It is well known that Plato was the first to require of philosophical study, in a really profound sense, that its objects should be apprehended, not in their _particularity_, but in their _universality_, in their genius, in their own nature and its realization: inasmuch as he affirmed that the truth of things[44] did not consist in individual good actions, true opinions, beautiful human beings or works of art, but in _goodness_, _beauty_, _truth_ themselves. Now, if the beautiful is in fact to be known according to its essence and conception, this is only possible by help of the thinking idea, by means of which the logico-metaphysical nature of the _Idea as such_, as also that of the _particular Idea of the beautiful_ enters into the thinking consciousness. But the study of the beautiful in its separate nature and in its own idea may itself turn into an abstract Metaphysic, and even though Plato is accepted in such an inquiry as foundation and as guide, still the Platonic abstraction must not satisfy us, even for the logical idea of beauty. We must understand this idea more profoundly and more in the concrete, for the emptiness of content which characterizes the Platonic idea is no longer satisfactory to the fuller philosophical wants of the mind of to-day. Thus it is, no doubt, the case that we, too, in modern times, must in our philosophy of art start from the idea of the beautiful, but we ought not to abide by the fashion of Platonic ideas, which was purely abstract, and was the mere beginning of the philosophic study of beauty. 3. The philosophic conception of the beautiful, to indicate its true nature at least by anticipation, must contain, reconciled within it, the two extremes which have been mentioned, by combining metaphysical universality with the determinateness of real particularity. Only thus is it apprehended in its truth, in its real and explicit nature. It is then fertile out of its own resources, in contrast to the barrenness of one-sided reflection. For it has in accordance with its own conception to develop into a totality of attributes, while the conception itself as well as its detailed exposition contains the necessity of its particulars, as also of their progress and transition one into another. On the other hand, again, these particulars, to which the transition is made, carry in themselves the universality and essentiality of the conception as the particulars of which they appear. The modes of consideration of which we have so far been treating, lack both these qualities,[45] and for this reason it is only the complete conception of which we have just spoken that can lead to substantive, necessary, and self-complete determinations. CHAPTER III. THE CONCEPTION OF ARTISTIC BEAUTY. PART I.--THE WORK OF ART AS MADE AND AS SENSUOUS.