States and the minds of individual races pour their currents into the stream of the world’s history. The strife, the victory, and the subjection of the spirits of individual races, and the passing over of the world spirit from one people to another, is the content of the world’s history. The development of the world’s history is generally connected with some ruling race, which carries in itself the world spirit in its present stage of development, and in distinction from which the spirits of other races have no rights. Thus these race-spirits stand around the throne of the absolute spirit, as the executors of its actualization, as the witnesses and adornment of its glory.
3. The Absolute Mind.—(1.) Æsthetics. The absolute mind is immediately present to the sensuous intuition as the beautiful or as art. The beautiful is the appearance of the idea through a sensible medium (a crystal, color, tone, poetry); it is the idea actualized in the form of a limited phenomenon. To the beautiful (and to its subordinate kinds, the simply beautiful, the sublime, and the comical) two factors always belong, thought and matter; but both these are inseparable from each other; the matter is the outer phenomenon of the thought, and should express nothing but the thought which inspires it and shines through it. The different ways in which matter and form are connected, furnish the different forms of art. In the symbolic form of art the matter preponderates; the thought presses through it, and brings out the ideal only with difficulty. In the classic form of art, the ideal has attained its adequate existence in the matter; content and form are absolutely befitting each other. Lastly, in romantic art, the mind preponderates, and the matter is a mere appearance and sign through which the mind every where breaks out, and struggles up above the material. The system of particular arts is connected with the different forms of art; but the distinction of one particular art from another, depends especially upon the difference of the material.
(a.) The beginning of art is Architecture. It belongs essentially to the symbolic form of art, since in it the sensible matter far preponderates, and it first seeks the true conformity between content and form. Its material is stone, which it fashions according to the laws of gravity. Hence it has the character of magnitude, of silent earnestness, of oriental sublimity.
(b.) Sculpture.—The material of this art is also stone, but it advances from the inorganic to the organic. It gives the stone a bodily form, and makes it only a serving vehicle of the thought. In sculpture, the material, the stone, since it represents the body, that building of the soul, in its clearness and beauty, disappears wholly in the ideal; there is nothing left of the material which does not serve the idea.
(c.) Painting.—This is preeminently a romantic art. It represents, as sculpture cannot do, the life of the soul, the look, the disposition, the heart. Its medium is no longer a coarse material substratum, but the colored surface, and the soul-like play of light; it gives the appearance only of complete spacial dimension. Hence it is able to represent in a complete dramatic movement the whole scale of feelings, conditions of heart, and actions.
(d.) Music.—This leaves out all relation of space. Its material is sound, the vibration of a sonorous body. It leaves, therefore, the field of sensuous intuition, and works exclusively upon the sensation. Its basis is the breast of the sensitive soul. Music is the most subjective art.
(e.) Lastly in Poetry, or the speaking art, is the tongue of art loosed; poetry can represent every thing. Its material is not the mere sound, but the sound as word, as the sign of a representation, as the expression of reason. But this material cannot be formed at random, but only in verse according to certain rhythmical and musical laws. In poetry, all other arts return again; as epic, representing in a pleasing and extended narrative the figurative history of races, it corresponds to the plastic arts; as lyric, expressing some inner condition of soul, it corresponds to music; as dramatic poetry, exhibiting the struggles between characters acting out of directly opposite interests, it is the union of both these arts.
(2.) Philosophy of Religion.—Poetry forms the transition from art to religion. In art the idea was present for the intuition, in religion it is present for the representation. The content of every religion is the reconciliation of the finite with the infinite, of the subject with God. All religions seek a union of the divine and the human. This was done in the crudest form by
(a.) The natural religions of the oriental world. God is, with them, but a power of nature, a substance of nature, in comparison with which the finite and the individual disappear as nothing.