifested in every part.
The same thing may be observed in particular actions and events, where we
find a similar organic totality present. The inner motive from which they
proceed is not wholly made visible upon the external surface of their actual

presence. What we do find is a total presentment of fact, whose most
fundamental ground of unity and vitality still remains hidden from sight.
Finally, when we consider from the same point of view any single
individual we are confronted with the same truth. Every human person is a
self-rounded totality, held together by the central unity of life. In the
immediate envisagement of reality, that is in his life, action, avoidance of
action, desires and impulses, he only appears in a fragmentary way; none
the less it is only from a general survey of all his actions or sufferings that
we are able to form an estimate of character. The centre of unity which thus
concentrates to a point the entire subject-matter of our extended survey is
not as such either visible or directly apprehended.
2. The second point of importance to which we would draw attention is this.
With the immediate appearance of individuality the Idea, as we have
already indicated, receives determinate existence. Through this very
immediacy however it becomes interwoven with the complexity of the
external world, is conditioned by the limitations of external circumstance
and the relative character of means and ends which are found there, in one
word is carried into the finitude of external Nature. For though immediate
singularity is in the first place a fully rounded off unity, it is for the same
reason only self-exclusive as a centre of negation opposed to others, and is,
by virtue of its immediate singularity, influenced by, no less than related to,
a totality of real existence other than its own, upon which it is dependent in
a thousand different ways. The Idea, in short, is in this very immediacy
realized in every direction as individual distinction. It is consequently now
merely a reflex of the inherent energy of the notion which binds all
individual existence, that of Nature no less than mind in reciprocal
correlation[263]. Such a relation to the existences themselves is a purely
external one, and appears also to them as a single external necessity uniting
each part of the manifold in one shifting complexus of interrelated
reciprocity. The immediacy of determinate existence is therefore, as thus
regarded, a system of necessary relations between apparently self-subsistent
individual things and forces, in which each singular entity is committed as a
means to the service of ends foreign to it, or itself is compelled to utilize
that which is external to itself as such a means. And inasmuch as the Idea is
under this aspect wholly realized on the ground of externality, there appears
at the same time the unrestrained play of every caprice and accident, no less

than the uncontrolled discharge of the burden of indigence. Singularity as
immediate appearance lives and moves in the realm of unfreedom.
(a) The individual animal is, for example, fettered wholly within the bounds
of its natural environment of air, water and land. Its entire way of living, the
mode of its self-nourishment, everything that concerns it, is thereby
determined. It is this which differentiates with such variety the species of
animal life. We find, moreover, intermediate strains, such as swimming
birds and suckling animals, which live in the water, amphibious species and
others which still further mediate between the more obviously generic.
These are, however, mere confusions of race, and indicate no higher
mediation of considerable range. Throughout we find the animal subject in
its self-preservation to the absolute necessities of external nature, cold,
drought, or insufficient supply of the means of nourishment. Under this
despotic dominion it is liable through the parsimony of circumstance to lose
the fulness of external form, the blossom of its beauty, in short to become as
it were the reflex of starving Nature herself. External conditions fix
imperatively the measure of beauty it either preserves or forfeits.
(b) The human organism, in its particular bodily existence is subject, if not
in the same measure, to external forces of Nature, and is compelled to face
the same contingencies, deficient livelihoods, and every kind of harassing
disease and misery.
(c) If we carry investigation further to that still higher plane of immediate
reality where spiritual interests are predominant we shall find this
dependence on external condition for the first time emphasized in its full
relativity. Here we are face to face with the prose of human existence in its
entire length and breadth. The contrast already noticed between ends
subservient to purely physical wants, and those profounder aims of spiritual
life, and the conflict which tends to inflict a loss on one side or the other,
already opens our view of it. Add to this every individual man, in order to
preserve himself as such, is compelled to make himself in many ways
subservient to others, and the limited aims of others, and on the other hand,
in order to satisfy his own narrow interests, to accept the service of others
as a mere means for their fulfilment. The individual, then, as he appears in
the prose-life of everyday existence, is not therefore active out of his own
particular totality, nor is he intelligible so much in virtue of himself as in
virtue of that which he is not[264]. For individual man stands in a relation of

