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.

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 2: Hegel, alluding no doubt to the words of the Gospel, puts
it "born and born again from mind (spirit)."]

[Footnote 3: It is assumed that such a fancy is seized and defined as
such in separation from other experience.]

[Footnote 4: The sentence is slightly ironical.]

[Footnote 5: _Dem Scheine._]

[Footnote 6: _Raisonnements_: a disparaging expression.]

[Footnote 7: Hegel here means the formal character, not the material on
which it is imposed in the several arts.]

[Footnote 8: Hegel says, "as that which has no right to be," _das
Nichtseyn sollende._]

[Footnote 9: _Erscheine_ as contrasted with _scheine._]

[Footnote 10: _Das An-und-Fürsichseyende._ That which is explicitly to
itself self-determinate being, no less than essentially such in its
substantive right.]

[Footnote 11: _Besonnener Art._ Possibly Hegel means "one more
compatible with common sense."]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 15: That is to say, the essential formative process involved
in its necessity.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 17: _Von ihm._ The pronoun, I take it, must refer here to
_das Andere_ rather than the subject of the verb.]

[Footnote 18: "Makes itself an alien to itself" perhaps expresses the
German better.]

[Footnote 19: That is, the work of art.]

[Footnote 20: _Haltpunkte._ Points of arrest in essential ideas
necessary which restrain this tendency to purely arbitrary caprice.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 22: Detail of historical fact and artistic observation.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 24: Lit., the inmost or most ideal (meaning).]

[Footnote 25: _Vollkommen._ Complete or rather completely articulate
and rounded in itself. It is not easy to select the English word that
exactly corresponds.]

[Footnote 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."]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 28: _Bestimmung._]

[Footnote 29: That is, in Hegel's view.]

[Footnote 30: _Das Wahre_.]

[Footnote 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."]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 33: _Subjektiven._]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 38: That is, in the first Part of the entire treatise.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 40: By man's sensitive life in its widest sense is, I think,
intended.]

[Footnote 41: The German words are _machen_ and _nachmachen._ We have
no exact equivalents.]

[Footnote 42: _Lit._, "to fill out (_ausfüllen_) in complete
equipment."]

[Footnote 43: _Individuelle._]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 45: At the end of the first main division of the work.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 51: Free, that is, from accidental and irrelevant matter.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 53: That is, apart from purely personal ends in its pursuit,
which are accidental to its essential notion.]

[Footnote 54: That is, in the medium of conscious life.]

[Footnote 55: _Einmal._ They are there, but they do not know they are
there.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 57: _Bedürfniss zur Kunst._]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 60: _Blinder_, blind in the sense that it is not guided by
deliberate and self-conscious reason, _i.e._, mere animal instinct.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 62: _Die Sache._ The subject-matter in its most real sense as
"content."]

[Footnote 63: That is, the so-called "good taste."]

[Footnote 64: _Begriff._ Concrete notional Idea.]

[Footnote 65: That is, in his physical form.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 67: _Sein Objekt._ The object in which he finds himself;
rather this, I think, than that which he has created.]

[Footnote 68: _Innerlich_, _i.e._, in the world of mind as contrasted
with that of the sensuous _vorhandene._]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 76: _Die Phantasie_.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 78: This confirms the conclusion above.]

[Footnote 79: _Für sich._ If merely admired as imitation and nothing
more.]

[Footnote 80: _Zur Ekelhaftigkeit._ "Sickeningly like" is Professor
Bosanquet's closer translation. The expression "damnably like" is not
unknown.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 82: Formal, _i.e._, implying no creative supplement from the
artist, purely mechanical.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 85: _Im Innersten_ is I think here obviously to be taken with
the verb, not with the substantives.]

[Footnote 86: _Ueberhaupt._]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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."]

[Footnote 92: _Einheit_--unity to the point of fusion, identity.]

[Footnote 93: _Unmittelbaren Befangenheit._ "Sunkenness" is Professor
Bosanquet's translation.]

[Footnote 94: _Theoretic_ as a direct transcript of _θεώρια, θεωρειν._]

[Footnote 95: _Gesichtspunkte._ The various points of view necessary to
arrive at such a general conclusion.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 97: "Poets aim at utility and entertainment alike."]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 100: Lit., "the spiritual universal," _i.e._, the universal
substance of its ideal content.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 102: _Im besten Sinne des Wortes._]

[Footnote 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."]

