I. What we, above all, in these respects endeavoured to enforce consisted in this, that poetry has to embrace the ideality of conscious life as its content; yet, in its artistic elaboration of the same, it cannot rest satisfied with the objective form of direct perception as other plastic arts; nor can it accept as its form the emotional ideality which alone reverberates through our soul-life, nor yet that of thinking and the relations of reflective thought. It has to maintain a mediate position between the extremes of immediate objectivity and the inner life of feeling and thought. This intermediate sphere of conception overlaps both sides. From thought it borrows the aspect of ideal _universality,_ which binds together the immediate particularity of the senses in more definitive simplicity; while, on the other hand, its mode of envisagement shares with plastic art the haphazard[1] juxtaposition of objects in space. The poetic imagination, moreover, is essentially distinct from thinking in that it permits, under the mode of sensuous apprehension from which it starts, particular ideas to remain in an unrelated series or contiguity; pure thinking, on the other hand, demands and promotes the reciprocal dependence of determinate concepts on each other, an interstructure of relations, consequential or conclusive judgments, and so forth. When, therefore, the _poetical_ imagination in its art-products renders necessary an ideal unity of all particularity, such integration may easily meet with obstruction by virtue of the above-mentioned diffuseness[2] which the nature of its content forbids it wholly to eschew; and it is just this which puts it in the power of poetry to embody and present a content in organic and vital inter-connection of successive aspects and divisions, yet impressed at the same time with the apparent independence of these. And by this means it is possible for poetry to extend the selected content at one time rather in the direction of abstract thought, at another rather under the condition of the phenomenal world, and consequently to include within its survey the most sublime thoughts of speculative philosophy, no less than the external objects of Nature, always provided that the former are not put forward in the logical forms of ratiocination and scientific deduction, or the latter as void of all vital or other significance. The function, in short, of poetry is to present a complete world, whose ideal or essential content must be spread before us under the external guise of human actions, events, and other manifestations of soul;life, with all the wealth and directness compatible with such art.