dependence to the influences, laws, organizations and other social relations
of civic life which he finds already existing around him, and to which he
must submit whether he forfeit his own independent soul-life thereby or
not. And more than this, each separate individual is not presented to others
as such totality, but is only reflected in whatever isolated interest they may
happen at the time to possess in his actions, desires, and opinions. And what
interests mankind mainly is some relation to their own particular thoughts
and aims. Even historically important actions and events, with which the
community is expressly associated, appear in this field of relative
appearances merely as a manifold of isolated efforts. It is a varied collection
to which each contributes as he may, with aims by no means identical, some
of which meet with success while others miscarry, and indeed, be they ever
so fortunate, are significant in a very subordinate degree if we consider
them as contributions to the wellbeing of all. What the majority may carry
through, in contrast with the entire aggregate of events and the end
applicable to all[265], to which it furnishes its quota, is after all a mere patch;
nay, even men of eminent standing, who feel and are fully conscious of the
universal passage of events[266], as their own world, are for all that clearly
immeshed in the same net of particular circumstances, conditions, and a
thousand other hindrances involved in their relative position. On all these
grounds it is plain that in this sphere of exterior life the individual world is
unable to offer us the vision of that independent and complete freedom of
the living principle, such as is essential to the true notion of beauty. It is, of
course, true that the immediate appearance of human reality and its events
and organizations is not without system, and as such is a totality of
activities; but this whole is rather in its appearance a mere mass of isolated
fragments. Moreover the practical concerns of such activities are divided
and subdivided into countless parts, and in such a way that each single part
is in touch with the merest fraction of all; and, in short, however much
individuals may remain steadfast to their own purposes, and only bring
forth to the light that which their own interest has employed as a means, the
self-subsistence and freedom of their will remains more or less of a formal
character, determined by external circumstance or accident, and constantly
thwarted by natural causes[267].
This is the prose of the world, as presented to our own consciousness no
less than to that of others; a world of finitude and change, a world

immeshed in relation and submerged beneath the pressure of necessity, a
world from which no individual can extricate himself. The central paradox
of life confronts every unit of the living whole. On the one hand there is the
impulse of individuality to perfect its isolated unity in self-exclusion; on the
other there is the necessary condition of dependence on others from which
none may claim immunity. However prolonged the struggle to overcome
this contradiction may be the effort of that interminable battle only
terminates with life itself.
3. Thirdly, the immediate singularity of the worlds of Nature and Mind is
not merely conditioned by dependence on others, but is deficient in any
complete self-subsistency owing to its confined nature, or with more
accuracy, because it is particularized in its own specific mode of
manifestation.
(a) We will explain our meaning further. Every single specimen of life in
the animal world is from the first fettered by a definite, that is to say, a
restricted and constant species, beyond the limits of which it cannot pass.
There is in the spiritual world, no doubt, a general picture of life and its
organization, which floats vaguely before our vision; but in the real world,
which is one with Nature, this universal organism breaks up into a
multitude of particulars, each of which possesses the determinate type of
form and grade of cultivation in which it is related to a definite portion of
the social organism. In addition to this and within these insuperable limits,
we find the pressure of that element of contingency, as regards general
condition or external environment, predominantly asserted both uniquely
and in haphazard fashion throughout every one of those individual units.
Such a state of things disturbs our vision of the self-subsistency and
freedom, which the idea of true beauty imperatively requires.
(b) As already observed, it is unquestionably true that Spirit discovers in its
own bodily organism the notion of life completely realized. This is so much
the case that, in contrast with it, the forms of the animal world appear not
only as incomplete, but in inferior species as even pitiable objects. The
human organism is also, however, broken up, if to a less, degree, in racial
subdivisions and the ascending grades of beauty which distinguish such
races. Moreover, in addition to this obviously very general line of
demarcation, we have presented to us all the accidental variety of qualities,
peculiar to distinct families and their interfusion with one another, such as

modes of life, facial expression, and general demeanour. We must further
associate with such characteristic traits, which all of them emphasize a
condition of essentially unfree particularity, those peculiarities which are
inseparable from activity employed in the endless round of commercial life
or professional career; qualities which find their ultimate expression in the
specific habits or idiosyncracies of any exceptionally marked character or
temperament, or, as the reverse side of the picture, in the various confusions
of arrested development. Poverty, care, anger, coldness, and indifference,
the rage of passion, the obstinate retention of narrow purposes, indications
of change and division in the spiritual world, entire dependence on that of
Nature—in one word all that is implied in the transitory condition of human
life—leaves its indelible, if quite incalculable, expression on the varied
surface of the faces of mankind. Who has not crossed weather-beaten types
of such, on which the storm of all the passions has imprinted its disturbing
wave; or others, where the coldness and superficiality of the soul within is
all the impression we receive; or, lastly, as the final verdict of self-absorbed
particularity[268], cases in which the general type seems almost totally to
have disappeared. There is no end to the caprice of the human features.
Speaking generally, we would associate with this ground the fact that the
beauty of children most arrests us. In their faces we find all pronounced
idiosyncracies slumber as it were beneath a quiet veil; no dominating
passion as yet ravages their soul; not one of the thousand interests of the
grown man has engraved for ever the expression of its necessity on these
mobile features. This envisaged innocence of the child, however, though we
may discover in its flexible animation the possibility of Life's completed
fulness, obviously fails to reveal those profounder indications of a spirit
which has been carried forward to explore the range of its own recesses and
to make its life one with rational purpose.
We may regard, then, immediate existence, both in the purely physical and
spiritual sense of the term, as a finitude, or more justly as a finitude which
does not satisfy its notion and for this very reason declares its finitude. For
the notion, and more concretely still, the Idea, is essentially independent
and free. Purely animal life, although as Life it is the Idea, is no
manifestation of infinity as such or freedom. This is alone possible under
conditions, where we find the notion penetrate so completely the reality
which is adequate to it, that it finds itself entirely at home therein, with no
extraneous matter, to disturb its possession. Then alone do we find it a

