[Sidenote: _Ideas and the gods. Art and mythology._]
In Beauty are contained truth and goodness, necessity and liberty. When beauty appears to be in conflict with truth, the truth in question is a finite truth with which beauty ought not to agree, because, as we have seen, the art of naturalism and of the merely characteristic is a false art.[28] The individual forms of art, being in themselves representatives of the infinite and the universe, are called Ideas.[29] Considered from the point of view of reality, Ideas are gods; their essence, their "in-itself," is in fact equivalent to God; every idea is an idea so far as it is God in a particular form; every idea, therefore, is equal to God, but to a particular god. Characteristic of all the gods is pure limitation and indivisible absoluteness: Minerva is the idea of wisdom united with strength, but she is lacking in womanly tenderness; Juno is power without wisdom and without the sweet attraction of love, for which she is forced to borrow the cestus of Venus; Venus again has not the weighty wisdom of Minerva. What would become of these ideas if deprived of their limitations? They would cease to be objects of Imagination.[30] Imagination is a faculty which has no connexion with pure intellect or with reason (_Vernunft_) and is distinct from fancy (_Einbildungskraft_) which collects and arranges the products of art, whereas imagination intuits them, forms them out of itself, represents them. Imagination is to fancy as intellectual intuition is to reason: it is therefore the intellectual intuition of art.[31] "Reason" no longer suffices in a philosophy such as this: intellectual intuition, which for Kant was a limiting concept, is now asserted as really existing: intellect sinks to a subordinate place: even the genuine imagination which operates in art is overshadowed by this new-fangled Imagination, twin with intellectual Intuition, who sometimes changes places with this sister of hers. Mythology is proclaimed a necessary condition of all art: mythology which is not allegory, for in the latter the particular signifies only the universal, while the former is already itself the universal; which explains how easy it is to allegorize, and how fascinating are such poems as those of Homer which lend themselves to such interpretations. Christian, as well as Hellenic, art has its mythology: Christ; the persons of the Trinity; the Virgin mother of God.[32] The fine between mythology and art is as shadowy as that between art and philosophy.