Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy, and Especially of His Logic
Georg Hegel · en
But this 'Absolute' is never in history completely revealed--we cannot
_see_ free action coincide with predetermination. Thus if History as
a whole be> conceived as a 'continuous and gradual self-revelation;
of the Absolute,' 'God never _is,_ if _is_ means exhibition; in the
objective world: _if God were, we_ should not be[15].' Nor is the
Absolute so revealed in Nature. Yet, even as the apparent contingency
of human action throws us back on an everlasting necessity which is
yet freedom, so the apparent uniformity of natural order shows us in
organic life the traces of a free self-regulating development. To
apprehend the truth at which both seem to point we want an organ of
intelligence which shall unite in itself the conscious activity of
free production with the unconscious instinct of natural creation.
Such an organ is found in they aesthetic power of genius, in the
Artist. The artistic product is the work of two intimately-conjoined
principles:--of the art (in the narrower sense) which can be taught
and learned, and is exercised consciously and with reflection, and of
that 'poesy in Art,' the unconscious grace of genius which can neither
be handed down nor acquired, but can only be inborn by free gift of
nature. In the work thus brought to birth there is something definite,
precise, and capable of exposition in finite formulae: there is also
something which no 'prose' can ever explicate, something which tells us
of the infinite and eternal, which ever reveals and yet conceals the
Absolute and Perfect. Art, thus springing from 'imagination, the one
sole power by which we can think and conjoin even the contradictory,'
gives objectivity and outward shape to that 'intellectual intuition' by
which the philosopher subjectively (in his own consciousness) sought to
realise to himself the unity of thought and existence.