really free and concrete individuality. The natural life, on the contrary, is
unable to overcome the element of feeling to which it is attached, and
which renders it incapable of penetrating the entire reality which enrings it.
It finds itself, moreover, immediately conditioned in itself, restricted in its
range and dependent, a result which is due to the fact that its freedom is not
truly self-determinate, but conditioned by the external: object. And the same
thing is true of the immediate and finite reality of the spirit world in its
knowledge, volitional action, and fateful history. For although in this latter
case we find centres of unity expressed which have a real significance,
neither these any more than the particularities they unite have truth as they
stand by themselves; but only that truth which, in their reciprocal relation to
each other, they manifest as constituent parts of a whole. And this whole,
albeit in a sense adequate to its notion, does not correspond to it in such a
way as to manifest itself in its full totality[269], which consequently still
remains aloof from such envisagement, or rather, is only apprehended in the
ideal world of thought. In other words, the notion finds no fully adequate
presentation in external reality, such as is powerful enough to marshal
homogeneously all the numberless fragments of particularity, and to
concentrate them into one expression and one single form.
(c) This, then, is the fundamental reason which prevents Spirit itself, on the
finite planes of determinate existence, and under the restricting conditions
of its externality and necessity, from rediscovering the immediate vision
and enjoyment of its freedom. It is consequently driven by its absence to
seek that vision in a higher sphere. That sphere is art, and its realization is
the Ideal.
We have thus seen that it is the defects of immediate reality which drive us
forward inevitably to the idea of the beauty of art. We are further under an
obligation to prove that its fundamental object[270] is to manifest here on
this very plane of rational reality and in its freedom the envisagement of
life, and, most important of all, the life of Spirit. Here, then, we have at last
the external revealed to us in a form adequate to the notion. Here, for the
first time, truth is lifted up from its environment of temporal conditions,
from its running to and fro among the whirl of finite particularity, and
attains repose; nay, more than this, discovers an external form, from which
the hunger of Nature and the prose of life no longer stare at us. Here at last
we have a form worthy of substantial truth, which is wholly self-contained

and self-dependent, determining with freedom its own content, and not
driven from such self-assertion by the weight of that of others.

[201] Als Beseelung sich kund gäbe. The reference is to the second class which
follows rather than truly animates life. The sun is such an animating principle.
How far modern physics with its investigations of the laws of motion that obtain
among the chemical atoms of any specific form of matter and its denial of all
dead matter would have modified Hegel's view is an interesting question.
[202] Wir wollen betrachten. Hegel seems to be conscious himself that there is
something fanciful in this interpretation of the significance of what is simply an
arbitrary, if systematic, arrangement of bodies according to natural laws.
[203] Ein besonderes Moment. See note [191] on p. 152. I think what Hegel
means here is that every body as a vehicle of light reflects the mode in which the
identity of the notion as system in the different parts asserts itself.
[204] In other words what should be phasal elements (Momente) of a whole
integrated within that unity remain independent units. They are not Momente in
the full sense.
[205] Als bloss real unterschiedener. The meaning is that the distinction is only
in the totality, not as in the former case in a body which though part of a system,
could be viewed as an independent body like the sun.
[206] Gewöhnliches Bewustseyn, i.e., the ordinary view of understanding
(Verstand) and sense-perception.
[207] Blosser Zusammenhang. Fortuitous is rather too strong. He means a bond
of union cemented by one principle without which either side fails to possess its
specific character, e.g., the human body apart from the human soul its animate
individuality, ceases to be human.
[208] Als Begriff seyende Begriff. The reference I take to be to the logical or
dialectical movement of the Idea.
[209] Viele tausend empfindende, or centres of feeling.
[210] Die realen Unterschiede, i. e., the distinctions of the body viewed as part
of the physical process of Nature.
[211] Zu ihrer subjektiven Einheit, that is to say, their unity with the notion of
Life as objectively realized in Nature, subjective only in the sense that it is ideal,
not apprehended by sense-perception as such.
[212] Nähere. I think Hegel uses nähe in the idiomatic sense in which he uses it
in the phrase (p. 150) when he speaks of Nature as das nächst Daseyn der Idee,
i.e., most elementary, more near to it when the notion first presses out of
abstraction into totality.
[213] Lötze apparently disputes this distinction, but it appears to me very clear.
[214] Seyn. The logical terms are here employed in their technical Hegelian
sense. Seyn is "being" as part of a process, it is rather a tendency to become than
a particular or determinate being (daseyn.)

