'For a philosophy like this,' says Hegel[12], 'individual man and humanity are the ultimate standpoint:--as a fixed invincible finitude of reason, not as a reflection of the eternal beauty, or as a spiritual focus of the universe, but as an ultimate sense-nature, which however with the power of faith can daub itself over here and there with an alien supersensible. Let us suppose an artist restricted to portrait-painting; he might so far idealise as to introduce in the eye of a commonplace countenance a yearning look, and on its lips a melancholy smile, but he would be utterly debarred from depicting the Gods, sublime over yearning and melancholy--as if the delineation of eternal pictures were only possible at the cost of humanity. So too Philosophy--on this view--must not portray the Idea of man, but the abstraction of a humanity empirical and mingled with short-comings, and must bear a body impaled on the stake of the absolute antithesis; and when it clearly feels its limitation to the sensible, it must at the same time bedeck itself with the surface colour of a supersensible, and point the finger of faith to a something Higher.
'But the truth cannot be defrauded by such a consecration if finitude be still left subsisting; the true consecration must annihilate it. The artist, who fails to give actuality the true truth by letting fall upon it the ethereal illumination and taking it completely in that light, and who can only depict actuality in its bare ordinary reality and truth (a reality however which is neither true nor real) may apply the pathetic remedy to actuality, the remedy of tenderness and sentimentality, everywhere putting tears on the cheeks of the commonplace, and an O God! in their mouth. No doubt his figures in this way direct their look over the actual heavenwards, but like bats they belong neither to the race of birds nor beasts, neither to earth nor heaven. Their beauty is not free from ugliness, nor their morals without weakness and meanness: the intelligence they haply may show is not without banality: the success which enters into it is not without vulgarity, and the misfortune not without cowardice and terror; and both success and misfortune have something contemptible. So too philosophy, if it takes the finite and subjectivity as absolute truth in the logical form habitual to her, cannot purify them by bringing them into relation with an infinite: for that infinite is not itself the true, because it is unable to consume finitude. But where a philosophy consumes the temporal as such and burns up reality, its action is pronounced a cruel dissection, which does not leave man complete, and a forcible abstraction which has no truth, above all no truth for life. And such an abstraction is treated as a painful amputation of an essential piece from the completeness of the whole: that essential piece, and absolute substantiality being believed to consist in the temporal and empirical, and in privation. It is as if a person, who sees only the feet of a work of art, were to complain, should the whole work be unveiled to his eyes, that he was deprived of the privation, that the incomplete was decompleted.'