Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/155

 which art gives occasion is, on the contrary, something which is necessarily the product of Spirit, not something which appears in an immediate or sensuous shape, and it has the Idea as its life-giving centre.

In what may be regarded as constituting the entire sphere of art, there may be other elements included than those which have just been alluded to. For truth has here a double meaning, and first of all that of accuracy, by which is meant, that the representation should be in conformity with the otherwise known object. In this sense art is formal, and is imitation of given objects, whatever the content may be. Here its law is not beauty. But in so far also as beauty is its law, art can be still taken as involving form, and have, moreover, a limited, well-defined content, as much as the literal truth itself. But this last in its true sense is correspondence of the object with its conception or notion, namely, the Idea. And this, as the free expression of the notion unhindered in any way by contingency or caprice, is the self-existent content of art, and is a content indeed which has to do with the substantial universal elements, the essential qualities, and powers of nature and of Spirit.

The artist, then, has to present truth, so that the reality, in which the conception or notion has power, and in which it rules, is at the same time something sensuous. The Idea exists consequently in a sensuous form, and in an individualised shape, which cannot miss having the contingent character attaching to what is sensuous. The work of art is conceived in the mind of the artist, and in his mind the union of the notion or conception and of reality has implicitly taken place. But when the artist has let his thoughts emerge into externality, and the work is completed, he soon retires from it.

Thus the work of art is, so far as perception is concerned, in the first instance, an external object of a quite ordinary sort, which has no feeling of self, and does not know itself. The form, the subjectivity, which the artist