The Greeks never treated with real seriousness what we understand by immortality. It was only in later times that the doctrine of immortality received at the hands of Socrates a profounder significance for the introspective reflection of human intelligence. When, for example, Odysseus[216] praises the happiness of Achilles in the lower world as one excelling that of all others who were before or came after him on the ground that he, once revered as a god, is now greatest chief among the dead, Achilles in the well-known words rates this fortune at a very low rank indeed, and makes answer that Odysseus had better utter no word of comfort to him on the score of death; nay, he would rather be a mere serf of the soil, and poor enough serve a poor man for wage, than rule as lord over all the ghosts of the dead who have vanished to Hades. In romantic art, on the contrary, death is merely a decease of the natural soul and finite consciousness, a decease, which only proclaims itself as negative as against that which is itself essentially negative and abolishes what has no real substance, and is consequently the deliverance of Spirit from its finitude and division, mediating at the same time the spiritual reconciliation of the individual subject with the Absolute[217]. Among the Greeks life in its union with the existence of Nature and the external world was the only life about which you could affirm anything, and death was consequently pure negation, the dissolution of immediate reality. In the romantic view of the world, however, death receives the significance due to its negativity, in other words the negation of the negative[218], and returns back to us thereby equally as the affirmative, as the resurrection of Spirit from the bare husk of Nature and the finiteness which it has outgrown. The pain and death of the extinguished light of individual being awakes again in its return upon itself in fruition, blessedness, and in short that reconciled existence which Spirit is unable to attain to save through the dying of its negative state, in which it is shut off from its most veritable truth and life. This fundamental principle does not therefore merely affect the fact of death as it approaches man in his relation to the world of Nature, but it is bound up with a process, which Spirit has to sustain in itself, quite independently of this external aspect of negation, if life and truth are to join hands.
(_c_) The _third_ presentment of this absolute world of Spirit is co-ordinated by man, in so far as he neither makes manifest the Absolute and Divine in its immediate and essential mode as such _Divine_, nor declares positively the process in which he is exalted to the Supreme Being, and reconciled with Him, but rather continues within the ordinary sphere of his human life. Here it is the purely _finite_ aspect of that existence which constitutes the content, whether we regard it in the light of its spiritual purposes, its worldly interests, passions, collisions, suffering, and enjoyments, or from that point of view which is wholly external, that of Nature, its kingdom, and all its detailed phenomena. In order to apprehend this content with adequacy, however, we must take up two distinct positions relatively to it. In other words, it is true that Spirit, for the reason that it has secured the principle of self-affirmation, expatiates in this province, as one on which it has a just claim, and one which, as native to it, provides satisfaction, an element from which it merely extracts this positive character[219], and is permitted thereby itself to be reflected in its positive satisfaction and intimacy; yet, on the other hand, we have the fact that this content is brought down to the level of pure contingency, a contingency which is unable to claim any independent validity, for the reason that mind cannot discover therein it veritable existence, and consequently only preserves its substantial unity by independently on its own account breaking up again this finite aspect of Spirit and Nature as a thing of finitude and negation.
3. In conclusion, then, so far as the relation of this content in its entirety to its mode of presentation is concerned, it would appear, in the first place, agreeably to what we have above stated, that the content of romantic art, relatively to the Divine, at any rate, is very _limited._ (_a_) For, first, as we have already indicated, Nature is divested of the Divine principle; in other words, the sea and mountains, valleys, Time, and Night, briefly all the general processes of Nature, have here lost the worth which they carry when related to the presentation and content of the Absolute. The images of Nature receive no further expansion in a symbolic significance. The thesis that their shapes and activities might possibly sustain traits of Divine import is taken away from them. For all the mighty questions in regard to the origin of the world, in regard to the Whence, Wherefore, and Whither, of created Nature and humanity, and all the symbolical and plastic experiments in the resolution and exposition of these problems disappear at once in the revelation of God in Spirit; and we may add that also in the spiritual sphere the world of variety and colour, with the characters, actions, and events, as they were envisaged by classical art, are now concentrated in _one_ single _light-focus_ of the Absolute and its eternal history of redemption. The whole content meets, therefore, at this single point of the Inmost of Spirit[220]--that is, of feeling, imagination, soul--all that strains after a union with truth, that seeks and wrestles to bring to birth the Divine in consciousness, and to maintain it; and, furthermore, is constrained to execute the world's aims and undertakings, not so much for the _world's_ sake as to further the unique and essential undertaking of its heart by means of the spiritual conflict of man's inward nature and his reconciliation with God, presenting personality and its conservation no less than all that paves the way to them for this object, and this alone. The heroism, which makes its appearance as the result of such aspirations, is not the kind of heroism which prescribes laws by its own fiat, establishes new systems, creates and informs circumstances, but rather a heroism of submission, which accepts everything as predetermined and ordered above it, and whose energies are now wholly restricted to the task of regulating temporal events in line with such direction, and making that which is in keeping with the higher order and of independent stability a valid factor in the world as if is and in the Time-process.
