THE PHILOSOPHY OF
FINE ART
BY
G. W. F. HEGEL
TRANSLATED, WITH NOTES, BY
F. P. B. OSMASTON, B.A.
AUTHOR OF "THE ART AND GENIUS OF TINTORET," "AN ESSAY
ON THE FUTURE OF POETRY," AND OTHER WORKS
VOL II
LONDON
G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
1920
CONTENTS OF VOL. II
SECOND PART
INTRODUCTION
[Evolution of the Ideal in the Particular Types of Fine Art, namely, the Symbolic, the Classical, and the Romantic. Symbolic Art seeks after that unity of ideal significance and external form, which Classical art in its representation of substantive individuality succeeds in securing to sensuous perception, and which Romantic art passes beyond, owing to its excessive insistence on the claims of Spirit]
SUBSECTION I
THE SYMBOLIC TYPE OF ART
INTRODUCTION
OF THE SYMBOL GENERALLY
[1. Symbol as a sign simply in language, colours, etc. [8]
2. Not a mere sign to represent something else, but a significant fact which presents the idea or quality it symbolizes [9]
3. Thing symbolized must have other qualities than that accepted as symbol. Term symbol necessarily open to ambiguity [10]
(a) Ambiguity in particular case whether the concrete fact is set before us as a symbol. Difference between a symbol and a simile. Illustrations [10]
(b) Ambiguity extends to-entire worlds of Art, e.g, Oriental art. Two theories with regard to mythos discussed and contrasted [14]
(c) The problems of mythology in the present treatise limited to the question, "How far symbolism is entitled to rank as a form of Art?" Will only consider symbol in so far as it belongs to Art in its own right and itself proceeds from the notion of the Ideal, the unfolding of which it commences] [19]
DIVISION OF SUBJECT
[1. The artistic consciousness originates in wonder. The effects that result from such a state. Art the first interpreter of the religious consciousness. Conceptions envisaged in plastic forms of natural objects [23]
2. The final aim of symbolic art is classical art. Here it is dissolved. The Sublime lies between the two extremes [26]
3. The stages of symbolical art classified according to their subdivisions in the chapters of this. Second Part of the entire treatise] [29]
CHAPTER I
UNCONSCIOUS SYMBOLISM
A. Unity of Significance and Form in its immediacy [36]
1. The religion of Zoroaster [37]
2. No true symbolical significance in the above [42]
3. Equally destitute of an artistic character [44]
B. Fantastic Symbolism [47]
1. The Hindoo conception of Brahmâ [50]
2. Sensuousness, measurelessness, and personifying activity of Hindoo imagination [51]
3. Conception of purification and penance [64]
C. Genuine Symbolism [65]
1. Nature no longer accepted in its immediate sensuous existence as adequate to the significance. Art and general outlook of ancient Egypt [75]
[(a) The inward import held independent of immediate existence in the embalmed corpse [76]
(b) Doctrine of immortality of the soul as held by Egyptians [76]
(c) Superterranean and subterranean modes of Egyptian art. The Pyramids] [77]
2. Worship of animals, as the vision of a secreted soul. Symbolical and non-symbolical aspects of this cult [78]
3. Works of Egyptian art are objective riddles. The Sphinx symbolic of the genius of Egypt. Memnons, Isis, and Osiris [79]
CHAPTER II
THE SYMBOLISM OF THE SUBLIME
A. Pantheism of Art [89]
1. Hindoo poetry [90]
2. Persian and Mohammedan poetry. Modern reflections of such poetry as in Goethe [92]
3. Christian Mysticism [97]
B. The Art of the Sublime [97]
1. God as Creator and Lord of a subject World. He is Creator, not Generator. His Dwelling not in Nature [100]
2. Nature and the human form cut off from the Divine (entgöttert) [101]
3. Nullity of objective fact a source of the enhanced self-respect of man. Man's finiteness and immeasurable transcendency of God. No place for immortality. The Law [103]
CHAPTER III
THE CONSCIOUS SYMBOLISM OF THE COMPARATIVE TYPE OF ART
A. Modes of Comparison originating from the side of externality [110]
1. The Fable. Aesop [113]
2. The Parable, Proverb, and Apologue [122]
3. The Metamorphosis [125]
B. Comparisons, which in their imaginative presentation originate in the Significance [128]
1. The Riddle [130]
2. The Allegory [132]
3. The Metaphor, Image, and Simile [137]
C. The Disappearance of the Symbolic Type of Art [161]
