Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/21

 and overcome these its particular shapes, this sensuous concrete existence.

Substance is, so to speak, an universal space which has not as yet organised, idealised, and brought under it that with which it is filled up—the particularisation which issued from it.

For this reason, too, the form of beauty cannot be created here, because the content—these particularisations of Substance—is not as yet the true content of Spirit.

Since, then, the limited content is the foundation, and is known as spiritual, the subject—this definite spiritual agent—becomes, owing to this, an empty form. In the Religion of Beauty, the Spiritual, as such, constitutes the foundation, so that the content, too, is the spiritual content. In that religion, statues or pictures, as sensuous matter, are merely the expression of the Spiritual. Here, however, the content is not of a spiritual kind.

Thus, the art we find here is symbolical art, which does indeed express essential characteristics, but not characteristics of the Spiritual. Hence the unbeautiful, the mad, the fantastic character of the art which makes its appearance here. The symbolism is not the purely Beautiful, just because a content other than spiritual individuality is the basis. Free subjectivity is not the permeating element, and is not essentially expressed by the form. In this phantasy there is nothing fixed, nothing moulds itself into forms of the beauty which is given only by the consciousness of freedom. Speaking generally, what we have here is complete dissolution of form, the restless movement, the manifestation of the self-importance of the individual. Devoid of anything to give it stability, the inner element passes over into external existence, and the unfolding of the Absolute—a process which outdoes itself in this world of imagination—is merely an endless breaking-up of the One into the Many, and an unstable reeling to and fro of all content.