For the reason, however, that this absolute content appears as concentrated to a focus in the inward _life of the soul_, and the entire process is imported into the life of mankind, the range of this content is thereby also infinitely extended. It _expands_, in fact, to a manifold variety practically without limit. For although every objective history supplies what is substantive in that self-concrete soul-life, yet for all that the subject of the same reviews it in all its aspects, presents isolated features taken from it, or unfolds it as it appears in continually novel human traits by way of addition, and may very well into the bargain both import the entire expanse of Nature, as environment and _locale_ of Spirit, and divert them to the one single object referred to. By this means the history of soul-life is infinitely rich, and can adapt its form to ever shifting conditions and situations in every possible way. And, further, if the individual at last steps forth from this absolute sphere and actively engages in worldly affairs, the range of interests, objects, and emotions will be difficult to count on the score in proportion as the spiritual self-possession is profound, agreeably to the principle in its fullest application; man is consequently distracted by an infinitely multiplied profusion of interior and exterior collisions, revolutions, and gradations of passion, and the most manifold degrees of satisfaction.
The Absolute in its unqualified and essential universality, in so far, that is, as it is unfolded in the conscious life of the human soul, constitutes the spiritual content of romantic art; and for this reason his collective humanity, no less than its entire evolution, becomes its inexhaustible material.
(_b_) Romantic art does not, however, _as art_ educe this content in the way we found was the case for the most part in symbolic art, and, above all, in the classical type and its ideal gods. Romantic art, as we have seen already, is not, in its _specific_ capacity, the instructive _revelation_, which, merely in the form of art, makes the content of truth visible to the senses. The content is already present in the conceptive mind, and the emotions independently and outside the sphere of art. _Religion_, as the consciousness of truth in its universality, is here an essential _premiss_ of art to a degree totally different from what it was in the previous cases; and, even if we look at the position in its wholly exterior aspect for the consciousness that is actual in the reality of the material world, it lies before us as the prosaic fact of the very present. That is to say, inasmuch as the content of revelation to mind is the eternal absolute nature of _mind_[221] itself, which breaks itself loose from Nature in its bareness and _subordinates_ the same, its manifestation in the immediacy of present life is such that the external material, in so far as it consists and is existent, only continues as a contingent world, out of which the Absolute recollects itself in the secret wealth of Spirit, and only by such means attains independence and truth. The external show receives thus the imprimatur of an indifferent medium, in which Spirit can repose no ultimate trust, and in which it can find no dwelling-place. The more it conceives the conformation of external reality as unworthy of its fulness the less it becomes able to seek consolation therein, or to discover its task of self-reconcilement consummated by a union therewith.