1. The Didactic Poem [163]
2. Descriptive Poetry [165]
3. Relation of both aspects of internal feeling and external object in the ancient Epigram [165]
SUBSECTION II
THE CLASSICAL TYPE OF ART
INTRODUCTION
THE CLASSICAL TYPE IN GENERAL
1. Self-subsistency of the Classical type viewed as the interfusion of the spiritual and its natural form [175]
[(a) No return of the ideal principle upon itself. No separation of opposed aspects of inward and external [175]
(b) Symbolism absent from this type except incidentally [176]
(c) Reproach of anthropomorphism] [179]
2. Greek art as the realized existence of the classical type [181]
3. Position of the creative artist under such a type [183]
[(a) His freedom no result of a restless process of fermentation. Receives his material as something assured in history or belief [183]
(b) His plastic purpose is clearly defined [184]
(c) High level of technical ability [185]
Classification of subject-matter] [186]
CHAPTER I
THE FORMATIVE PROCESS OF THE CLASSICAL TYPE OF ART
Introduction and Division of subject [189]
1. The Degradation of Animalism as such [191]
(a) The sacrifice of animals. How regarded by the Greeks [192]
(b) The Chase, or examples of such in heroic times [194]
(c) Tales of metamorphosis. Illustrations both from Greek and Egyptian traditions [194]
2. The Contest between the older and later Dynasties of Gods [201]
(a) The oracles whereby the gods attest their presence through natural existences [205]
(b) The ancient gods in contradistinction from the new [208]
[(α) The Titan natural potences included among the older régime [208]
(β) They are the powers of Earth and the stars [208] without spiritual or ethical content. Prometheus. The Erinnyes [209]
(γ) The order of these gods is a succession] [215]
(c) The conquest of the older régime of gods [217]
3. The Positive Conservation of the conditions set up by Negation [220]
(a) The Mysteries [220]
(b) Preservation of old régime still more obvious in artistic creations. Illustrations from Greek poetry [221]
(c) The Nature-basis of the later gods. Nature not in itself divine to the Greek. Illustrations of both points of view [223]
CHAPTER II
THE IDEAL OF THE CLASSICAL TYPE OF ART
Introduction and Division of subject-matter [229]
1. The Ideal of Classical Art generally [230]
(a) The Classical Ideal is a creation of free artistic activity, though it reposes on earlier historical elements [230]
[(α) The Greek gods are neither the appearance of mere external Nature, nor the abstraction from one Godhead [232]
(β) The Greek artist is a poet. But his productive power is concretely spiritual, not merely capricious [233]
(γ) The relation of the Greek gods to human life. Illustrations from Homer, etc.] [233]
(b) What is the type of the new gods of Greek art? [235]
[(α) Their concentrated individuality, or substantive characterization [236]
(β) Their beauty not merely spiritual, but also plastic [237]
(γ) Removal of them from all that is purely finite into a sphere of lofty blessedness exalted above mere sensuous shape] [238]
(c) The nature of the external representation. Sculpture, in its secure self-possession, most suited as the medium [241]
2. The Sphere or Cycle of the Individual Gods [242]
(a) What is called the "divine Universum" is here broken up into particular deities [242]
(b) Absence of an articulate system [243]
(c) The general character of their distinguishing attributes [244]
3. The particular Individuality of the Gods [246]
(a) The appropriate material for such individualization
[(α) The natural religions of symbolism a primary source. Illustrations [247]
(β) That of local conditions [250]
(γ) That of the world of concrete fact. Illustrations from Homer, etc.] [254]
(b) Retention of a fundamental ethical basis [258]
(c) Advance in the direction of grace and charm [259]
CHAPTER III
THE DISSOLUTION OF THE CLASSICAL TYPE
1. Fate or Destiny [261]
2. Dissolution through the nature of the anthropomorphism of the gods [263]
[(a) Absence or defect of the principle of subjectivity as here asserted [263]
(b) The transition to Christian conceptions only found in more modern art. The prosaic art of the Aufklärung. Illustrations [266]
(c) The dissolution of classical art in its own province] [270]
3. Satire [273]
