beginning this emancipation was religious; through the Germans it became political as well.  The remaining divisions cannot here be detailed.  Their captions run:  The Elements of the Germanic Spirit (the Migrations; Mohammedanism; the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne); the Middle Ages (the Feudal System and the Hierarchy; the Crusades; the Transition from Feudal Rule to Monarchy, or the Cities); Modern Times (the Reformation; its Effect on Political Development; Illumination and Revolution).

The philosophy of history[1] is Hegel’s most brilliant and most lasting achievement.  His view of the state as the absolute end, the complete realization of the good, is dominated, no doubt, by the antique ideal, which cannot take root again in the humanity of modern times.  But his splendid endeavor to “comprehend” history, to bring to light the laws of historical development and the interaction between the different spheres of national life, will remain an example for all time.  The leading ideas of his philosophy of history have so rapidly found their way into the general scientific consciousness that the view of history which obtained in the period of the Illumination is well nigh incomprehensible to the investigator of to-day.

[Footnote 1:  A well-chosen collection of aphorisms from the philosophy of history is given by M. Schasler under the title Hegel:  Populaere Gedanken aus seinen Werken, 2d. ed., 1873.]

%(e) Absolute Spirit% is the unity of subjective and objective spirit.  As such, spirit becomes perfectly free (from all contradictions) and reconciled with itself.  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.