(_b_) In so far, however, as we find in painting for its fundamental type, not as in sculpture the entirely perfected resolution of the spiritual idea and the bodily form in one content, but rather the predominant exposition of the self-absorbed ideality of soul, to that extent the spatial figure in extension is not a truly adequate medium of expression for the inward life of Spirit. Art therefore abandons the previous medium of configuration, and in the place of spatial forms employs the medium of _tone_ in the limited duration of its sounds; tone in fact by its assertion of the material of Space under a purely negative relation secures for itself a finite existence nearer to ideality, and corresponds to that soul-life, which in accordance with its own inward experience conceives and grasps that life as emotion, and then expresses that content, as it enforces its claim in the unseen movement of heart and soul, in the procession of tones. The second art, therefore, which follows this principle of exposition is that of _music._
(_c_) Thereby, however, music merely is placed at the opposite extreme, and, in contrast to the plastic arts, both in respect to its content and relatively to its sensuous material, and the mode of its expression, cleaves fast to the formless content of its pure ideality. It is, however, the function of art, in virtue of its essential notion, to disclose to the senses not _merely_ the soul-life, but the manifestation and actuality of the same in its _external reality._ When, however, art has abandoned the process of veritably informing the real and consequently visible form of objective existence, and has applied its activity to the element itself of soul-life, the objective reality, to which it once more recurs, can no longer be the reality as such in itself, but one which is merely _imagined_ and prefigured to the mind or sensitive soul. The presentment, moreover, as being the communication to Spirit of creative mind working in its own domain is compelled to use the _sensuous_ material united to its disclosure simply as a mere means for such communication. It must consequently lower its denomination to that of a sign which of itself is without significance. It is at this point that _poetry_ or the art of speech, confronts us, which now incorporates its art-productions in the medium of a speech elaborated to an instrument of artistic service, precisely as intelligence already in ordinary speech makes intelligible to spiritual life all that it carries in itself. And, moreover, for the reason that it is able thus to unfold the _entire_ content of Spirit in its own medium, it is the _universal_ art, which belongs indifferently to all the types of art, and is only excluded in that case where the spiritual life which is still unrevealed to itself in its highest form of content is merely able to make itself aware of its own dim presentiments in the form and configuration of that which is external and alien to itself.