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.