Solger joins Schelling in placing beauty in the region of the Idea, inaccessible to common consciousness. It is distinct from the idea of Truth, because instead of dissolving the appearances of common consciousness after the manner of truth, art accomplishes the miracle of making appearance dissolve itself while still remaining appearance; artistic thought, therefore, is practical, not theoretical. Furthermore, it is distinct from the idea of Goodness, with which at first sight it would seem to be closely related, because in the case of Goodness the union of ideal with real, of the simple with the multiple, of the infinite with the finite, is not real and complete, but remains ideal, a mere ought-to-be. It is related more closely to Religion, which thinks the Idea as the abyss of life where our individual conscience must lose itself in order to become "essential" (_wesentlich_), while in beauty and art the Idea manifests itself by gathering into itself the world of distinctions between universal and particular and placing itself in their place. Artistic activity is more than theoretical, it is of a practical nature, but realized and perfected; art, therefore, belongs not to theoretical philosophy (as Kant thought, according to Solger), but to practical. Necessarily attached on one side to infinity, it cannot have common nature as its object; for example, art is absent from a portrait, and the ancients showed their discrimination in selecting gods and heroes for objects in sculpture since every deity--even in limited and particular form--always signifies a determinate modification of the Idea.[35] [Sidenote:_ G. W. F. Hegel_.] The same concept of art appears in the philosophy of Hegel, whatever may be the minor differences which he felt to separate himself from his predecessors. Little concerned as we are with the shades and varieties of mystical Æsthetic exhibited by each of these thinkers, we are chiefly concerned to lay bare the substantial underlying identity, the mysticism of arbitrarism which gives them their historic place in Æsthetic. [Sidenote: _Art in the sphere of absolute spirit._]