This triple mode of seizing on reality offers art the well-known division into _first_, the _plastic_ arts, which elaborate their content for vision in the external form and colour of objects, _secondly_, in the art of _sound, music_, and _thirdly_, into _poetry_, which as the art of _speech_ uses tone merely as a symbol, in order, by means of it, to address itself directly to what is ideal in the contemplation, emotion, and imagination of our spiritual life. If we rest satisfied with this sensuous aspect of our subject-matter, as the final principle of its differentiation, we shall, in respect to our first principles, find ourselves in a difficulty, because the grounds of this division, instead of being deduced from the concrete notion of our subject-matter, are merely borrowed from the most abstract features of it. We have consequently to look about us once more for a principle of division that has deeper roots, which has, in fact, already been put forward in the introduction of this work as the truly systematic mode of dividing this third section of it. The function of art is just this and only this, namely, to bring before the grasp of the senses truth, as it is in the world of spirit, reconciled, that is, in its unity as a whole with objectivity and the sensuous material. In so far, then, as this is possible at this stage in the element of the external reality of the art-product to that extent the totality, which the Absolute is in its very truth, breaks apart into the various modes that differentiate it as a process. The _middle point_, the truly substantive centrum, is given us here in the representation of the _Absolute_, God Himself as God, in His independent _self-subsistence_, not as yet developed to the point of motion and difference, or advanced to the active operation of and separation from what is His, but presented essentially self-absorbed in supreme divine repose and stillness, briefly the Ideal embodied in a form essentially adequate to itself, which persists in its determinate existence in correspondent identity with itself. And in order that it may appear in infinite self-subsistency the Absolute must be conceived as Spirit, as conscious Subject, but as Subject which possesses essentially itself its own adequate mode of external appearance. As divine subject, however, which passes forth into actual reality, it has confronting it an _external_ world for environment, which, in conformity with the Absolute, must be built up to an appearance harmonious with the same, an appearance permeated with the Absolute. This environing world is then on one side the _objective_ as such, the basis, the embrace of external Nature, which, taken by itself, possesses no absolute significance for Spirit, nor any ideality such as is present to individual consciousness[18], and consequently is only able to express by suggestion the spiritual Ideal which its appearance must seek to secure by embodying its embraced content in a world of Beauty.