56 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



art does not give any longer that satisfaction of our 

 spiritual demands which former ages and peoples sought 

 and found in her ; a satisfaction which, certainly on the 

 part of religion, was intimately connected with art. 

 The beautiful days of Grecian art and the golden period 

 of the later middle ages are past. . . . Our age is there- 

 fore in general not favourable towards art. . . . The 

 theory of art is in our times much more in request than 

 in those ages when art, as art alone, gave complete satis- 

 faction. Art invites us to a reasoned contemplation, 

 and this not with the object of furthering art itself 

 but with the object of scientifically finding out what 

 art is." 1 



We see from this that Hegel had abandoned the 

 position occupied for a moment by the philosophy of 



35. Schelling. We noted above that Schelling had aban- 



Art aban- 

 doned by doned it likewise. They were both led to see that the 



Schelling for * 



mysticism. re }jgi ous interest of the Christian world could not be 

 exhausted by the means and in the region of Art. But 

 they differed in this, that Schelling sought a fuller com- 

 prehension by descending into mystical depths, Hegel by 

 ascending to greater intellectual heights. The second 

 point which interests us, and which is peculiar to Hegel's 

 philosophy of the beautiful, is this, that he did not do 

 justice to the Beautiful in Nature. He neither allows that 



36. natural things possess beauty in themselves they possess 



Hegel uii- 

 appreciative it only for the contemplating mind nor does he seem 



of natural * 



to consider natural beauty as equal to artistic beauty. 

 In the same introduction he makes the remark that it 

 had never occurred to anyone to emphasise specially 



1 Hegel's 'Werke,' vol. x., part i., pp. 14 sqq. 