(a) Distinction between the dissolution of classical and symbolic art [274]
(b) The Satire [276]
(c) The Roman world as the basis of the satire with illustrations ancient and modern [277]
SUBSECTION III
THE ROMANTIC TYPE OF ART
INTRODUCTION OF THE ROMANTIC IN GENERAL
1. The Principle of inward Subjectivity [282]
2. The steps in the Evolution of the content and form of the Romantic Principle [283]
[(a) Point of departure deduced from the Absolute viewed as the determinate existence of a self-knowing subject of thought and volition. Man viewed as self-possessed Divine. History of Christ [286]
(b) This process of self-recognition and reconcilement viewed as a process in which strain and conflict arise. Death as viewed by Christian and Greek art contrasted [287]
(c) The finite aspect of subjective life in the secular interests, the passions, collisions, and suffering, or enjoyment of the earthly life] [290]
3. The romantic mode of exposition in relation to its content [291]
(a) The content of romantic viewed relatively to the Divine extremely restricted. Nature divested of its association, symbolic or otherwise, with Divinity [291]
(b) Religion the premiss of romantic art in a far more enhanced degree than in symbolic art. Influence of the romantic principle on the medium adopted [293]
(c) Two worlds covered by the romantic principle, viz., the soul-kingdom of Spirit reconciled therein, and the realm of external Nature from which even the aspect of ugliness is not excluded. Latter world only portrayed in so far as soul finds a home therein] [293]
Division of subject-matter [295]
CHAPTER I
THE RELIGIOUS DOMAIN OF ROMANTIC ART
1. The Redemption history of Christ [302]
(a) The principle of Love as paramount in this religious sphere. How far Art in such a sphere is a superfluity [303]
(b) From a certain aspect the appearance of Art is necessary [303]
(c) The aspect of contingency in the particularity of an individual Person as such Divine [304]
[(α) The presentment by artists of the exterior personality of Christ [304]
(β) The conflict inherent in the religious growth, viewed as a process, though determining that process universally, is concentrated in the history of one person in the first instance [306]
(γ) The feature of death only regarded here as a point of transition to self-reconcilement] [308]
2. Religious Love [309]
(a) Conception of the Absolute as Love [309]
(b) Form of Love as self-concentrated emotion. Affiliation of such with sensuous presentment [310]
(c) Love as the Ideal of romantic art [310]
[(α) Christ as Divine Love [311]
(β) Form most compatible with Art the love of mother. Mary, mother of Jesus [311]
(γ) Love of Christ's disciples and the Christian community] [313]
3. The Spirit of the Community [313]
(a) The Martyrs [315]
(b) Penance and conversion within the soul [320]
(c) Miracles and Legends [323]
CHAPTER II
CHIVALRY
Introduction [325]
1. Honour [332]
(a) Notion of same. Contrast between Greek and modern art in this respect [332]
(b) Vulnerability of same [335]
(c) Reparation demanded. Honour a mode of self-subsistency which is self-reflective [336]
2. Love [337]
(a) Fundamental conception of. Illustrations from poetry [337]
(b) Collisions of the same [341]
[(α) That between honour and love [341]
(β) That between the supreme spiritual forces of state, family, etc., and love [342]
(γ) Opposition between love and external conditions in the prose of life and the prejudice of others] [342]
(c) Limitation of contingency inherent in the conception itself [343]
3. Fidelity [345]
(a) Loyalty of service [346]
(b) The nature of its co-ordination with a social order either in the world of Chivalry or the modern [347]
(c) Nature of its collisions. Illustrations. The "Cid," etc. [348]
CHAPTER III
THE FORMAL SELF-STABILITY OF PARTICULAR INDIVIDUALITIES
Introduction [350]
1. The Self-subsistence of individual Character [354]
(a) The formal stability of character [355]
(b) Character viewed as an inward but undisclosed totality. Illustrations from Shakespeare [359]
(c) The substantial interest in the display of such formal character. Shakespeare's vulgar characters, and the geniality of their presentment [365]
2. The Spirit of Adventure [367]
(a) The contingent nature of ends and collisions [368]
