Art must be looked upon as the phenomenal result of certain religious, social, intellectual, and natural conditions. To trace these conditions, their origin, influence, and gradual development, by means of a critical and historical investigation into the causes which produced them, will be our task. For art is like a mirror: whatever looks into it is reflected by it. If a poor, untrained imagination stares into it, no one must be astonished that poor and distorted images result. It is usually accepted as a truism that the essence of art is the reproduction of nature. Wherever, then, nature were reflected in the ‘Art-mirror,’ we should have the best work of art. But this is not so. For art has to reflect the phenomena of the makrokosm as a subjectively-conceived mikrokosm. We do not see matters as they really are, as each thing is surrounded by a thick fog of incidental, objective, and subjective peculiarities. This fog must be cleared away, to show us nature in the bright colours of intellectual and self-conscious idealisation. Nature furnishes us with mortar and stones for the building, but the architect’s intellectual power has to arrange these elements, and to bring them into an artistic shape. Nature furnishes us with flowers, trees, animals and men; but the ornamental designer or painter has to reproduce and to group them so as to impress the forms of nature with an intellectual vitality. Before the artist proceeds to his work he must become thoroughly conscious of the distinction between the SUBLIME and the BEAUTIFUL. It is essential that he should draw a strict line of demarcation between the two conceptions; in order not to waste his energies on the reproduction of objects which are beyond the powers of art. During the long period of the cosmical formation of the earth, when mountains were towered upon mountains, rocks upheaved, islands submerged; when air, water, fire, and solid matter seemed engaged in never-ending conflict--nature was _sublime_. The dynamic force appeared to be the only element, and the counterbalancing static force was without influence. Gradually vegetable and animal life, in their first crude forms, commenced to show themselves.