 The first issue, aesthetic consciousness, is discussed at length in Bosanquet’s A History of Aesthetic (and, to an extent, in his introductory essay to The Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Fine Art). In A History of Aesthetic, for example, Bosanquet describes the gradual recognition, over the course of European history, of art as a synthesis of content and expression. He traces the continuity and ‘interruption’ in the understanding of art and the beautiful, from the classical Greek model (with its idea that “art... is symbolic”), through the middle ages, to the beginnings of a concrete synthesis in Schiller and Goethe, and then towards a “synthesis of content and expression in that ‘characteristic’ which overmasters the mind and feeling” (History of Aesthetic, p. 458) which he finds in Ruskin’s analysis of “the penetrative imagination”. While Hegel had earlier held that there was a development in consciousness over time—that at one point includes aesthetic consciousness—Bosanquet was not committed to the Hegelian claim that aesthetic consciousness developed dialectically. 