The _third_ and last form or phase in the evolution of absolute mind (spirit) is _philosophy._ In the boundaries of the religious sphere, where God is apprehended in the first instance perforce as an external object, and men are taught that there is a God, and how He has revealed Himself and still is revealed to mankind, the subjective consciousness is indeed made the vehicle of such knowledge, and the religious sense imparted stirs and fills the heart of the community; but the inwardness of devotion which is born of the emotions and the imagination is not the highest form of inwardness. We are bound to recognize that the purest form of knowledge is conscious _thought_ in its freest activity. In this alone the content of knowledge is, adequate to the demands of that which is consciously apprehended: here alone we are in the presence of that most intelligent form of cultus, which seeks wholly to appropriate to itself, and to grasp in concrete thought what is otherwise only the evanescent content of feeling or the imagination. In the purview of such a philosophy art and religion, as two aspects of one truth, become related under a unifying conception. On the one hand, though philosophy, by its surrender of all sensuous externality, has lost the _objective_ presentation of art, yet it has exchanged it for the highest form under which concrete reality is objectively apprehended and redeemed, in other words, that of _speculative reason._ It has, on the other, lost the emotional subjectivity of the religious consciousness in the same pure medium. For while human thought is the most inward and appropriate vehicle of subjective life, such thought, in its fullest grasp of truth, the Idea, is actuality in the most objective and universal sense of the term, and is only to be apprehended by pure thought in the medium native to itself. With this adumbration of the difference between the spheres of art, religion, and philosophy we must on the present occasion rest content. The sensuous mode of consciousness is that which first appears in the history of mankind. The earliest stages of religion are for this reason indistinguishable from a religion of art and its sensuous manner of presentation. In the religion of Spirit for the first time is God as Spirit cognized also on a higher plane, and one more adequate to thought, wherein it likewise follows as a corollary, that the presentation of truth in sensuous shape is not truly adequate to Spirit. Now that we know something of the position which art occupies in the field of spiritual activity, and that which belongs to the philosophy of art among the several philosophical sciences, we will proceed in this introductory portion of our work in the first place to investigate the general idea of the beauty of art. SUBDIVISION OF SUBJECT IDEA OF THE BEAUTY OF ART, OTHERWISE, FINE ART To arrive at the Idea of Fine Art in all its concreteness it will be necessary for us to consider it under three phases.