The central thought of the Absolute Idealism of Schelling is the underlying identity of Nature and the Self. In Nature, from matter up to the organism, the objective factor predominates, or, in Schelling's phrase, the conscious self is determined by the unconscious. In morality, science, the subjective factor predominates, or the unconscious is determined by the conscious. But the work of art is a natural appearance and so unconscious, and is yet the product of a conscious activity. It gives, then, the equilibrium of the real and ideal factors,--just that repose of reconciliation or "indifference" which alone can show the Absolute. But-- and this is of immense importance for our theory--in order to explain the identity of subject and object, the Ego must have an intuition, through which, in one and the same appearance, it is in itself at once conscious and unconscious, and this condition is given in the aesthetic experience. The beautiful is thus the solution of the riddle of the universe, for it is the possibility of the explicit consciousness of the unity of Nature and the Self--or the Absolute. So Beauty is again the pivot on which a system turns. Its place is not essentially different from that which it held in the systems of Kant and Schiller. As the objective possibility for the bridge between sense and reason, as the vindication of freedom in the phenomenal world, and as vindication of the possible unity of the real and the ideal, or nature and self, the world-elements, its philosophical significance is nearly the same. With Hegel Beauty loses little of its commanding position. The universe is in its nature rational; Thought and Being are one. The world-process is a logical process; and nature and history, in which spirit of the world realizes itself, are but applied logic. The completely fulfilled or expressed Truth is then the concrete world-system; at the same time the life or self of the universe; the Absolute. This Hegel calls the Idea, and he defines Beauty as the expression of the Idea to sense.