Fine art is not art in the true sense of the term until it is also thus free, and its _highest_ function is only then satisfied when it has established itself in a sphere which it shares with religion, and philosophy, becoming thereby merely one mode and form through which the _Divine_, the profoundest interests of mankind, and spiritual truths of widest range, art brought home to consciousness and expressed. It is in works of art that nations have deposited the richest intuitions and ideas they possess; and not infrequently fine art supplies a key of interpretation to the wisdom and religion of peoples; in the case of many it is the only one. This is an attribute which art shares in common with religion and philosophy, the peculiar distinction in the case of art being that its presentation of the most exalted subject-matter is in sensuous form, thereby bringing them nearer to Nature and her mode of envisagement, that is closer to our sensitive and emotional life. The world, into the profundity of which thought penetrates, is a supersensuous one, a world which to start with is posited as a Beyond in contrast to the immediacy of ordinary conscious life and present sensation. It is the freedom of reflecting consciousness which disengages itself from this immersion in the "_this side_," or immediacy, in other words sensuous reality and finitude. But the mind is able, too, to heal the _fracture_ which is thus created in its progression. From the wealth of its own resources it brings into being the works of fine art as the primary bond of mediation between that which is exclusively external, sensuous and transitory, and the medium of pure thought, between Nature and its finite reality, and the infinite freedom of a reason which comprehends. Now it was objected that the _element_[7] _of art_ was, if we view it as a whole, of an _unworthy_ character, inasmuch as it consisted of appearance and deceptions inseparable from such. Such a contention would of course be justifiable, if we were entitled to assume that appearance had no _locus standi_[8] at all. An appearance or show is, however, essential to actuality. There could be no such thing as truth if it did not appear, or, rather, let itself appear[9], were it not further true for some _one_ thing or person, _for_ itself as also _for_ spirit. Consequently it cannot be appearance in general against which such an objection can be raised, but the particular mode of its manifestation under which art makes actual what is essentially real and true. If, then, the appearance, in the medium of which art gives determinate existence to its creations, be defined as _deception_, such an objection is in the first instance intelligible if we compare it with the _external world_ of a phenomena, and its _immediate_ relation to ourselves as material substance, or view it relatively to our own world of emotions, that is our inward sensuous life. Both these are