In proceeding now to a closer determination of the several divisions of symbolic art it will be necessary, in the first place, to fix the boundary lines within which the development of the successive grades of this type moves forward. Speaking generally, as we have already observed, the entire sphere we have now to define is in principle a _forecourt_ of art. We have here, in the first instance, significant conceptions which are purely abstract, which are still in themselves destitute of essential individuality, the immediate artistic presentment of which may be as truly described either as adequate or inadequate[19]. Our first definition of boundary consists, therefore, in determining generally the earliest modes under which artistic perception and representation work themselves out[20] into actuality; on the further side of the line at the other extreme we have real art, in the direction of which symbolic art uplifts itself as to its truth. 1. In discussing the origins of this appearance of symbolic art from the _subjective_ point of view, we may draw attention to an observation made previously, that the artistic consciousness, no less than the religious, or rather we should say both in their essential unity, and we may even include the impulse of scientific inquiry, have originated in _wonder._ The man who is still unable to wonder at anything lives in a condition of crassness and obtuseness which is devoid of all interest, in which for him everything is as naught for the reason that he fails as yet to separate or unravel himself from objects around him and their own immediate and independent existence. The man, however, at the opposite extreme, whose wonder is _no longer_ excited, is the man who contemplates the entire external world as somewhat which he has made himself clear about. It may be under the abstract conceptions of the commonsense understanding resulting in some general survey of knowledge attainable by the average mind, or it may be in the noble or profounder consciousness of his own absolute spiritual freedom and universality. In either case he has converted the bare fact of such objects and their existence into some spiritual insight of their truth brought home to himself. We may conclude, then, that wonder originates in the condition where we find that man, as conscious Spirit, torn away from his first most immediate association with Nature, and from his earliest and entirely active[21] relation to desire, steps back from Nature and his own individual existence, and seeks after and finds in the objects which surround him a universal, an essential and permanent principle. Then for the first time the facts of Nature astonish him, they become for him an other-than-himself he would fain appropriate, and within which he strives to rediscover his own substance, that is the universal, thoughts, reason. For the dim foretaste here of a higher and the consciousness of the external are still unsevered, and this