This explains the necessity there is that art should make its appearance here, and the moments indicated are those from which it results that the god exists as a work of art. Here, however, art is not yet free and pure; it is not as yet even in the process of transition to fine art. In this perverted state it still presents itself in such a way that outward forms which belong to immediate nature, and which are not produced by Spirit, such as the sun, animals, &c., do just as well as any other for self-consciousness. The artistic form which breaks forth out of an animal, the form of the Sphinx, is more a mixture of artistic form and animal form. Here a human countenance looks forth upon us from the body of an animal; subjectivity is as yet not clear or manifest to itself. The artistic form is therefore not as yet purely beautiful, but is more or less imitation and distortion. The general character of this sphere is the intermingling of subjectivity and substantiality.
The artistic activity of this whole people was not as yet absolutely pure fine art, but rather the impulse towards the fine art. Fine art contains this determination, namely, that Spirit must have become in itself free—free from passion, from the natural life in general, from a condition of subjugation or thraldom produced by means of inner and outer Nature; it must feel the need to know itself as free, and thus to exist as the object of its consciousness.
In so far as Spirit has not yet arrived at the stage of thinking itself free, it must picture itself as free, must have itself before itself as free Spirit in sensuous perception. If it is thus to become an object for sensuous perception in the mode of immediacy, which is a product, this involves that its definite existence, its immediacy, is wholly determined by means of Spirit, has entirely such a character as implies that here it is a free spirit which is described.
This, however, is precisely what we call the Beautiful, in which all externality is absolutely significant and
