As for the worthiness of art to be philosophically considered, it is indeed true that art can be used as a casual amusement, furnishing enjoyment and pleasure, decorating our surroundings, lending grace to the external conditions of life, and giving prominence to other objects through ornamentation.  Art thus employed is indeed not an independent or free, but rather a subservient art.  That art might serve other purposes and still retain its pleasure-giving function, is a relation which it has in common with thought.  For science, too, in the hands of the servile understanding is used for finite ends and accidental means, and is thus not self-sufficient, but is determined by outer objects and circumstances.  On the other hand, science can emancipate itself from such service and can rise in free independence to the pursuit of truth, in which the realization of its own aims is its proper function.

Art is not genuine art until it has thus liberated itself.  It fulfils its highest task when it has joined the same sphere with religion and philosophy and has become a certain mode of bringing to consciousness and expression the divine meaning of things, the deepest interests of mankind, and the most universal truths of the spirit.  Into works of art the nations have wrought their most profound ideas and aspirations.  Fine Art often constitutes the key, and with many nations it is the only key, to an understanding of their wisdom and religion.  This character art has in common with religion and philosophy.  Art’s peculiar feature, however, consists in its ability to represent in sensuous form even the highest ideas, bringing them thus nearer to the character of natural phenomena, to the senses, and to feeling.  It is the height of a supra-sensuous world into which thought reaches, but it always appears to immediate consciousness and to present experience as an alien beyond.  Through the power of philosophic thinking we are able to soar above what is merely here, above sensuous and finite experience.  But spirit can heal the breach between the supra-sensuous and the sensuous brought on by its own advance; it produces out of itself the world of fine art as the first reconciling medium between what is merely external, sensuous, and transient, and the world of pure thought, between nature with its finite reality and the infinite freedom of philosophic reason.

Concerning the unworthiness of art because of its character as appearance and deception, it must be admitted that such criticism would not be without justice, if appearance could be said to be equivalent to falsehood and thus to something that ought not to be.  Appearance is essential to reality; truth could not be, did it not shine through appearance.  Therefore not appearance in general can be objected to, but merely the particular kind of appearance through which art seeks to portray truth.  To charge the appearance in which art chooses to embody its ideas