into thought-expression, and by so doing recovering it to itself. And moreover in this active and frequent relation to that "other" than itself the reflective mind is not in any way untrue to itself. We have here no oblivion or surrender of itself; neither is it so impotent as to be unable to comprehend what is differentiated from that other[17]; what it actually does is to grasp in the notion _both_ itself and its opposite. For the notion is the universal, which maintains itself in its particularizations, which covers in its grasp both itself and its "other," and consequently contains the power and energy to cancel the very alienation into which it passes. For this reason the work of art, in which thought divests itself of itself[18], belongs to the realm of comprehending thought; and mind, by subjecting it[19] to scientific contemplation, thereby simply satisfies its most essential nature. For inasmuch as thought is its essence and notion, it can only ultimately find such a satisfaction after passing all the products of its activity through the alembic of rational thought, and in this way making them for the first time in very truth part of its own substance. But though art, as we shall eventually see with yet more distinctness, is far indeed from being the highest form of mind, it is only in the philosophy of art that it comes into all that it may justly claim. In the same way art is not debarred from a philosophical inquiry by reason of its unregulated caprice. As already intimated, it is its true function to bring to consciousness the highest interests of mind. An immediate consequence of this is that, so far as the _content_ of fine art is concerned, it cannot range about in all the wildness of an unbridled fancy; these interests of spirit posit categorically for the content that embodies them definite points of attachment[20], however multifold and inexhaustible may be the forms and shapes they assume. The same may be said of the forms themselves. They too do not remain unaffected by constraining principles. It is not every chance form which is capable of expressing and presenting these interests, capable of assimilating them and reproducing them. It is only through one determinate content that the form adequate to its embodiment is defined. It is upon grounds such as these that we are also able to discover a track adapted to critical reflection through the apparently endless vistas of artistic creations and shapes. We have now, I trust, by way of prelude, succeeded in restricting the content of our science on the lines of definition proposed. We have made it clear that neither is fine art unworthy of philosophical study, nor is such a philosophical study incapable of accepting as an object of its cognition the essence of fine art. II