[215] Das Negiren, the negation of them as entirely independent structures.
[216] Des Idealisirens, e.g., the principle of ideality which is in one aspect of it
negation.
[217] Affirmatives Fürsichseyn, e.g., the explicit ideal totality of Life apart from
the process.
[218] Bilderin.
[219] Das Innere, otherwise called subjective (see note above) and meaning what
is not externally visible as materia, though it may be visible indirectly as
explained further on.
[220] The rather difficult German here is: Da nun aber in der Objektivität der
Begriff als Begriff die sich auf sich beziehende in ihrer Realität für sich seyende
Subjektivität ist. The comma after Begriff is clearly a misprint.
[221] The words here are das subjektive Fürsichseyn, i.e., the self-conclusion of
an explicit whole in virtue of a principle of ideal unity (i.e., life) asserted,
throughout.
[222] Ein Beharrendes,> one that persists in an inert form.
[223] Hegel uses the word scheinen both for the ideal manifestation of the Idea
in the object and the appearance of material reality reduced by it to mere "show"
(herabgesetzt zum scheinen), i.e., deprived of its independent reality. This
introduces a slight confusion I have endeavoured to avoid by using different
terms.
[224] Unseres Verstandes. We supply the notion of intelligent purpose.
[225] That is, the assumed subordination of all organs to one definite end.
[226] Sichbewegens. The emphasis is of course on the self. But even then the
statement is rather an excess. For it seems difficult to attribute all the beauty
visible in the spontaneous movements of so many living creatures, notably that
of birds, to their purely formal character. At least there is something given by
such motion analogous to the impression we receive from music and the dance;
they are gesetzmässig in short.
[227] Zufällig—capricious as opposed to a uniform principle. There is, however,
one apparent bond of external similarity, between the majority of such members,
namely, their covering of skin; this not merely relates the cheek to the neck, for
example, but to some extent destroys the distinction.
[228] Physical parts, that is to say.
[229] That is to say, it is based on a purely limited experience which does not
necessarily concern the true nature of the objects perceived.
[230] Stangen. The word may express the branches on which the flowers are
carried or the stamens they carry at their apex.
[231] Geistreich, "intelligent," i.e., an ingenious way of regarding such facts.
[232] Dies wunderbare Wort.
[233] The use of the word Sinn to which Hegel here alludes is not quite identical
with our word Sense. In the English use of the term there is more stress on the

materia presented to sense-perception and perhaps less reference to intellect
when the word is employed in such an expression as "That man has sense."
However, Milton has "What surmounts the reach of human sense," and no doubt
both are employed very similarly in many writers.
[234] Bleibt bei der Ahnung.
[235] Naiver Weise, a common epithet of Hegel to denote freedom from all
philosophical prepossessions, a frank and simple attitude of reception.
[236] Betrachtung appears to imply in its contrast with Anschauung the presence
of that intuitive sense or imaginative co-ordination above discussed.
[237] Gestaltende Macht, i.e., plastic force.