(_c_) The manner in which, therefore, romantic art gives to itself a real embodiment agreeably to the spirit of the principle above indicated, and on the side of its external appearance, is not one which essentially overleaps the ordinary presentment of reality: it is by no means averse to accept as cover for itself real existence in its finite defects and definition. That beauty therefore disappears from it, which tended to raise the outside envisagement above the soilure of Time, and the traces that unite it with a Past, in order to declare the beauty of existence in its blossom in the room of what had otherwise been a dismantled image. Romantic art has no longer for its aim the freedom and life of existence in its infinite tranquillity and absorption of the soul in the bodily presence; no more a life such as _this_ arrests it. It turns its back on this pinnacle of beauty. It interweaves the threads of its soul experience with the contingent material of Nature's workshop, and gives unfettered play to the emphatic features of ugliness itself. We have, in short, two worlds included in the Romantic, a spiritual realm essentially complete in itself, the soul-kingdom, which finds reconciliation in its own sphere, and therewith the otherwise straightforward repetition of birth, death, and resurrection now for the first time perfected in the true circular orbit, doubled back in the return upon itself, the genuine Phoenix life of Spirit. On the other hand, there is the realm of external Nature simply as such, which, released as it is from its secure association and union with Spirit, becomes now a completely empirical reality, concerning the form of which the soul cares little or nothing. In classical art Spirit controlled the empirical phenomenon and transpierced it through and through, because it was the very thing which it had to accept as its completed reality. But now the ideal kingdom is indifferent to the mode of configuration in the world of immediate sense, because this immediacy is beneath the sphere of the blessedness of essential soul-life. The external phenomenon is no longer able to express this inward life; and if any call is made upon it for this purpose, it merely is utilized to make plain that the external show is an existence which does not satisfy, and is forced to point back by suggestion to the spiritual content, the soul and its emotions, as the truly essential medium. Precisely for the same reason romantic art suffers externality on its own part to go on its way freely; and in this respect permits all and every material, flowers, trees, and so on, down to the most ordinary domestic utensils, to appear in its productions just as they are, and as the chance of natural circumstance may arrange them. Such a content as this, however, carries at the same time with it the result, that as purely exterior matter, its worth is of no validity and insignificant; it only receives its genuine worth when the soul has made itself a home in it, and it is taken to express not merely the ideal, but _spiritual inwardness_[222] itself, which, instead of blending itself with the exterior thing, appears simply to have attained its own reconciliation with itself. The ideality thus brought home to a point is that mode of expression which is without externality, invisibly declaring itself, and only itself, in other words, a tone of music simply, which is neither an object nor possesses form, a wavelet over waters[223], a ringing sound over a world, which, in sounds such as this, and the varied phenomena which are united with it, can only receive and reflect one reverberation of this self-absorption of the soul.
To sum up, then, in a word, this relation of content and form in the romantic type, where it remains true to its distinctive character, we may affirm that the fundamental note of the same, for this very reason that its principle constitutes an ever expanding universality and the restlessly active depths of heart and mind, is that of _music_, and when combined with the definite content of imagination, lyrical. This _lyrical_ aspect is likewise the primary characteristic of romantic art, a tone which gives the key-note also to the epic poem and drama, and which is wafted as a breath of soul even around the works of the plastic arts, since here, too, spirit and soul are desirous of speaking by means of the plastic shape to soul and mind.
As regards the _division_ of our subject, which we must now in conclusion determine for the examination of this our third extensive domain of artistic production on the lines of its development, we shall find that the basic notion of the romantic relatively to its substantive and progressive articulation is comprised most conveniently in three branches of division we may define as follows.
The _first_ sphere is the province of _religion_ strictly, in which the redemption history, the life, death, and resurrection of Christ constitute the central interest. The principle which is emphasized as all-important here is that self-involution which mind accomplishes by negating its immediacy and finitude, overcoming the same, and by means of this liberation secures its own self-possessed infinity and absolute self-subsistence in its own kingdom.
This self-subsistence passes, then, in the _second_ place from the Divine dwelling of essential Spirit, surrenders its pure exaltation of finite man to God, in order to enter the _temporal world._ Here it is, in the first instance, the subject of consciousness simply, which has become self-affirmative, and which possesses as the substantive material of its content, no less than as the interest of its existence, the virtues of this positive subjectivity, such as honour, love, fidelity, and bravery, the aims and obligations, in short, of romantic chivalry.
The content and form of the _third_ chapter may be generally indicated as the _formal consistency of character._ In other words, if the subjective life has been so far concentrated, that spiritual independence is its essential characteristic, it follows also that the _particular_ content, with which such independence is associated as with what is strictly its own, will also partake of such a character; this self-subsistence, however, inasmuch as it does not, as was the case in the sphere appertinent to essential and explicit religious truth, repose in the substantive core of its life, is only able to reach a formal type. Conversely the configuration of external conditions, situations, and events is now also independently free, and is involved consequently in every sort of capricious adventure. For this reason we find, to put it in general terms, as the termination of the romantic, the contingency of the exterior condition and internal life, and a falling asunder of the two aspects, by reason of which Art commits an act of suicide, and betrays the fact that conscious life must now secure forms of loftier significance, than Art alone is able to offer, in which to grasp and retain truth.
[Footnote 206: Throughout, of course, the German word translated in these paragraphs as mind or spirit is _Geist._] [Footnote 207: Absolute ideality may perhaps interpret the text more intelligibly.]
[Footnote 208: It is so because as self-identity it distinguishes itself from everything to which it is related.]
[Footnote 209: _Das wirkliche Subjekt_, Hegel means, of course, individual man.]
[Footnote 210: "Most intimate" would perhaps express the meaning more clearly.]
