"But we may assert against this view, even at this stage, that the beauty of art is higher than nature. The beauty of art is beauty born of the spirit and born again, and the higher the spirit and its productions stand above nature and its phenomena, the higher too is the beauty of art above that of nature. Indeed, considered formally, even a useless notion that enters a man's head is higher than any product of nature, because in such a notion spirituality and freedom are always present."
"But what is higher about the spirit and its artistic beauty is not something merely relative in comparison with nature. On the contrary, spirit is alone the true, comprehending everything in itself, so that everything beautiful is truly beautiful only as sharing in this higher sphere and generated by it. In this sense the beauty of nature appears only as a reflection of the beauty that belongs to spirit, as an imperfect incomplete mode [of beauty], a mode which in its substance is contained in the spirit itself."
G.W.F. Hegel, trans. T.M. Knox, "Introduction" in Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) 2.
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