Let us guard ourselves meanwhile from supposing that, like the blind forces of nature, the artist does not know what he does, that reflection has no part in his works. There is, in the first place, in the arts a technical part which must be learned, and a skill which is acquired by practice. Furthermore, the more elevated art becomes, the more it demands an extended and varied culture, a study of the objects of nature, and a profound knowledge of the human heart. This is eminently true of the higher spheres of art, especially in Poetry. If works of art are creations of the human spirit, they are not on that account inferior to those of nature. They are, it is true, _living_, only in appearance; but the aim of art is not to create living beings; it seeks to offer to the spirit an image of life clearer than the reality. In this, it _surpasses_ nature. There is also something divine in man, and God derives no less honor from the works of human intelligence than from the works of nature. Now what is the cause which incites man to the production of such works? Is it a caprice, a freak, or an earnest, fundamental inclination of his nature? It is the same principle which causes him to seek in science food for his mind, in public life a theatre for his activity. In science he endeavors to cognize the truth, pure and unveiled; in art, truth appears to him not in its pure form, but expressed by images which strike his sense at the same time that they speak to his intelligence. This is the principle in which art originates, and which assigns to it a rank so high among the creations of the human mind. Although art is addressed to the sensibility, nevertheless its direct aim is not to excite sensation, and to give birth to pleasure. Sensation is changeful, varied, contradictory. It represents only the various states or modifications of the soul. If then we consider only the impressions which art produces upon us, we make abstraction of the truth which it reveals to us. It becomes even impossible to comprehend its grand effects; for the sentiments which it excites in us, are explicable only through the ideas which attach to them. The sensuous element, nevertheless, occupies a large place in art. What part must be assigned to it? There are two modes of considering sensuous objects in their connection with our mind. The first is that of simple perception of objects by the senses. The mind then knows only their individual side, their particular and concrete form; the essence, the law, the substance of things escapes it. At the same time the desire which is awakened in us, is a desire to appropriate them to our use, to consume them, to destroy them. The soul, in the presence of these objects, feels its dependence; it cannot contemplate them with a free and disinterested eye.