[Footnote 211: Hegel here gives expression to what is perhaps not wholly defensible logic, though it may be truly poetic mysticism.]
[Footnote 212: I would refer any reader who is inclined to gasp at this interpretation of Christian revelation to some useful remarks of Professor Bosanquet in his Preface to his translation, p. XXVIII.]
[Footnote 213: _Die Ausbreitung dieses Selbstanschauens, In-sich-und-Bei-sich-seyns_ _des Geistes ist der Frieden._ One of Hegel's terrors for the translator, though the sense is obvious enough.]
[Footnote 214: The analysis no doubt has its interest. But among other difficulties it is not easy to see how the argument, based as it is on rational grounds, makes for anything but annihilation.
Death is a negation--it, according to the argument, puts an end to the "process"--what remains then is apparently the evanescence of the finite spirit. This reference to "happiness" assumes that conscious individual life continues, which is a mere _pelitio principii._ If it continues the former dual aspect would seem to be implied in it. The analysis of the actual significance of death for Christendom and Greek paganism retains, of course, its validity.]
[Footnote 215: But surely in a sense personal life, if only limited to Earth's existence, may be, I do not say necessarily is, all the more valuable. This is an important aspect of the matter which is not here adequately answered, and it suggests a real grievance against the extravagant follies of a certain type of Christendom. The present feeling of the wisest minds of our own time will be inclined to regard a good deal of Hegel's remarks here as insufficient or lacking directness. One recalls those significant lines of a great writer but recently taken from us: /$ Sensation is a gracious gift But were it cramped in station, The prayer to have it cast adrift Would spout from all sensation.
$/ Hegel's point of view seems neither to be that of mysticism nor mere absorption.]
[Footnote 216: "Odyssey," XI, vv. 481-91. But this illustration is at least evidence of the high value a Greek attached to life on Earth.]
[Footnote 217: True enough as an analysis of the Christian consciousness; but the difficulty above pointed out remains so far as the writer refers to a future life, which he sometimes appears to do, sometimes not. Conditions are assumed for human personality of which we can form no conception.]
[Footnote 218: He means it is the negation of that which is itself a negation, finite existence. The conclusion is of course, as above suggested, replete with difficulty.]
[Footnote 219: That is, I presume, the positive character of natural conditions; but it may mean its own "affirmative" relation.]
[Footnote 220: _Auf die Innerlichkeit des Geistes._] [Footnote 221: Reason or Spirit are perhaps preferable.]
[Footnote 222: The German words are _das Innerliche_ and _die Innigkeit._] [Footnote 223: This is obviously not wholly independent of form.]
CHAPTER I THE RELIGIOUS DOMAIN OF ROMANTIC ART Inasmuch as romantic art, in the representation of the consciousness of absolute subjectivity, understanding this as the comprehension of all truth, the coalescence of mind with its essence--receives its substantive content in the satisfaction of soul-life, in other words the reconciliation of God with the world and therein with Himself, it follows that at this stage the Ideal for the first time is completely at home. For it was blessedness and self-subsistency, contentment, repose, and freedom which we declared as most fundamentally defining the Ideal. Of course, we cannot therefore on this account deduce the Ideal simply from the notion and reality of romantic art; but relatively to the classic Ideal the form it receives is entirely altered. This relation, already in general terms indicated, we must now before everything else establish in its fully concrete significance, in order to elucidate the fundamental type of the romantic mode of presentation. In the classical Ideal the Divine is in one aspect of it restricted to pure individuality; in another aspect the soul and spiritual blessedness of particular gods find their exclusive discharge through the physical medium; and as a third characteristic, for the reason that the inseparable unity of each individual both essentially and in its exterior form supplies the principle of the same, the negativity of the dismemberment implied in human life, that is the pain of both body and soul, sacrifice, and resignation are unable to appear as essentially pertinent to these godlike figures. The Divine of classical art falls, it is true, into an aggregation of gods, but there is no organic and essential self-division, no universally proclaimed essence such as we find in the particular presentment of man whether in form and spirit, whether empirically or subjectively considered; and just as little has it confronting it, as being itself the Absolute in invisible form, a world of evil, sin, and ignorance, together with the task of resolving such contradictions in harmony, and only by thus growing on level terms with the very truth and divine out of this reconciliation. In the notion of the absolute subjectivity, on the contrary, this opposition between substantive universality and personality is inherent, an opposition, whose consummated mediation the subjective ideality perfects with its substance, exalting thereby the substantive presence to the articulate and absolute subject of self-knowledge and volition. But there is, _secondly_, appertinent to the reality of the subjective condition conceived as mind the profounder contradiction of a finite world, through whose abrogation