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most advanced theories that shape our modern civilization. Civili- 
zation, in his application of philosophic analysis, is the mind real- 
izing itself. Human consciousness perceives the ideal form which 
measures and moulds the phenomenal world, although this con- 
sciousness is not awaked at once, and only gradually awakes to find 
itself contemplating its ideal prototype, its absolute personality, 
which thus becomes self-consciousness ; and this rousing of self- 
consciousness constitutes the intellectual progress of the race. It 
sees its ideas realized, or reflected, in art as well as nature, and 
makes at each step an advance in civilization. Hegel’s philosophy 
was the revelation, in the world of time and space, of self-con- 
sciousness, of the personality of the absolute, of the advancement 
of humanity in the consciousness of its unity and perfection, of the 
gradual merging of the individual into the universal, which univer- 
sal consciousness is the progress of thought from nature to spirit, 
from the sensual to the ideal, from the objective to the subjective ; 
and, under this system, art is an expression of the spiritual, a mani- 
festation, more or less clear, of the etern'al idea which measures the 
outer and phenomenal, recognizing in the external world the image 
of itself and comparing all things to this inner form, this self- 
determined and abiding idea, which is the absolute, the ego, the 
rational totality of the race, the spiritual personality. The reality 
of things—art among them—is in the idea, while all else is show 
and changing phenomena. ‘‘ The real world,’’ says an Hegelian 
writer, ‘“‘is the spiritual world ; things exist because spirits expe- 
rience them, and spirits experience them because, as parts of the 
complete life, it is their interest to be as manifold and wealthy in 
their self-realization as possible.’’ 
In a word, idealism, in which the world of nature and art is the 
evolution of spiritual existence—this is the basis, the road-bed, so 
to speak, in which Hegel’s esthetics is planted; and it must be 
confessed that it is an admirable foundation of art, going beneath 
the superficial theories now prevailing, most of which regard art as 
a mere fashion to catch, like a mirror, the flitting reflections of the 
outward, and to decorate life and amuse the senses ; and also going 
beneath that false realism which lies in the physical merely, and 
not in the mind that contains the unchangeable types of beauty. 
Art, according to Hegel, is the discovery of the type-ideas upon which 
nature and all things are formed and which must be sought within, 
not without, so that self-apprehension is the artist’s highest law, 
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