(_d_) Assuming, then, that the work of art is a creation of man in the sense that it is the offspring of mind or spirit we have still a further question in conclusion, which will help us to draw a more profound inference still from our previous discussion. That question is, "What is the human _need_ which stimulates art-production?" On the one hand the artistic activity may be regarded as the mere play of accident, or human conceits, which might just as well be left alone as attempted. For, it may be urged, there are other and better means for carrying into effect the aims of art, and man bears within himself higher and more weighty interests, than art is capable of satisfying. In contrast to such a view art appears to originate in a higher impulse, and to satisfy more elevated needs, nay, at certain times the highest and most absolute of all, being, as it has been, united to the most embracing views of entire epochs and nations upon the constitution of the world and the nature of their religion. This inquiry, however, concerning a necessity for art which shall not be merely contingent, but absolute, we are not as yet able to answer with completeness; it demands, in fact, a concreter mode of exposition than is compatible with the form of this introduction. We must accordingly deem it sufficient for the present merely to establish the following points. The universal and absolute want from which art on its side of essential form[53] arises originates in the fact that man is a _thinking_ consciousness, in other words that he renders explicit _to himself_ and from his own substance[54], what he is and all in fact that exists. The objects of Nature exist exclusively in immediacy and _once for all._[55] Man, on the contrary, as mind _reduplicates_ himself. He is, to start with, an object of Nature as other objects; but in addition to this, and no less truly, he exists _for himself_; he observes himself, makes himself present to his imagination and thought, and only in virtue of this active power of self-realization is he actually mind or spirit. This consciousness of himself man acquires in a twofold way; in the _first_ instance _theoretically._ This is so in so far as he is under a constraint to bring himself in his own inner life to consciousness--all which moves in the human heart, all that surges up and strives therein--and generally, so far as he is impelled to make himself an object of perception and conception, to fix for himself definitively that which thought discovers as essential being, and in all that he summons out of himself, no less than in that which is received from without, to recognize only himself. And _secondly_, this realization is effected through a _practical_ activity. In other words man possesses an impulse to assert himself in that which is presented him in immediacy, in that which is at hand as an external something to himself, and by doing so at the same time once more to recognize himself therein.