(_c_) But the earlier fashion alike of rules and of theories has already been violently thrown aside in Germany--especially owing to the appearance of genuine living poetry,--and the rights of genius, its works and their effects, have had their value asserted against the encroachment of such legalities and against the wide watery streams of theory. From this foundation both of an art which is itself genuinely spiritual, and of a general sympathy and communion with it, have arisen the receptivity and freedom which enabled us to enjoy and to recognize the great works of art which have long been in existence, whether those of the modern world,[43] of the middle ages, or even of peoples of antiquity quite alien to us (_e.g._ the Indian productions); works which by reason of their antiquity or of their alien nationality have, no doubt, a foreign element in them, yet in view of their content--common to all humanity and dominating their foreign character--could not have been branded as products of bad and barbarous taste, except by the prejudices of theory. This recognition, to speak generally, of works of art which depart from the sphere and form of those upon which more especially the abstractions of theory were based, led, in the first instance, to the recognition of a peculiar kind of art--that is, of _romantic_ art,--and it therefore became necessary to apprehend the idea and the nature of the beautiful in a deeper way than was possible for those theories. With this influence there co-operated another, viz. that the idea in its self-conscious form, the thinking mind, attained at this time, on its side, a deeper self-knowledge in philosophy, and was thereby directly impelled to understand the essence of art, too, in a profounder fashion.