seek to unite these two sources of inspiration in his composition, to discover in both the material and support[393] for his conception and execution. In short, he will, acting in the first instance on the security of such general principles[394], endeavour on the one hand to fill out with more concrete detail the generality of his imaginative idea, and on the other to idealize and spiritualize the human or any other of the forms of Nature, which are submitted to serve him as particular models. The musician, on the contrary, it is true, does not abstract from all and every content, but finds the same in a text, which he sets to music, or with absolute freedom gives musical utterance to some definite mood in the form of a theme, which he proceeds to elaborate. The actual region, however, of his compositions remains the more formal ideality, in other words pure tones, and his absorption of content becomes rather a _retreat_ into the free life of his own soul, a voyage of discovery into that, and in many departments of music even a confirmation, that he as artist is free of the content. If we are in a general way permitted to regard human activity in the realm of the beautiful as a liberation of the soul, as a release from constraint and restriction, in short to consider that art does actually alleviate the most overpowering and tragic catastrophies[395] by means of the creations it offers to our contemplation and enjoyment, it is the art of music which conducts us to the final summit of that ascent to freedom. Or in other language that which the plastic arts secure through the objective fact of a plastic beauty, which displays the entirety of human life, human nature as such, its universal and ideal significance, in the detail of its particularity, without losing that essential harmony, this effect music must produce in a wholly different manner. The plastic artist need only _exhibit_, in that which is enclosed in the conception, what _was already therein from the first_, so that every detail in its essential determinacy is merely a closer explication of the totality which already floats before the mind in virtue of the content which is there to exhibit it. A figure, for example, in a plastic work of art, requires in this or that situation a body, hands, feet, bust, a head with a given expression, a given pose, other figures, or other aspects to which it is related as a whole, etc., and all these aspects presuppose the others, in making collectively essentially complete work. The elaboration of the theme is in such a case merely a more accurate analysis of that which already itself essentially contains it, and the more elaborate the picture is, which thereby confronts us, the more concentrated is the unity, and the stronger becomes the connection of the parts. The most consummate expression of detail must be, if the work of art is the best class, at the same time an elucidation of the highest form of unity.