t have that individuality which the artistic
ideal demands; its abstractness and one-sidedness thus render its shape
defective and whimsical. The first form of art is therefore rather a
mere search after plasticity than a capacity of true representation. The
spiritual idea has not yet found its adequate form, but is still engaged
in striving and struggling after it. This form we may, in general, call
the _symbolic_ form of art; in such form the abstract idea assumes a
shape in natural sensuous matter which is foreign to it; with this
foreign matter the artistic creation begins, from which, however, it
seems unable to free itself. The objects of external nature are
reproduced unchanged, but at the same time the meaning of the spiritual
idea is attached to them. They thus receive the vocation of expressing
it, and must be interpreted as if the spiritual idea were actually
present in them. It is indeed true that natural objects possess an
aspect which makes them capable of representing a universal meaning, but
in symbolic art a complete correspondence is not yet possible. In it the
correspondence is confined to an abstract quality, as when, for example,
a lion is meant to stand for strength.

This abstract relation brings also to consciousness the foreignness of
the spiritual idea to natural phenomena. And the spiritual idea, having
no other reality to express its essence, expatiates in all these natural
shapes, seeks itself in their unrest and disproportion, but finds them
inadequate to it. It then exaggerates these natural phenomena and shapes
them into the huge and the boundless. The spiritual idea revels in them,
as it were, seethes and ferments in them, does violence to them,
distorts and disfigures them into grotesque shapes, and endeavors by the
diversity, hugeness, and splendor of such forms to raise the natural
phenomena to the spiritual level. For here it is the spiritual idea
which is more or less vague and non-plastic, while the objects of nature
have a thoroughly definite form.

The incongruity of the two elements to each other makes the relation of
the spiritual idea to objective reality a negative one. The spiritual as
a wholly inner element and as the universal substance of all things, is
conceived unsatisfied with all externality, and in its _sublimity_ it
triumphs over the abundance of unsuitable forms. In this conception of
sublimity the natural objects and the human shapes are accepted and left
unalter