If, however, it is in contrast with philosophic thought and religious and ethical principles, that the mode of appearance of the shapes of art, is described as a deception, there is certainly this in support of the view that the mode of revelation attained by a content in the realm of thought is the truest reality. In comparison, nevertheless, with the appearance of immediate sensuous existence and that of historical narration, the show of art possesses the advantage that, in its own virtue, it points beyond itself, directing us to a somewhat spiritual, which it seeks to envisage to the conceptive mind. Immediate appearance, on the contrary, does not give itself out to be thus illusive, but rather to be the true and real, though as a matter of fact such truth is contaminated and obstructed by the immediately sensuous medium. The hard rind of Nature and the everyday world offer more difficulty to the mind in breaking through to the Idea than do the products of art.
But if from this particular point of view we place art thus highly, we must not, on the other hand, fail to remember that neither in respect to content or form is art either the highest or most absolute mode of bringing the true interests of our spiritual life to consciousness. The very form of art itself is sufficient to limit it to a definite content. It is only a particular sphere and grade of truth which is capable of being reproduced in the form of a work of art. Such truth must have the power in its own determinate character to go out freely into sensuous shape and remain adequate to itself therein, if it is to be the genuine content of art, as is the case, for example, with the gods of Greece. On the other hand there is a profounder grasp of truth, in which the form is no longer on such easy and friendly terms with the sensuous material as to be adequately accepted and expressed by that medium. Of such a type is the Christian conception of truth; and above all it is the prevailing spirit of our modern world, or, more strictly, of our religion and our intellectual culture, which have passed beyond the point at which art is the highest mode under which the absolute is brought home to human consciousness. The type peculiar to art-production and its products fails any longer to satisfy man's highest need. We are beyond the stage of reverence for works of art as divine and objects deserving our worship. The impression they produce is one of a more reflective[11] kind, and the emotions which they arouse require a higher test and a further verification. Thought and reflection have taken their flight above fine art. To those who are fond of complaint and grumbling such a condition of things may be held as a form of decadence; it may be ascribed to the obsession of passion and selfish interests, which scare away the seriousness of art no less than its blithesomeness. Or we may find the fault to lie in the exigencies of the present day, the complex conditions of social and political life, which prevent the soul, entangled as it is in microscopic interests, from securing its freedom in the nobler objects of art, a condition, too, in which the intelligence itself becomes a menial to such trifling wants and the interests they excite in sciences, which subserve objects of a like nature, and are seduced into the voluntary exile of such a wilderness.