(_γγ_) In this respect, later forms of lyric art are expressly distinguishable from the folk-song. There are, no doubt, folk-songs which originate contemporaneously with the works of a genuine lyrical _art._ These latter, however, belong to a range and type of individuals such as--far from participating in more modern stages of artistic culture--are, in the entire nature of their general outlook, not yet liberated from the immediate popular sense. We must, however, not regard this distinction between the Lyric of the folk-song and the artistic poem as though it was only when reflection and the artistic consciousness, in union with deliberate executive ability, appear with all the elegance of such a union, that the Lyric attains to its perfection. Such a notion would really amount to this--that a Horace, for instance, and the Roman lyric poets generally, were to be reckoned among the finest writers of this type, or even in their own range that the Master Singers were preferable to the preceding epoch of the genuine Minnesong. Such an extreme deduction from our previous statement is not justified. What we ought to conclude is this, that individual imagination and art directed to the service of this very self-consistent personal life, which in fact constitutes its principle, presupposes also, for the basis of their true perfection, a free and self-trained recognition of imaginative idea no less than artistic activity. (_γ_) We have our _final_ phase of composition to distinguish from those already discussed. The folk-song appears before the true elaboration of a prosaically organized condition of actual conscious life. Lyric poetry of the truly artistic type, on the other hand, wrests itself away from the prosaic coordination which surrounds it, and creates from the poet's imagination, in its acquired independence, a new poetic world of inward observation and emotion, by means of which, for the first time, the true content and type of expression truly adequate to the human soul, as seen from within, becomes the object of vital art. There is, however, over and above this, a form of intelligence which, from this point of view, stands in a more exalted position than the imagination of the emotional or conceptive life, inasmuch as it is able, with more penetrative universality and more necessary coalescence to bring its content before our free cognition than is ever possible to art. This is _philosophical thought._ Conversely, however, this form is attached to the abstract condition of being exclusively evolved in the medium of thought, posited as wholly ideal universality; and, in consequence, the concrete man may find himself also constrained to express the content and the results of his philosophical consciousness in a concrete way, that is, as permeated by his temperament and sensuous perception, his imagination and feeling, in order thereby to possess and exhaust the absolute expression of all that engages either soul or intellect.