as finite, and by whose resultant reconciliation with the Absolute the Infinite by virtue of its own absolute activity makes its proper being self-subsistent, and so for the first time exists as absolute Spirit. The appearance of this actuality on the _terrain_, and in the configuration of the human spirit receives consequently, in respect to its _beauty_, a totally different mode of relation to that presented by classical art. Greek beauty unfolds the inward aspect of spiritual individuality solely as it is envisaged by means of its bodily shape, actions, and events, wholly expressed in what is exterior, and living wholly therein. For romantic art, on the contrary, it is absolutely necessary that the soul, albeit envisaged in the exterior medium, should at the same time demonstrate its capacity of self-withdrawal from the tenement of the body and self-substantive life. The bodily frame can therefore now only express the inwardness of mind, in so far as it makes it plain that it is not in this material existence, but in itself, that the soul discovers its congruent reality. On account of this beauty is now no longer an idealization in respect to the objective form, but rather the ideal and essential configuration of the soul itself; it is in short a beauty of spiritual ideality, that is the specific mode of such, as every content is informed and elaborated within the temple of the subjective world, and without retaining the external medium in this its permeation with Spirit. For the reason, then, that by this means the interest disappears, which consists in clarifying real existence to the point of our classical unity, and is concentrated in the contrary direction of wafting a new breath of beauty through the unseen content of the spiritual itself, art ceases to retain the old solicitude for what is exterior at all. It accepts the same directly as it may chance to find it, leaving it to take whatever form may happen to please it. The reconciliation with the Absolute is in the Romantic an act of the inward life, which no doubt is embodied externally, but which does not retain that exterior in its material realization as its essential content and object. We may observe that in close association with this indifference towards the idealizing union of soul and body, and in its relation to the external treatment of the more predominant individuality of a sitter, we find the art of _portraiture_, which does not entirely erase particular traits and lines, as they are found in Nature, and her inevitable deficiencies--defects inseparable from finite effects--in order to replace them with something more adequate. Generally speaking even here there is a certain limit to the licence given to Nature in this respect; but to the general aspect of form in the first instance it is quite indifferent; and no attempt is made to exclude wholly from it the accidental impurities of finite and sensuous existence.
We may adjoin a further quite sufficient reason for the imperative character of this radical definition of romantic art from another point of view. The classic Ideal, where we find it at the culminating point of its very truth, is self-exclusive, self-subsistent, retiring and not susceptible[224] in its nature, an orbed individual totality, which repels all else from itself. Its conformation is uniquely its own; its life is bound up in that and that exclusively, and it will harbour no affinity with what is purely empirical and contingent. Whoever, therefore, approaches an ideal such as this as spectator, is unable to appropriate its existence as an embodiment strictly akin to that of his own presence. The figures of the eternal gods, albeit human, do not belong to our mortality, for these gods have not themselves experienced the infirmities of finite existence, but are directly exalted above them. Their affinity with what is empirical and relative is interrupted. The infinite subjectivity, what we call the Absolute of romantic art, is on the contrary not absorbed in its presentment; it is rather carried into its _own_ domain, and for this very reason retains such external aspect as it possesses not so much _for itself_ as for the contemplation of others, as, in short, an exterior presence which is freely offered for this purpose. This externality must further appear in the form of common fact, the human as our senses perceive it, since it is through that that God Himself descends to the level of finite and temporal existence, in order to mediate and reconcile the absolute antithesis, which is inherent in the notion of the Absolute. For this reason our empirical humanity also contains in its bodily presence an aspect, which unfolds to man a bond of affinity and kinship, by virtue whereof he is able to contemplate even his direct natural presence with assurance; and he can do so because the Divine incarnation does not, with the severity of the classical type, thrust on one side the particular and contingent, but presents to his vision that which he himself possesses, or that which he recognizes and loves in others around him. It is just this homeliness incidental to what we ordinarily meet with which attracts and enables romantic art to entrust itself to the external aspect of reality. Inasmuch, then, as the externality which is turned adrift is called upon, through this very abandonment, to suggest the beauty of soul, the lofty pretension of its spirituality and the sacred colour of the emotional life, so, too, at the same time, it is a condition of its doing so that it be absorbed itself within the ideal realm of mind and its absolute content, and that it appropriate the same.
