Unlike in Fichte, here immediacy and infinitude are not mutually exclusive aspects of cognition. The uniqueness of the Romantic concept of the Absolute resides in the fact that the Romantic conception of infinitude regards it not as empty but “substantial and filled” (SW 1, 129). Benjamin argued that the Romantics specifically identified this structure of the Absolute with the Idea of art, and in particular with artistic form (SW 1, 135). Art criticism becomes central to this concept of infinite fulfilment because, like the epistemological relation between reflection and thought in Fichte, criticism both consummates the finite and particular work by raising it to a higher level—in which the form of the work is transformed into content as the object of criticism—and simultaneously connects the work’s particular artistic form with the continuity and unity of absolute form in the Idea of art. Criticism is, for the Romantics, the continuation and ongoing completion of the particular work through its infinite connection with other art works and works of criticism. By conceiving the Idea of art as a ‘medium of reflection’, the early Romantics dissolve the Enlightenment world-view of the positive sciences that Fichte inherited from Kant, and in doing so overcome the critical injunctions placed upon the experience of the infinite (SW 1, 132; 131). This conception of a fulfilled infinity constitutes the messianism that Benjamin claims is essential to Early Romantic epistemology.