Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/265

from universality. In accordance with this element of finitude, there emerges a discordance or want of harmony between that which man implicitly, in his real nature is, and what he actually is. The impress of simple necessity is not stamped on all the features and parts of the individual man. Empirical individuality and the expression of simple inwardness are mingled together, and the ideality of the natural, freedom and universality are, owing to the conditions of the merely natural life and because of a number of natural needs which come into play, obscured. Looked at from this point of view, from which an “Other” appears in man, the appearance of the outward form does not correspond with simple necessity, but the fact that on his existence in all its shapes and parts the stamp of universality, of simple necessity is impressed—which Goethe appropriately called significance, as representing the essential character of classic art—renders it necessary that the form should be planned only in Spirit, should be produced only out of it, and brought into existence only by its mediation, that it should in short be ideal and a work of art. This is something higher than a natural product. We are, no doubt, in the habit of saying that a natural product is the more excellent, just because it is made by God, while a work of art is made only by man, as if, forsooth, natural objects did not also owe their existence to immediate natural finite things, to seeds, air, water, light; as if the power of God lived only in Nature and not also in what is human, in the realm of the spiritual. If the real truth is that natural products only flourish under the conditions supplied by what for them are external and contingent circumstances, and under their influence, an influence which comes from without, then in the work of art it is the necessity which appears as the inward soul and as the notion of externality. That is to say, necessity does not here mean that objects are necessary in themselves and have necessity as their predicate, but that necessity