As Schiller understood in his Letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man, man is a creature in whom the "accidents" are truly essential; it is essentially wrong to make an abstract and absolute divorce of essence and accidents in the case of human beings. The business of man, as Hegel phrased it, is to live as a "concrete universal," a living concept who is constantly taking up the particles of life into his organismic wholeness, giving an encompassing meaning to the crazed details of our Babel of objectivity. That we participate in the power or action or genius of the infinite is demonstrated by our constant mediation between phenomena and principles, particulars and universal laws, finite and infinite. We transfigure all that is inert and opaque with the radiance of an ever-living sense of essentiality, of a "concentricity" that is and is-not our own selves.
