 Schelling developed his philosophy of art in a series of lectures he gave in the years 1802–03 and 1804–05, although the result of these efforts was published only posthumously in 1859. He conceives of art as the manifestation of the Infinite in the Finite, and divides the arts into formative (bildende, often rendered as “figurative”) and verbal (redende). Formative arts function by manipulating their characteristic material, that is, their medium, whereas verbal arts convey content semantically. Music belongs to the formative arts, alongside painting and sculpture. Schelling distinguishes three elements in music: rhythm, modulation (harmony), and melody. On these he projects the triad of the formative arts, claiming that rhythm is the musical in music, modulation the painterly, and melody the sculptural. As this suggests, Schelling believes rhythm, and more generally music’s temporal dimension, to be of fundamental importance. Music’s necessary form is temporal succession. Rhythm allows us to perceive a multiplicity of temporally contiguous moments as a unity, and thereby performs a function similar to that of self-consciousness, which allows us to perceive various experiences as a unified whole (Schelling 1859: §79).