 Bauer’s prize manuscript of 1829, De pulchri principiis, presented the unity of concept and objectivity as the central idea of Hegel’s idealism. It examined this unity as expressed in art, comparing Hegel’s aesthetic theory to Kant’s Third Critique. The manuscript supplemented the criticisms of Kant from Hegel’s Berlin Aesthetics lectures with the logical analysis of categories provided by the 1827 Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Bauer argued that while the Critique of Judgement attempted to bridge the gap between thought and being, and thus opened the way to Hegel, it reproduced the antinomies characteristic of the first two critiques. Kant’s synthesis failed, since he continued to define the concept as merely subjective, and the object as the unknowable thing-in-itself, transcending the cognitive power. Self-consciousness, or the subject of the transcendental unity of apperception, was likewise impervious to cognition from the Kantian standpoint. In Hegel’s syllogisms of the idea, objectivity attained rational form, while the concept acquired an explicit, material existence. Beauty, life, and idea were moments in the process which constituted the actuality of reason. As the immediate unity of thought and objectivity, art illustrated the inexhaustible fecundity of the philosophical Idea. The manuscript underlined the opposition of faith and reason in its critique of the religious conceptions of the unity of thought and being. Faith was taken to be inimical to free inquiry, which is the element of reason.