World-Spirit itself that _invented_ the
proper form for the concrete spiritual ideal--the subjective mind--in
this case the spirit of art--has only _found_ it, and given it natural
plastic existence in accordance with free individual spirituality. The
form in which the idea, as spiritual and individual, clothes itself when
revealed as a temporal phenomenon, is _the human form_. To be sure,
personification and anthropomorphism have frequently been decried as a
degradation of the spiritual; but art, in so far as its task is to bring
before direct contemplation the spiritual in sensuous form, must advance
to such anthropomorphism, for only in its body can mind appear in an
adequately sensuous fashion. The migration of souls is, in this respect,
an abstract notion, and physiology should make it one of its fundamental
principles that life has necessarily, in its evolution, to advance to
the human shape as the only sensuous phenomenon appropriate to the mind.

The human body as portrayed by classical art is not represented in its
mere physical existence, but solely as the natural and sensuous form and
garb of mind; it is therefore divested of all the defects that belong to
the merely sensuous and of all the finite contingencies that appertain
to the phenomenal. But if the form must be thus purified in order to
express the appropriate content, and, furthermore, if the conformity of
meaning and expression is to be complete, the content which is the
spiritual idea must be perfectly capable of being expressed through the
bodily form of man, without projecting into another sphere beyond the
physical and sensuous representation. The result is that Spirit is
characterized as a particular form of mind, namely, as human mind, and
not as simply absolute and eternal; but the absolute and eternal Spirit
must be able to reveal and express itself in a manner far more
spiritual.

This latter point brings to light the defect of classical art, which
demands its dissolution and its transition to a third and higher form,
to wit, the _romantic_ form of art.

ROMANTIC ART

The romantic form of art destroys the unity of the spiritual idea and
its sensuous form, and goes back, though on a higher level, to the
difference and opposition of the two, which symbolic art left
unreconciled. The classical form of art attained, indeed, the highest
degree of perfection which the sensuous process of art was capable of
realizing; and, if it shows any de