THE NOTION OF THE BEAUTIFUL IN ITS GENERAL SIGNIFICANCE I We have defined beauty to be the Idea of the beautiful. By this definition is implied that we have to conceive the beautiful as Idea, and, moreover, as Idea in a determinate shape, as _Ideal._ Idea, as thus posited, is just this, the conceptive notion, the realization of the same, and the unity of both. The notion, as such, is not yet the Idea, although the terms notion and idea are often loosely interchanged. Idea is the notion only as presented in, and brought into coalescence with, its objective reality. This unity, however, is by no means to be regarded as the mere _neutralization_ of notion and reality, so that the individual character and quality of either is absorbed; as, for example, where we find that in a chemical compound salt-potash and acid tend to neutralize each other in so far as they have weakened their opposition. In this unity, on the contrary, the notion is retained as the commanding factor. It is already implicitly, in virtue of its own nature, this very identity. Out of its own wealth it evolves the reality as part of itself, by means of a process which, being no other than that of development, surrenders nothing of its own nature, but brings into more concrete actuality the riches of the notion, and for this reason continues in unity with itself and its objective realization. Such a unity of the notional concept and its realization is the Idea defined in abstract terms. The word idea is, of course, frequently used by authors of works dealing with the theory of art. It must, however, be admitted that many connoisseurs of high standing are particularly severe upon its employment. The latest and most interesting example of this polemical attitude is to be found in Herr von Rumohr's "Italian investigations." This work is based on the practical interest that the arts excite, and is wholly unconcerned with that which for brevity we may call the Idea. The truth is that this writer, who appears to have no knowledge of the development of philosophy in modern times, freely confuses the expression as above defined with the undetermined conceptions of the phantasy, or the abstract and characterless Ideal of well-known art theories or schools of art, ideas which present a lean contrast to the clearly defined and richly caparisoned objects of Nature in their truth, and which this writer opposes to the idea and empty Ideal, which the artist himself evolves from his own consciousness. We have, of course, no more right to suppose that creative work can be the result of such poverty, than we can with justice assume that a thinker can think with conceptions wholly indeterminate, and persist in his thought with a content destitute of all defined relation. Such an objection, however, does not apply in any respect to the Idea in the sense we use the expression. This Idea is through and through concrete; a whole which consists of