have an intuition, through which, in one and the same
appearance, it is in itself at once conscious and unconscious,
and this condition is given in the aesthetic experience. The
beautiful is thus the solution of the riddle of the universe,
for it is the possibility of the explicit consciousness of
the unity of Nature and the Self--or the Absolute.

So Beauty is again the pivot on which a system turns. Its
place is not essentially different from that which it held
in the systems of Kant and Schiller. As the objective
possibility for the bridge between sense and reason, as the
vindication of freedom in the phenomenal world, and as
vindication of the possible unity of the real and the ideal,
or nature and self, the world-elements, its philosophical
significance is nearly the same.

With Hegel Beauty loses little of its commanding position.
The universe is in its nature rational; Thought and Being
are one. The world-process is a logical process; and nature
and history, in which spirit of the world realizes itself,
are but applied logic. The completely fulfilled or expressed
Truth is then the concrete world-system; at the same time the
life or self of the universe; the Absolute. This Hegel calls
the Idea, and he defines Beauty as the expression of the Idea
to sense.

This definition would seem to be as to the letter in accord
with the general tendency as have already outlined. It might
be said that it is but another phrasing of Schelling's thought
of the Absolute as presented to the Ego in Beauty. But not