Note 65 — Part I

Schelling also recognized the transfiguring power of Art; but he traced it to the fact that the artist invariably paints Nature at her zenith. See p. II, The Philosophy of Art (translation by A. Johnson): "Every growth of nature has but one moment of perfect beauty, ... Art, in that it presents the object in this moment, withdraws it from time, and causes it to display its pure being in the form of eternal beauty." This is making the natural object itself the adequate source of its own transfiguration, and the theory overlooks the power of the artist himself to see things as they are not.