e, and civil life opens a career for his activity; but he
only finds an imperfect pleasure in these pursuits. He cannot then find
the ideal after which he sighs. Then he rises to a higher sphere, where
all contradictions are effaced and the ideas of good and happiness are
realized in perfect accord and in constant harmony. This deep want of
the soul is satisfied in three ways: in art, in religion, and in
philosophy.

Art is intended to make us contemplate the true and the infinite in forms
of sense. Yet even art does not fully satisfy the deepest need of the
soul. The soul wants to contemplate truth in its inmost consciousness.
Religion is placed above the dominion of art.

First, as to idea of the beautiful, Hegel begins by giving its
characteristics. It is infinite, and it is free; the contemplation of
the beautiful suffices to itself, it awakens no desire. The soul
experiences something like a godlike felicity and is transported into a
sphere remote from the miseries of life. This theory of the beautiful
comes very near that of Plato.

Secondly, as to beauty in nature. Physical beauty, considered
externally, presents itself successively under the aspects of regularity
and of symmetry, of conformity with a law, and of harmony, also of purity
and simplicity of matter.

Thirdly, beauty in art or the ideal is beauty in a higher degree of
perfection than real beauty. The ideal in art is not contrary to the
real, but the real idealized, purified, and perfectly expressed. The
ideal is also the soul arrived at the consciousness of itself, free and
fully enjoying its faculties; it is life, but spiritual life and spirit.
Nor is the ideal a cold abstraction, it is the spiritual principle under
the form of a living individuality freed from the laws of the finite.
The ideal in its highest form is the divine, as expressed in the Greek
divinities; the Christian ideal, as expressed in all its highest purity
in God the Father, the Christ, the Virgin. Its essential features are
calm, majesty, serenity.

At a lower degree the ideal is in man the victory of the eternal
principles that fill the human heart, the triumph of the nobler part of
the soul, the moral and divine principle.

But the ideal manifested in the world becomes action, and action implies
a form of society, a determinate situation with collision, and an action
properly so called. The heroic age is the best society for the ideal in
action; in its determinate situati