To sum up finally what is implied in this act of surrender we may assert that it consists in the general conception, that in romantic art the infinite subjectivity does not abide in solitary self-sufficiency, as the Greek god did, living in the full perfection and blessedness of his self-exclusion; rather it moves out of itself in relation to somewhat else, which, however, is its own substance, in which it discovers itself again and continues all the time in union with itself.
This condition of self-unity in some other that is yet its own is the real form of beauty appropriate to romantic art, the Ideal of the same, which receives for its mode and envisagement what is, in its essence, subjective ideality or inwardness, soul-life and its attendant emotions. The romantic Ideal expresses, therefore, the relation to another spiritual correlative, which is so closely associated with the ideal possessions of the first one, that it is only by virtue of this further one that the soul lives in the complete wealth of its own kingdom. This essential life of the soul in another is, when expressed in terms of emotion, the inwardness of love.
We may consequently affirm _lave_ to be the general content of the romantic, so far as the sphere of religion is concerned. Love, however, only receives its truly ideal configuration when it expresses the _positive_ reconcilement of Spirit in its immediacy. Before, however, we shall be in a position to examine this stage of the fairest and most ideal spiritual satisfaction, we must first pass in review _the process of negation_, which the absolute Subject enters in overcoming the finiteness and immediacy of its human envisagement, a process which is divulged in the life, death, and suffering of God for the world and humanity, and its possible reconcilement with God. And, secondly, we have on the other side, humanity, which is called upon conversely on its own account to pass through the very same process in order to make actual the reconciliation which is implicitly contained in its nature.
Midway within the steps of this process, in which the _negative_ aspect of the sensuous and spiritual passage 011 to death and the grave constitutes the central act of achievement, we shall find that the expression of _affirmative_ blessedness is conspicuous, which in this sphere characterizes art's most beautiful creations. For the better division of this first chapter we may examine its subject-matter as it falls into three distinct heads of inquiry.
_First_, we have the redemption-history of Christ; the phasal moments of absolute Spirit presented in the person of God Himself, in so far as He becomes man, and takes to Himself an actual existence in the world of finitude and its concrete conditions, and in this to start with isolated existence gives visible shape to the Absolute itself.
_Secondly_, we shall consider love in its positive presentment as the feeling of reconciliation between the human and the Divine; in other words the Holy Family, the maternal love of Mary, the love of Christ and that of his disciples.
_Thirdly_, we have the community before us. Here it is the Spirit of God as present by virtue of the conversion of soul and the mortification of the natural and finite sense, in short, the return of man to God, a return in which penances and pains mediate in the first instance this union of God and man.
1. THE REDEMPTION-HISTORY OF CHRIST The reconciliation of God with His own substance, history in its absolute significance, or, in one word, the process of realization, is made visible to our senses and assured to our minds by the revelation of God in the world. The content of this reconcilement as expressed in the most direct way is the coalescence in unity of the absolute essence of reality with the individual subject of human consciousness.
An individual man is God and God is an individual man. In this truth is implied the fact that the human spirit _intrinsically_, that is, relatively to its notion and essence, is Spirit in truth; and every particular individual in virtue of the humanity he connotes possesses the infinite vocation no less than the infinite significance of being an object of God and in union with God. But along with this and of a like importance the obligation is imposed on man to realize this notion, which, in the first instance, he merely possesses under the implication of his nature. In other words, he has to place before himself and attain to this union with God as the seal of his existence.
Only when he has thus consummated his proper destiny does he become essentially free and infinite Spirit. This he can only do in so far as that unity is itself the origination, the eternal ground-root of the human and Divine nature. The goal is here the explicit beginning of the process, namely, the presupposition for the religious consciousness exhibited in romantic art, that God is Himself man and flesh, that He has become this particular human individual, in whom the reconciliation consequently no longer remains as only implicit, so that it is merely to be inferred from its _notional_ existence, but asserts itself in _objective_ existence also before the perception of human sense as this particular and actually existing man. The importance of this aspect of _particularity_ consists in this that it enables all other individuals to find in the same the picture of his own reconcilement with God; it is now no longer a mere possibility, but a fact which has on this very account appeared as really accomplished in this one person.
Inasmuch, however, as this unity, conceived as the ideal reconciliation of opposed factors of one process, is no immediately unified mode of being, it is inevitable, in the _second_ place, that the process of Spirit as exemplified in this _one_ individual--the process, that is, by means of which consciousness is for the first time Spirit in Truth--should receive the form of its existence in the history of this very person. This history of Spirit attaining its consummation in one personal life consists simply in all that we have already adverted to;