In tone music forsakes the element of external form and its sensuous _visibility_, and requires for the apprehension of its results another organ of sense, namely hearing, which, as also the sight, does not belong to the senses of action but those y of contemplation; and is, in fact, still more ideal than sight. For the unruffled, aesthetic observation of works of art no doubt permits the objects to stand out quietly in their freedom just as they are without any desire to impair that effect in any way; but that which it apprehends is not that which is itself essentially ideally composed[380], but rather on the contrary, that which receives its consistency in its sensuous existence. The ear, on the contrary, receives the result of that ideal vibration of material substance[381], without placing itself in a practical relation towards the objects, a result by means of which it is no longer the material object in its repose, but the first example of the more ideal activity of the soul itself which is apprehended. And for the further reason that the negativity into which the oscillating medium here enters is from one point of view an annihilation of the spatial condition, which is itself removed by means of the reaction of the body[382], the expression of this twofold negation, that is tone, is a mode of externality which, in virtue of its very mode of existence, is in its very origination self-destructive, and there and then itself fundamentally disappears. And it is by virtue of this twofold negation of externality, in which the root-principle of tone consists, that the same corresponds to the ideal personal life; this resonance which, in its essential explicitness[383], is something more ideal than the subsistent corporeality in its independent reality, also discloses this more ideal existence[384], and thereby offers a mode of expression suited to the ideality of conscious life. 2. If we now, by a reverse process, inquire of what type this inner life must be, if we are to prove it on its own account adapted to the expression of sound and tones, we may recall the fact already observed that by itself, that is, accepted as a real mode of objectivity, tone, in contrast to the material of the plastic arts, is wholly abstract. Stone and colour receive the forms of an extensive and varied world of objects, and place them before us in their actual existence. Tones are unable to do this. For musical expression therefore it is only the inner life of soul that is wholly devoid of an object which is appropriate, in other words, the abstract personal experience simply. This is our entirely empty ego, the self without further content. The fundamental task of music will therefore consist in giving a resonant reflection, not to objectivity in its ordinary material sense, but to the mode and modifications under which the most intimate self of the soul, from the point of view of its subjective life and ideality, is essentially moved.