The Breviary of Aesthetic 15
his who should bring the airy images of the fancy before
the tribunal of morality: without meaning, because the
discrimination of true and false always concerns an affirma-
tion of reality, or a judgment, but it cannot fall under the
head of an image or of a pure subject, which is not the sub-
ject of a judgment, since it is without qualification or predi-
cate. It is useless to object that the individuahty of the
image cannot subsist without reference to the universal, of
which that image is the individuation, because we do not
here deny that the universal, as the spirit of God, is every-
where and animates all things with itself, but we deny that
the universal is rendered logically explicit and is thought
in the intuition. Useless also is the appeal to the principle
of the unity of the spirit, which is not broken, but, on the
contrary, strengthened by the clear distinction of fancy from
thought, because from the distinction comes opposition, and
from opposition concrete unity.
Ideality (as has also been called this character that dis-
tinguishes the intuition from the concept, art from philoso-
phy and from history, from the affirmation of the universal
and from the perception or narration of what has hap-
pened) is the intimate virtue of art: no sooner are reflection
and judgment developed from that ideality, than art is dis-
sipated and dies: it dies in the artist, who becomes a critic;
it dies in the Contemplator, who changes from an entranced
enjoyer of art to a meditative observer of life.
But the distinction of art from philosophy (taken widely
as including all thinking of the real) brings with it other
distinctions, among which that of art from myth occupies
the foremost place. For myth, to him who believes in it,
presents itself as the revelation and knowledge of reality
as opposed to unreality,—a reality that drives away other