[238] This account of the criterium to be adopted in determining beauty in the
animal creation is open to some criticism. Mobility is no doubt one element of
beauty, but it is only one. Professor Bosanquet points out in his criticism of the
passage ("Hist, of Aesthetik," p. 338) that it amounts to the assertion that
ugliness is purely relative. The defect is not only due, it seems to me, to Hegel's
insufficient regard for Nature as a modern painter would so regard it, but it may
be traced also to his manifest preference for motion in all the manifestations of
Nature.
[239] Schnabelthier, otherwise called the duck-billed platyptis, a mammal found
in Australia, much the size of an otter, with the horny beak of a duck and paws
formed for swimming.
[240] Getrübt, we have the word trüben above, translated there "troubled," life
merely seen through the thick veil of instinctive sense.
[241] That is, the unity manifested is as abstract from all concrete totality as the
form itself.
[242] This shows clearly that symmetry is only in an analogous way applicable
to musical tones.
[243] In other words, uniformity is outside the purely qualitative relation,
whereas symmetry is not so.
[244] Beseelte Lebendigkeit, lit., the insouled life-principle.
[245] Lit., "Is continually thrust out into the external." Its activity as life is
directed outward.
[246] Was schon im Sichverzehren begriffen ist. I think the distinction implied is
that in smell we are in actual contact with a part of the object. The same thing
would, however, be true of sight according to former theory exploded by
Newton's hypothesis.
[247] Gesetzmässigkeit. I cannot think of an English word that quite reproduces
it. I am not sure that either conformity to rule or law singly quite expresses it. It
implies both.
[248] As in uniformity.
[249] As in symmetry.
[250] That is to say, apart from symbolical meaning, it possesses no hidden law
to be discovered in the relation of part to part.
[251] The words are die grosse und kleine Axe von wesentlichem Unterschiede.
These refer primarily, it appears, to the axes of an ellipse, but the expression may
possibly include the axes of a parabola parallel to the sides of a cone. However I
admit frankly I find the words von wesentlichem Unterschiede difficult to
interpret closely.
[252] In the text grossen, obviously a misprint.
[253] The incorrectness of this statement according to more recent analysis does
not, of course, affect the argument.
[254] Nicht einseitig. I think the meaning here is that colour is not an abstract
idea for independent qualities, but is the generic notion of a really existing

totality.
[255] Alles melodische, primarily, organic, of course.
[256] Namely, that of abstract unity.
[257] Hegel expresses this rather differently by saying that they tend to pass over
into pink (röthliche) or orange (gelbliche) and green. I have put the same
statement rather more directly.
[258] I think this is the meaning of the words aber nur äusserlich, d.h., nicht
beschmützt. Violet, however, is now regarded as a cardinal colour. It may also be
doubted whether the difficulty of harmonizing pure colour is as Hegel states it.
[259] This of course is a very questionable position from the point of view of
aesthetic taste no less than the conformity of our sight to natural objects. The
obvious retort is, it all depends what the nature of the green is. Why is there such
a preponderance of green in Nature as we find it?
[260] That is to say, under the Platonic view of universal.
[261] So I have interpreted the words, Die Subjectivität nun aber liegt in der
Negativen Einheit als Ideellsetzen der Unterschiede und ihres realen Bestehens.
[262] Das Insichseyn, i.e., the incipient singularity of a feeling subject.
[263] I have translated the words bleibt nur die innre Macht "merely a reflex of
the inherent energy," etc. I do not pretend thereby to clear up all the difficulties
of this paragraph. I would rather remind the general reader that in this entire
discussion of the principle of individuality and its modes of real existence we are
face to face with one the fundamental difficulties of the Hegelian philosophy, the
passage of the Idea to Nature. Readers who wish to see difficulties more fully
developed on this aspect of Hegel's thought should read Professor Seth's
interesting and on the whole moderately worded criticism contained in his little
book "Hegelianism and Personality" (Blackwood and Sons; see particularly
Lecture IV, Thought and Reality).
[264] Aus Anderem, e.g., the not-self of experience.
[265] Des totalen Zwecks.
[266] I think the expression das Ganze der Sache means this rather than the
entire "organic whole of living reality."
[267] It is well for the general reader to remember that we have here no full
account of what constitutes the content of a free will. The emphasis throughout is
on human activity as exercised in a world conditioned in its external aspect by
necessary laws of Nature.
[268] The reference here must I think he mainly, perhaps wholly, to the distorted
face of the criminal, outcast, or insane classes. But it is just possible that a
certain type of aggressive genius may also be denoted.
[269] The totality of the notion.
[270] Beruf, i.e., that which it professes to do.

CHAPTER III

THE BEAUTY OF ART, OR THE IDEAL

In our consideration of the beauty of art we will confine our attention to
three fundamental points of view:
First, the Ideal in its essential import.
Secondly, the determination of the Ideal in a particular work of art.
Thirdly, the creative subjectivity of the artist.

