Schopenhauer's system no doubt contains here and there premonitions of a better and more profound treatment of art. Schopenhauer, who was capable on occasion of clear and keen analysis, constantly insists that the forms of space and time must not be applied to the idea or to artistic contemplation, which admits of the general form of representation only.[9] From this he might have inferred that art, so far from being a superior and extraordinary level of consciousness, is actually its most immediate level, namely that which in its primitive simplicity precedes even common perception with its reference of objects to a position in the spatial and temporal series. To free oneself from common perception and to live in imagination does not mean rising to a Platonic contemplation of the ideas, but descending once more into the region of immediate intuition, becoming children again, as Vico had seen. On the other hand Schopenhauer had begun to examine the categories of Kant with an unprejudiced eye; he was not satisfied with the two forms of intuition, and wished to add to them a third, causality.[10] In conclusion, we note that, like his predecessors, he makes a comparison between art and history, with this difference and advantage over the idealist authors of the philosophy of history, that for him history was irreducible to concepts; it was contemplation of the individual, and therefore not science. Had he persevered in his comparison between art and history, he would have arrived at a better solution than that at which he stopped; that is to say, that the matter of history is the particular in its particularity and contingency, while that of art is that which is, and is always identical.[11] But instead of pursuing these happy ideas Schopenhauer preferred to play variations on the themes fashionable in his day. [Sidenote: _J. F. Herbart._]