Under the aspect in which it is related to the _objective_ world, the beginnings of art are more intimately associated with religion. The earliest works of art are of the mythological order. In religion it is nothing less than the Absolute, which breaks to consciousness through its own impulse[23], though the determinating factors of that consciousness be the most abstract and jejune conceivable. And the earliest _phase in this evolution_ of the Absolute is the phenomenal presence of Nature, in whose existence man dimly forebodes the Absolute, and envisages the same for himself in the semblance of natural objects. In this striving Art discovers its source. We shall find, however, in this very effort art first made visible, not so much where the Absolute is descried by human eyes in the external world which immediately confronts them, a mode of Divine reality in which they rest content, but rather where man's consciousness evolves from its own substance a mode of apprehending what it conceives as the Absolute in the form of a self-subsistent externality, no less than that objective presentation which he unites with it in more or less adequate fashion. For we must remember that Art possesses a substantial content which is grasped by mind (spirit), and which, it is true, appears in external guise, but for all that in a form of externality, which is not merely immediately visible to sense, but is primarily the _product_ of _mind_ regarded as the existing fact which intrinsically comprehends that content as a whole and then expresses it. Art is consequently and by virtue of its power to create forms cognate with its own substance the _first_ interpreter of the religious consciousness; it, in fact, is the first to make the prosaic view of the objective world a thing valid to itself[24], when our humanity has fought itself essentially free as the self-consciousness of Spirit from the immediacy of sense, and sets itself over against the same in the strength of the same freedom with which it accepts and understands that objectivity as simply external fact and no more. This complete separation of the subject and object of sense-perception is, however, indicative of a considerably later phase of man's spiritual history. The first knowledge of truth, on the contrary, declares itself as an intermediate state between the purely unintelligent absorption of the individual in Nature and that spiritual condition which is entirely released from it. This intermediate state, however, in which Spirit merely envisages for itself its conceptions in the plastic forms of Nature's objects because it still fails to master any form of higher significance, although it strives through such association to bring the two aspects of its experience into one homogeneous whole, is, to put it in its general terms, the attitude of art and poetry as contrasted with that of the prosaic understanding. And for this reason we find