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and that by which he seizes the universal, the absolute beauty. 
Nature acts as a medium of the manifestation of the ideas, or idea, 
of beauty, and is the objective form of a subjective fact. The art- 
ist studies nature, viewing it as an intermediary of the spiritual per- 
fect truth, and not as perfect in itself; for perfection is in the idea 
consciously apprehended. 
Mr. Stillman, in a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled 
‘©The Revival of Art,’’ has favored this Hegelian theory of art, 
carrying it, however, so far as to make the artist wholly an idealist 
inspired by that beauty which he sees in his mind, and he seems to 
give but little value to the inspiration and study of nature, quoting 
Turner’s saying that ‘‘ nature puts him out.’’ 
The truth, I believe, would hold nature as that which mediates 
between and unites the ideal and the real, the subjective and the 
objective. The true idealist is he who has the deepest knowledge 
of nature, and who can use this knowledge in the formulation of 
his own conceptions. 
But, even before Hegel, Schelling attempted to construct an es- 
thetic philosophy. His poetic temperament led him to look on 
nature as unconscious art, and to believe that material forms sym- 
bolize spiritual processes, so that in nature our ideals are expressed. 
He said that ‘‘ artists were often unconscious philosophers and that 
the greatest philosophers were consummate artists.’’ 
Singularly enough, too, the pessimistic philosopher, Schopenhauer, 
set forth one of the most consistent, if but partial, theories of es- 
thetics of any of the school of the German idealists; for while 
himself belonging to this school, instead of Hegel’s ego, or spirit- 
ual personality representing the absolute, he regarded the ‘* world- 
will,’’? or the concentrated power of all world-activities, as the 
capricious and accidental but real creator of the phenomenal world 
of nature, which ‘‘ world-will’’ and its ideas we interpret by expe- 
rience. Our intelligence, as also a creature of the Wedtgeist or 
Weltwille, penetrates to the inner will of nature, and ‘‘ reaches its 
perfection in the power of contemplation that sinks into the depths 
of nature, and which belongs, above all, to the temperament of the 
productive artist.’’ Art, then, according to Schopenhauer, is ‘‘ the 
embodiment of the essence of the ‘ world-will,’ as seen or interpre- 
ted, by the artist’s intelligence. The world-will has fashions of 
expressing itself, kinds and degrees of self-objectification, and these, 
in so far as contemplation can seize them, are ultimate types or 