A. THE IDEAL SIMPLY, OR AS SUCH

1. The most general conclusion which may be gathered from the
examination we have already made in a merely formal way of the Ideal of
art may be thus summarized. Truth, in its unravelment as external reality, is
only fully in possession of a true and determinate existence, however much
it may combine and retain in embracing unity a manifold content, in so far
as every portion of the content thus unfolded permits this unity, which may
be called either the animating soul or the unified totality, freely to appear.
To take the human form once more under review as the most direct
illustration of this, we have already remarked that it is a totality of organic
members each of which is penetrated by the notion, differentiated thus in
every particular organ by some particular mode of activity and the specific
motion congenial to it. If we ask ourselves now in which particular organ
the soul appears as such in its entirety we shall at once point to the eye. For
in the eye the soul concentrates itself; it not merely uses the eye as its
instrument, but is itself therein manifest. We have, however, already stated,
when referring to the external covering of the human body, that in contrast
with the bodies of animals, the heart of life pulses through and throughout
it. And in much the same sense it can be asserted of art that it has to convert
every point of the external appearance into the direct testimony of the
human eye, which is the source of soul-life, and reveals Spirit. Take the
famous adjuration of Plato to the stars in the lines:
When thou gazest forth at the stars, my star,
Would that I were the heavens and thence on thee

Could gaze forth out of a thousand eyes.
Conversely we may exclaim that art gives to her forms the dilation of a
thousand-eyed Argus, through which the inward life of Spirit at every point
breaks into view. And not merely is it the bodily form, the expression of
countenance, the attitude and demeanour which thus avails; the same
appearance is everywhere visible in actions and events, speech and voice-
modulation, in short, under every condition of life through which it passes,
and under which it is possible for soul to make itself recognized in its
freedom and ideal infinity.
(a) And, in close connection with this inquiry into the interpenetration
through all parts of the animating soul, we may justly ask ourselves, what
precisely we understand under this conception of a soul which is throughout
visible: or to restrict attention to definite limits we may inquire what are the
specific characteristics of the soul whereof art reveals to us the truest
manifestation. For in ordinary parlance one refers to the animating
principle[271] peculiar to metals, stones, wild animals, to say nothing of that
belonging to every kind of human character and its expressions. To natural
objects, however, such as stones and plants, the expression "soul" in the
complete acceptation of the term above mentioned is not strictly applicable.
Such soul as purely natural objects possess is entirely finite, transitory, and
rather a specific nature than a soul. The determinate individuality of such
existences is consequently completely exposed in their finite existence; and,
inasmuch as all that is present there is a positive limit of restriction, such
appearance as there may be of a further claim to independence and freedom
is only an appearance; ideal characteristics which may indeed be imported
into them from without by means of art, but are not in the nature of the
objects by themselves. In the same way the soul of sense-feeling, through
which Nature manifests first the Life-principle only betrays a subjective
individuality, which still remains shut within itself, unable to assert its
reality in the further sense of a return upon itself in a consciousness which
shall attach to it the form of infinity. Its content is, therefore, of a restricted
nature, and its manifestation in part the unrest, power of motion, sexual
impulse, anxiety or fear of the dependent life; and, in part, it is the mere
expression of an inwardness capable of overcoming its finitude. The
animating life of Spirit (mind) brings us first into contact with the free
infinity capable within its own external and determinate existence of

remaining constant to the inner principle of unity, and, in the act of
expression, still reflected back upon its ideal substance. To Spirit
consequently is it alone permitted to impress the hall-mark of its infinity
and free self-recurrence on its external expression, even though by such
expression it enters the realm of narrow boundaries. At the same time we
may observe that Spirit, too, is only free and infinite in so far as it truly
apprehends its universality, and deliberately posits for itself and accepts
those ends which are adequate to its own notion. Consequently, in so far as
it fails to grasp its own freedom it can only exist in a restricted content, a
character that is stunted, a temperament at once crippled and superficial. In
combination with nullity of this kind the manifestation of Spirit must
perforce remain wholly formal. We shall only find here the abstract crust of
self-conscious Spirit, whereof the content contradicts the infinity of its
freedom. Only by virtue of a genuine and essentially substantive content
through which the restricted and mutable particularity derives its essential
self-subsistency—so that definite structure and intrinsic worth, determined
limit and substantial content, are realized in one totality—is such existence
thereby able, through the very mode of expression which confines it, to
proclaim itself also in its universal substance of self-contained soul-life. It
is, in short, the province of art to comprehend and enunciate determinate
and rational existence in its truth, that is to say, in the form adequate to its
substance, the truly explicit content. And, consequently, the truth of art
cannot consist in a mere conformity such as that to which we restrict the so-
called imitation of Nature; external form must express harmoniously an
internal content which is in itself harmonious throughout, and consequently
can express itself as such.
(b) Art then, by comparing what is otherwise stained and rent through the
contingent elements of external existence with the harmony that is essential
to its notional truth, rejects that in the world of appearance which it is
unable to combine in such a unity, and for the first time through this
purification reveals the Ideal. It is possible to regard such a result as the
flattery of art, as we sometimes hear it said, for example, that portrait-
painters flatter. But even the portrait-painter, a type of art in which the Ideal
is less prominent than in many others, should at least flatter in this sense,
that he is bound to treat with indifference all that is merely the external
detail of form, texture, and colour, the mere adjuncts, that is to say, of
physical life such as hairs, pores, scars, and other external accidents, in his

