But this 'Absolute' is never in history completely revealed—we cannot see free action coincide with predetermination. Thus if History as a whole be> conceived as a 'continuous and gradual self-revelation; of the Absolute,' 'God never is, if is means exhibition; in the objective world: if God were, we should not be[15].' Nor is the Absolute so revealed in Nature. Yet, even as the apparent contingency of human action throws us back on an everlasting necessity which is yet freedom, so the apparent uniformity of natural order shows us in organic life the traces of a free self-regulating development. To apprehend the truth at which both seem to point we want an organ of intelligence which shall unite in itself the conscious activity of free production with the unconscious instinct of natural creation. Such an organ is found in they aesthetic power of genius, in the Artist. The artistic product is the work of two intimately-conjoined principles:—of the art (in the narrower sense) which can be taught and learned, and is exercised consciously and with reflection, and of that 'poesy in Art,' the unconscious grace of genius which can neither be handed down nor acquired, but can only be inborn by free gift of nature. In the work thus brought to birth there is something definite, precise, and capable of exposition in finite formulae: there is also something which no 'prose' can ever explicate, something which tells us of the infinite and eternal, which ever reveals and yet conceals the Absolute and Perfect. Art, thus springing from 'imagination, the one sole power by which we can think and conjoin even the contradictory,' gives objectivity and outward shape to that 'intellectual intuition' by which the philosopher subjectively (in his own consciousness) sought to realise to himself the unity of thought and existence.
'To the philosopher,' Schelling concludes, 'Art is supreme, because it as it were opens to him the Holy of Holies, where in everlasting and original unity there burns, as it were in one flame, what is parted asunder in nature and history, and what in life and conduct, no less than in thinking, must for ever flee apart. The view the philosopher artificially makes for himself of nature is for Art the original and natural. What we call nature is a poem which is locked up in strange and secret characters. Yet could the riddle be disclosed, we should recognise in it the Odyssey of the mind, which, strangely deceived, in seeking itself, flees from itself: for through the sense-world there is a glimpse, only as through words of the meaning, only as through half-transparent mist of the land %of imagination, after which we yearn. That splendid picture emerges, as it were, by the removal of the invisible partition-wall which sunders the actual and the ideal world, and is only the opening by which those figures and regions of the world of imagination, that but imperfectly glimmer through the actual, come forward in all their fulness. Nature is to the artist no more than it is to the philosopher, viz. the ideal world as it appears under constant limitations, or only the imperfect reflex of a world which does not exist outside him, but within him.'
'If it is Art alone, then, which can succeed in making objective and universally accepted what the philosopher can only exhibit subjectively, it may also be expected that philosophy, as it was in the infancy of science born and nourished by poetry, and with it all those sciences which were by it carried on towards perfection, will after their completion flow back as so many single streams into the universal ocean of poetry from which they issued. Nor is it in general hard to say what will be the means for the return of science to poetry: for such a means has existed in mythology before this, as it now seems, irrevocable separation took place. But as to how a new mythology,—which cannot be the invention of the single poet, but of a new generation, as it were representing only a single poet,—can itself arise, is a problem, the solution of which is to be expected only from the future destinies of the world and the further course of history[16].'
[1] Schelling, Werke, iii. 13. (References always to the first series.)
[2] Schelling, Werke, ii. 409.
[3] Schelling, Werke, ii. 500.
[4] Ibid. ii. 350.
[5] Compare vol. ii. 360 and 429.
[6] See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 424.