The universal and absolute need out of which art, on its formal side,[52] arises has its source in the fact that man is a _thinking_ consciousness, _i.e._ that he draws out of himself, and makes explicit _for himself_, that which he is, and, generally, whatever is. The things of nature are only _immediate and single_, but man as mind _reduplicates_ himself, inasmuch as _prima facie_ he _is_ like the things of nature, but in the second place just as really is _for_ himself, perceives himself, has ideas of himself, thinks himself, and only thus is active self-realizedness.[53] This consciousness of himself man obtains in a twofold way: _in the first place theoretically_, in as far as he has inwardly to bring himself into his own consciousness, with all that moves in the human breast, all that stirs and works therein, and, generally, to observe and form an idea of himself, to fix before himself what thought ascertains to be his real being, and, in what is summoned out of his inner self as in what is received from without, to recognize only himself. Secondly, man is realized for himself by _practical_ activity, inasmuch as he has the impulse, in the medium which is directly given to him, and externally presented before him, to produce himself, and therein at the same time to recognize himself. This purpose he achieves by the modification of external things upon which he impresses the seal of his inner being, and then finds repeated in them his own characteristics. Man does this in order as a free subject to strip the outer world of its stubborn foreignness, and to enjoy in the shape and fashion of things a mere external reality of himself.[54] Even the child's first impulse involves this practical modification of external things. A boy throws stones into the river, and then stands admiring the circles that trace themselves on the water, as an effect in which he attains the sight of something that is his own doing. This need traverses the most manifold phenomena, up to the mode of self-production in the medium of external things as it is known to us in the work of art. And it is not only external things that man treats in this way, but himself no less, _i.e._ his own natural form, which he does not leave as he finds it, but alters of set purpose. This is the cause of all ornament and decoration, though it may be as barbarous, as tasteless, as utterly disfiguring or even destructive as crushing Chinese ladies' feet, or as slitting the ears and lips. It is only among cultivated men that change of the figure,[55] of behaviour, and of every kind and mode of self-utterance emanates from spiritual education.[56]