undivided effort both to apprehend and deliver the subject selected in its
universal character and permanent spiritual individuality. It is one thing to
imitate a physiognomy in the general outlines of purely superficial repose
apparent at any time; it is quite another to detect and delineate the particular
features which reveal the fundamental soul-life or character of the sitter. As
already remarked, the Ideal is only truly found when the external
presentment is in itself a vehicle of the soul. It is one of our latest fashions
to attempt, by means of those so-called "living pictures," an intentional and
gratifying imitation of famous masterpieces. In these we find a fair
reproduction of general accessories, such as grouping and draping; but,
instead of the spiritual expression of the figures, have only too often to put
up with faces absolutely commonplace. Such a defect mars the entire
reproduction. The Madonnas of Raphael, on the contrary, in every detail of
their countenance—whether it be cheeks, eyes, nose, or mouth—exhibit
with harmonious consistency one supreme type of sacred joy, the pious,
modest love of a devoted mother. We may affirm, if we will, that all women
are capable of such emotion; but, at any rate, not every formal shape of
feminine countenance is capable of expressing the depth of the same so
consummately.
(c) This reference, then, of all points of external existence to their spiritual
significance, so that the external appearance unveils in adequate measure
the spirit thereof, is just what constitutes the nature of the Ideal. It is,
however, a "carrying back" into inwardness, in which we do not find the
universal thus carried back to its extremest limit to the form of abstract
thought, that is to say, but is rather suffered to rest halfway at the point in
which we find the purely external and the purely inward meet together
harmoniously. The Ideal is consequently the reality selected out of the mass
of chance particulars, in so far as the inner core in this external totality thus
raised in opposition to universality is itself manifested as living
individuality.[272] For the individual subjectivity, which not only carries in
itself a substantive content, but permits the same to appear in its own
external appearance, stands in this central position, that in it all that is
substantially the content is not suffered in its universal aspect to appear as
an abstraction of itself, but still remains enclosed within the sphere of
individuality, and consequently appears associated with a determinate
existence, which now for its part, freed from mere finitude and transitory
condition, is gathered up in a free and harmonious expression of most

intimate soul-life. Schiller, in his poem "The Ideal and Life," contrasts the
reality and its pains and struggles with "the still shadowland of Beauty."
Such a land of shadow is the Ideal. The spirits which rise up here have lost
in death immediate existence, are released from the hunger of Nature, freed
from the claims which fettered them in subjection to external forces and all
the changes and confusions which are linked together with finite
appearance. But however much the Ideal treads under foot the mere object
of sense and natural form, it draws at the same time the very wealth of it to
itself, for it is art that is able to assign the very limits to all that the external
appearance required for its self-preservation within which the external thing
may appear as the manifestation of spiritual freedom. For this reason it is
the Ideal which alone among things envisaged to sense presents a free and
self-contained content reposing on its own resources, in complete sensuous
enjoyment and satisfaction with itself. The music of this rapture may be
heard through every embodiment of the Ideal. However far the external
form may be carried the soul of the Ideal is never wholly absorbed in it.
And in truth such manifestation is only beautiful in so far as its beauty not
merely permeates the whole, but is a subjective unity, by virtue of which the
subject-matter of the Ideal must appear emergent from all the fracture of its
former individual parts and their respective ends and energies, raised in the
Ideal itself to a higher totality and self-subsistence.
(α) We may in this respect point to the blessed repose[273], this self-
contentment in its own self-secure consummation, as the crown of the Ideal.
The ideal form of art stands like some blissful god before us. For the
blessed gods are ultimately above and beyond the grim earnest of actual
necessity, anger, and interest in finite existence and purely finite ends; and
this positive withdrawal involved in the negation of all isolated particularity
give them the characteristics of cheerfulness and repose. In this sense we
may interpret that phrase of Schiller: "Life is earnest, Art is cheerful."
Pedants, no doubt, have often enough cracked a joke over it, inasmuch as
poetry in general, and Schiller's in particular, is a serious matter; and in
truth no ideal art is without such a quality; but for all that in this very
earnestness the essential character of cheerfulness[274] remains. This force
of individuality, this triumph of self-concentrated freedom, is that which we
recognize in an exceptional degree in ancient works of art and the
blithesome repose of their figures. And this is not merely the case when we

