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disengages itself. Thus the external can here appear as contingent towards its significance.
The Philosophy of Religion has to discover the logical necessity in the progress by which the Being, known
as the Absolute, assumes fuller and firmer features; it has to note to what particular feature the kind of cultus
corresponds - and then to see how the secular self-consciousness, the consciousness of what is the supreme
vocation of man - in short how the nature of a nation's moral life, the principle of its law, of its actual liberty,
and of its constitution, as well as of its art and science, corresponds to the principle which constitutes the
substance of a religion. That all these elements of a nation's actuality constitute one systematic totality, that
one spirit creates and informs them, is a truth on which follows the further truth that the history of religions
coincides with the world-history.
As regards the close connection of art with the various religions it may be specially noted that beautiful art
can only belong to those religions in which the spiritual principle, though concrete and intrinsically free, is
not yet absolute. In religions where the Idea has not yet been revealed and known in its free character, though
the craving for art is felt in order to bring in imaginative visibility to consciousness the idea of the supreme
being, and though art is the sole organ in which the abstract and radically indistinct content - a mixture from
natural and spiritual sources - can try to bring itself to consciousness; - still this art is defective; its form is
defective because its subject-matter and theme is so - for the defect in subject-matter comes from the form
not being immanent in it. The representations of this symbolic art keep a certain tastelessness and stolidity -
for the principle it embodies is itself stolid and dull, and hence has not the power freely to transmute the
external to significance and shape. Beautiful art, on the contrary, has for its condition the self-consciousness
of the free spirit - the consciousness that compared with it the natural and sensuous has no standing of its
A. ART 68
 PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
own: it makes the natural wholly into the mere expression of spirit, which is thus the inner form that gives
utterance to itself alone.
But with a further and deeper study, we see that the advent of art, in a religion still in the bonds of sensuous
externality, shows that such religion is on the decline. At the very time it seems to give religion the supreme
glorification, expression, and brilliancy, it has lifted the religion away over its limitation. In the sublime
divinity to which the work of art succeeds in giving expression the artistic genius and the, spectator find
themselves at home, with their personal sense and feeling, satisfied and liberated: to them the vision and the
consciousness of free spirit has been vouchsafed and attained. Beautiful art, from its side, has thus performed
the same service as philosophy: it has purified the spirit from its thraldom. The older religion in which the
need of fine art, and just for that reason, is first generated, looks up in its principle to an other-world which is
sensuous and unmeaning: the images adored by its devotees are hideous idols regarded as wonder-working
talismans, which point to the unspiritual objectivity of that other-world - and bones perform a similar or
even a better service than such images. But even fine art is only a grade of liberation, not the supreme
liberation itself. - The genuine objectivity, which is only in the medium of thought - the medium in which
alone the pure spirit is for the spirit, and where the liberation is accompanied with reverence - is still absent
in the sensuous beauty of the work of art, still more in that external, unbeautiful sensuousness.
� 563 Beautiful Art, like the religion peculiar to it, has its future in true religion. The restricted value of the
Idea passes utterly and naturally into the universality identical with the infinite form; - the vision in which
consciousness has to depend upon the senses passes into a self-mediating knowledge, into an existence
which is itself knowledge - into revelation. Thus the principle which gives the Idea its content is that it
embody free intelligence, and as 'absolute' spirit it is for the spirit.
B. REVEALED RELIGION(1)
� 564 It lies essentially in the notion of religion, - the religion i.e. whose content is absolute mind - that it be
revealed, and, what is more, revealed by God. Knowledge (the principle by which the substance is mind) is a
self-determining principle, as infinite self-realizing form - it therefore is manifestation out and out. The [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]