[Footnote 104: That is the contingency of the world of Nature as
contrasted with the essential stability of mind or spirit.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 107: _An und für sich Wahre._]

[Footnote 108: _Unbefangenen_, _i.e._, the naïve outlook of ordinary
life.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 110: _Begriff._ Notion, or concrete Idea of it.]

[Footnote 111: Of that world in its opposition to reason.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 114: _Für sich._]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 116: That is, by Kant, of course.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 118: That is, the concrete idea of humanity as a collective
aggregate.]

[Footnote 119: That is, intelligence as asserted by a society of human
beings as public opinion, etc.]

[Footnote 120: _Die Ineinsbildung._]

[Footnote 121: "Grace and Dignity."]

[Footnote 122: _Gesinnungen._ "Sentimental views" is probably what is
implied.]

[Footnote 123: _Alle Sache._]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 125: I presume the revelation is not merely that of visible
shape or even mainly.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 128: _Schönseligkeit._ Borrowed no doubt from Goethe's notion
of a "fair soul."]

[Footnote 129: Like the "vaulting ambition" of Shakespeare which falls
on the other side, is _über sich selbst._]

[Footnote 130: _Haltung._ Professor Bosanquet translates this
"conduct." I rather think it refers to "bearing, demeanour." They are,
as we say, "featureless, flaccid figures."]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 132: _Moment._ A phase in an evolutionary, or, as it is here,
a dialectical process. A momentary feature of it.]

[Footnote 133: This final section is called the Division of the
Subject.]

[Footnote 134: _Subjektivität._ That is, the ideality of consciousness,
or thought.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 136: _Fackeldistel_. "Torch thistle," a plant of the genus
Cereus.]

[Footnote 137: Or, "as mind and in mind."]

[Footnote 138: That is to say, presents to itself to conscious grasp of
itself as such Art-spirit (_als künstlerischer._)]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 142: _Das wahrhaft Innere._ That is, the inward of the truth
of conscious life.]

[Footnote 143: Means apparently the notion in its absolute sense.]

[Footnote 144: Because it represents spirit as independent of an
appropriate bodily form.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 147: _Subjekt_, _i.e._, the individual Ego of
self-consciousness.]

[Footnote 148: _Das subjective Innere,_ lit., the subjective inner
state.]

[Footnote 149: _Geistigkeit._ Professor Bosanquet translates it here
"intellectual being."]

[Footnote 150: The distinction between a percipient and an external
object falls away. The content displayed is part of the soul-life
itself.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 153: _Gestalt._ Plastic power is perhaps a better
translation.]

[Footnote 154: He means that in architecture the building is merely a
shrine or environment of the image of the god.]

[Footnote 155: Infinite, of course, in the concrete sense of rounded in
itself, as the circle, or, still more, the living organism.]

[Footnote 156: Lit., "which is not also that of the spiritual sphere."]

[Footnote 157: That is, an object limited only in space.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 159: Lit., "A multiplicity of isolated examples of
inwardness."]

[Footnote 160: That is, in the life shared by all as one community
actuated by a common purpose.]

[Footnote 161: As in sculpture.]

[Footnote 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._"]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 164: Reference, of course, to Hegel's unfortunate acceptance
of Goethe's theory of colour.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 169: Succession in time is "more ideal" than coexistence in
space because it exists only as continuity in a conscious subject.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 172: As in painting.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 174: _Absolute Formen._ Adequate in the sense of being
unconditionally so.]

FIRST PART

THE IDEA OF FINE ART, OR THE IDEAL

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.

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._

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 176: _Unendliche Negativität._]

[Footnote 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).]

[Footnote 178: _In seiner Gemeinde._ We should rather expect _in seiner
Gebiete._]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 180: The spheres of art and social life are first perceived
as merely independent circles of activity.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 182: _Welche sick durch alles hindurchzieht_, _i.e._, which
permeates all experience.]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 184: He means, I think, province of the universal, rather
than "universal expansion of horizon."]

[Footnote 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.]

[Footnote 186: _Anschauung_, that is to say, it is the object of man's
receptive senses.]

[Footnote 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.]

CHAPTER I

THE NOTION OF THE BEAUTIFUL IN ITS GENERAL SIGNIFICANCE

We have defined beauty to be the Idea of the beautiful.

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