The break between subject and object,
representation and thing, thought and being, infinite and finite is done
away with, and the infinite recognized as the essence of the finite. The
knowledge of the reconciliation of the highest opposites or of the infinite
_in_ the finite presents itself in three forms: in the form of intuition
(art), of feeling and representation (religion), of thought (philosophy).

(1) _Aesthetics_.--The beautiful is the absolute (the infinite in the
finite) in sensuous existence, the Idea in limited manifestation. According
to the relation of these moments, according as the outer form or the inner
content predominates, or a balance of the two occurs, we have the symbolic
form of art, in which the phenomenon predominates and the Idea is merely
suggested; or the classical form, in which Idea and intuition, or spiritual
content and sensuous form, completely balance and pervade each other, in
which the former of them is ceaselessly taken up into the latter; or
the romantic form, in which the phenomenon retires, and the Idea, the
inwardness of the spirit predominates. Classical art, in which form and
content are perfectly conformed to each other, is the most beautiful, but
romantic art is, nevertheless, higher and more significant.

Oriental, including Egyptian and Hebrew, art was symbolic; Greek art,
classical; Christian art is romantic, bringing into art entirely new
sentiments of a knightly and a religious sort--love, loyalty and honor,
grief and repentance--and understanding how by careful treatment to ennoble
even the petty and contingent. The sublime belongs to symbolic art; the
Roman satire is the dissolution of the classical, and humor the dissolution
of the romantic, ideal.

Architecture is predominantly symbolic; sculpture permits the purest
expression of the classical ideal; painting, music, and poetry bear a
romantic character. This does not exclude the recurrence of these three
stages within each art--in architecture, for example, as monumental
(the obelisk), useful (house and temple), and Gothic (the cathedral)
architecture. As the plastic arts reached their culmination among the
Hellenes, so the romantic arts culminate among the Christian nations. In
poetry, as the most perfect and universal (or the totality of) art, uniting
in itself the two contraries, the symbolic and the classical, the lyric
is a repetition of the architectonic-musical, the epic, of the
plastic-pictorial, the drama