The nations of Europe form a family according to the universal principle of their legislation, their ethical code, and their civilization.  But the relation among States fluctuates, and no judge exists to adjust their differences.  The higher judge is the universal and absolute Spirit alone—­the World-Spirit.

The relation of one particular State to another presents, on the largest possible scale, the most shifting play of individual passions, interests, aims, talents, virtues, power, injustice, vice, and mere external chance.  It is a play in which even the ethical whole, the independence of the State, is exposed to accident.  The principles which control the many national spirits are limited.  Each nation as an existing individuality is guided by its particular principles, and only as a particular individuality can each national spirit win objectivity and self-consciousness; but the fortunes and deeds of States in their relation to one another reveal the dialectic of the finite nature of these spirits.  Out of this dialectic rises the universal Spirit, the unlimited World-Spirit, pronouncing its judgment—­and its judgment is the highest—­upon the finite nations of the world’s history; for the history of the world is the world’s court of justice.

INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART (1820-21)

BY GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

TRANSLATED BY J. LOEWENBERG, PH.D.  Assistant in Philosophy, Harvard University

THE MEANING OF ART

The appropriate expression for our subject is the “Philosophy of Art,” or, more precisely, the “Philosophy of Fine Arts.”  By this expression we wish to exclude the beauty of nature.  In common life we are in the habit of speaking of beautiful color, a beautiful sky, a beautiful river, beautiful flowers, beautiful animals, and beautiful human beings.  But quite aside from the question, which we wish not to discuss here, how far beauty may be predicated of such objects, or how far natural beauty may be placed side by side with artistic beauty, we must begin by maintaining that artistic beauty is higher than the beauty of nature.  For the beauty of art is beauty born—­and born again—­of the spirit.  And as spirit and its products stand higher than nature and its phenomena, by so much the beauty that resides in art is superior to the beauty of nature.

To say that spirit and artistic beauty stand higher than natural beauty, is to say very little, for “higher” is a very indefinite expression, which states the difference between them as quantitative and external.  The “higher” quality of spirit and of artistic beauty does not at all stand in a merely relative position to nature.  Spirit only is the true essence and content of the world, so that whatever is beautiful is truly beautiful only when it partakes of this higher essence and is produced by it.  In this sense natural beauty appears only as a reflection of the beauty that belongs to spirit; it is an imperfect and incomplete expression of the spiritual substance.