observation of the personal emotional state and its singularity, instead of penetrating and sounding the matter for study, in other words the work of art, and in doing so bidding good-bye to the wholly subjective state and its conditions. In feeling, however, it is just this subjective state void of content which is not merely accepted, but becomes the main thing; and that is precisely why people are so proud of having emotions. And for no other reason that is why such an investigation is tedious owing to its indefinite nature and emptiness, and even repellent in its attention to trivial personal idiosyncrasies. (_b_) Inasmuch, however, as the work of art is not merely concerned with exciting some kind of emotion or other--for this is an object it would share without any valid distinction with eloquence, historical composition, religious edification and much else--but is only a work of art in so far as it is beautiful, it occurred to reflective minds to discover a _specific feeling for beauty_, and a distinct _sense faculty_ correspondent with it. In such an inquiry it soon became clear that a sense of this kind was no definite and mere[60] instinct rigidly fixed by Nature, which was able by itself and independently to distinguish the beautiful. As a consequence the demand was made for _culture_ as a condition precedent to such a sense, and the sense of beauty as thus cultivated was called _taste_, which, albeit an instructed apprehension and discovery of the beautiful, was none the less assumed to persist in the character of immediate feeling. We have already discussed the way in which abstract theory attempted to form such a sense of taste, and how external and one-sided that sense remained. While the critical sense generally of the time when such ideas were in currency was lacking in the _universality_ of its principles, as a _specific_ critique of particular works of art it was less concerned to substantiate a judgment _more decisive_ than hitherto--indeed the material to effectuate this was not as yet forthcoming--than to promote in a general way the _cultivation_ of such a taste[61]. Consequently this educative process also came to a halt in the region of the more indefinite, and merely busied itself by its reflections in the fitting out of feeling as a sense of beauty in such a way that beauty could immediately be discovered whenever and wherever it might chance to appear. The real depth of the subject-matter remained notwithstanding a closed book to such a taste. Profundity of this kind demands not merely sensitive reception and abstract thought, but the reason in its concrete grasp and the most sterling qualities of soul-life. Taste on the contrary is merely directed to the outside surfaces, which are the playground of the feelings, and upon which one-sided principles may very well pass, as currency. But for this very reason our so-called good taste is scared by every kind of profounder