political wisdom, and adheres thereby unquestionably to that opposition between the inward life of soul and the real environment outside it. And the reason of this hesitancy is this that the bare conceptions of genuine ethical truth which it derives from its own inner world are unable to fully satisfy it; it consequently faces that which is exterior to this, to which it relates itself in a negative and hostile spirit with the object of changing it. This consciousness is, as already stated, on the one hand no doubt an inward and present content, which, self-determined and at the same time deliberately articulate, is concerned with a world that confronts it, to which this content is opposed, and which receives the task to depict this same reality in the semblance of the very traits of the corruption peculiar to that world, and which form such a contrast with its own ideas of goodness and truth. From another point of view this very contrast is cancelled by art itself. In other words, another type of art arises, in which the conflict of this opposition is not emphasized through the medium of mere thoughts, remaining thus in its disunion; but this reality in the very folly of its corruption is itself submitted to a mode of artistic presentation, which exposes it as self-destructive, and exposes it in such a way that it is precisely in and through this self-destructive process of what is of no weight that truth is enabled to assert itself upon this mirror as the secure and endurable power, and thereby all the force of a direct opposition to what is essentially true is removed from that side represented by folly and unreasonableness. This art is comedy, of the type Aristophanes dramatized for his fellow-citizens, connecting it closely with all that was essential in the world around him, and doing so with equanimity[204], in a mood of pure and hearty joviality. 3. SATIRE