face a satisfaction that involves no struggle, but even in an example where
the subject is rent by some breach in the entire content of its existence. For
when the heroes of tragedy are represented as subject to Fate we find that
the demeanour they present, which may be summed up in the words, "It is
so!" still remains a simple withdrawal into personality[275]. The subject thus
depicted remains throughout true to himself. He surrenders that which is
seized from him, but the aims he pursued are not simply taken away; he
suffers them to lapse and consequently does not lose his initiative. The man
who is the bondman of Destiny may lose his life, but not his freedom. This
repose on the essential birthright of Spirit is that which is able to preserve
and reveal the blithe atmosphere of repose in grief itself.
(β) In romantic art, it is true, the breach or dissonance of the subjective
principle is carried further, inasmuch as in it the exposed contradictions are
emphasized and their division can be preserved. Thus, to take an example,
we find the art of painting, in its representation of the Passion, not
unfrequently dallies round the expression of ribaldry visible in the hideous
contortions and grimaces of tormenting common soldiers; and, in its
attachment to such discordant emotions, especially when depicting what is
criminal, shameless, or evil, permitting the glad serenity of the Ideal to pass
away. Even when such disruption loses its force, we find frequently that
ugliness, or, at least, the absence of real beauty, is set up in its place. In
another school of the earlier Flemish art of painting the downright
directness and truth of the representation, no less than the inextinguishable
confidence of the faith to which it testifies, tend to assert, in despite of
itself, a reconciliation in the feelings of all who behold it[276]. But such an
unyielding result falls[277] short of the entire cheerfulness and satisfaction
appropriate to the Ideal. However, it is possible also in romantic art, albeit
here the representation of suffering and grief penetrates the soul and its
emotions more deeply than is the case with antique art, that the delineation
may reveal to us a spiritual intimacy, a delight in resignation, a blessedness
in pain, a rapture in sorrow, nay, even a voluptuous ecstasy in
martyrdom[278]. Not only in painting but in the profoundly religious music
of Italian composers, we find this ecstasy and illumination of grief
abundantly expressed. We may, as a summary definition in romantic art,
call it "the smile through tears." The tears have their origin in affliction, the
smile in blithesome serenity, and consequently this smile through weeping

indicates, as it were, the point of self-repose in the midst of pain and
suffering. It is hardly necessary to add that the smile indicated here is no
mere sentimental emotion, no mere vanity of the subject treated or dabbling
with beauty[279] over painful effects and insignificant traits of subjective
feeling; rather (on its artistic side) it must appear as the firm delineation and
freedom of beauty in defiance of all pain, in the spirit of what was said of
Ximenes in the romances of the Cid, "how beautiful she was in tears." In
contrast to this emotional abandonment in men is either ugly and repellent,
or actually ridiculous. Children, for example, break into tears at the slightest
provocation, and we can only laugh at them. The tears, however, in the eyes
of a man of earnest and self-contained character, under stress of deep
feeling, betray a very different type of emotion. Laughter and tears can,
however, very readily fall apart as unrelated, and are, as such, falsely
utilized as a vehicle of art in such abstraction; the laughter chorus in
Weber's "Freischütz" may be cited as an example. Laughter, after all, is a
kind of explosion, which it is impossible to exercise without restraint and
preserve the Ideal. Another example of this laughter, which is nothing but
laughter, occurs in a duet of Weber's "Oberon," throughout which we are in
a continual state of anxiety for the prima donna's throat and lungs. How
very differently the inextinguishable laughter of the gods affects us in
Homer, a sound which breaks from the blessed repose of divinity, and rather
expresses gladsome serenity than abstract and wanton abandonment. Just as
little ought weeping, devoid of all restraint, to be introduced into the ideal
work of art, of such a kind as that we may hear in all its comfortlessness in
another part of the "Freischütz." And speaking generally, in music singing
must take to itself the kind of joy and rapture which we catch from the lark
in the open sky. Shrieking, whether of pain or delight, is not music at all.
Even in the expression of suffering the sweet tones of the plaint must
penetrate and clarify the sorrows, so that it continually may seem to us
worth all the suffering to arrive at such sweetness of plaint in its expression.
And this is the sweetness of melody, the singing of every kind of art.
(γ) Regarded in a certain relation to this fundamental axiom of art we may
find some justification for the principle of irony in its modern sense; but it
must not be overlooked that irony is frequently destitute of all real
seriousness, and is particularly prone to expatiate over bad subject-matter;
and, in another aspect of it, it is apt to run to seed in the mere yearning of
emotion rather than actively participate in practical life, as is proved by the