[(α) Christian Chivalry in its conflict with Moors, Arabs, and Mohammedans. Crusades. Holy Grail [369]
(β) The universal spirit of adventure in the personal experience of individuals. Dante and the "Divine Comedy" [371]
(γ) The contingency within the soul due to love, honour, and fidelity] [371]
(b) The comic treatment of such contingency. Ariosto and Cervantes, contrast between [372]
(c) The spirit of the novel or romance [375]
3. The Dissolution of the Romantic type [377]
(a) The artistic imitation of what is directly presented by Nature [379]
[(α) Naturalism in poetry. Diderot, Goethe, and Schiller [381]
(β) Dutch genre painting [382]
(γ) Interest in objects delineated related to artistic personality] [385]
(b) Individual Humour [386]
(c) The end of the romantic type of Art [388]
[(α) Conditions under which it is possible for the artist to bring the Absolute before the aesthetic sense [389]
(β) The position of Art at the present day. Analogous position of modern artist and dramatist [391]
(γ) General review of previously evolved process of Art's typical structure. What is possible for modern art and the conditions necessary. Illustration of the terminus of romantic art with the nature of the Epigram. Supreme function of Art] [394]
[SECOND PART]
EVOLUTION OF THE IDEAL IN THE PARTICULAR TYPES OF FINE ART
THE PHILOSOPHY OF FINE ART
INTRODUCTION
All that has hitherto been the object of our examination in the first part of this inquiry referred to the reality of the Idea of the beautiful as Ideal of art. In whatever direction, however, we developed the notion of the ideal art-product, we throughout applied to it a meaning of purely general signification. But the idea of the beautiful implies a totality likewise of essential differences, which as such must in veritable form assert themselves. These differences we may broadly describe as the particular modes of art, as the evolved content of that which is implied in the notion of the Ideal, and which secures actual form through art. When, however, we speak of these forms of art as of distinct species or grades[1] of the Ideal, we do not accept the term in the ordinary usage of it as though we found here in external guise particular classes of objects related to and modifying the Ideal respectively as their common genus. Species in the sense used here simply expresses the various and continuously expanding determination of the idea of the beautiful and the Ideal of art itself. The universality of the ideal representation is in the case posited not determined on the side of external existence, but is assumed to be the closer determination of itself in the explication of its own notion; or, in other words, it is the notion itself which unfolds itself in a totality of particular types of art.
More closely regarded, then, the specific types of art have their origin, as the unfolded realization of the Idea of the beautiful, in the very nature of the Idea itself, which by means of them presses forward to real and concrete appearance. Moreover, just in so far as it ceases to expand[2] in the abstract determination or concrete fulness of any one of them, it manifests itself in some other form of realized expression. For the Idea is only Idea in its essential truth in so far as it proceeds in this self-evolution by means of its own activity. And inasmuch as it is, as Ideal, immediate appearance, and moreover with each mode thereof is still identical as the idea of the beautiful, we find that in every particular phase which reveals the Ideal in its process of self-explication we have another actual manifestation which is immediately related to the essential characterization of those diverse types of yet further expansion. It really is a matter of no consequence whether we regard this process as a process of the Idea within its own substance, or that of the form under which it attains determinate existence, inasmuch as both aspects are immediately bound up with each other, and the perfecting of the Idea as content, and the perfecting of its form are but two ways of expressing the same process. Or, to put the matter in the reverse way, the defects of a given form of art of this kind betray themselves as a defect of the Idea, in so far as such defects give a limited significance to the essential nature of the Idea in external form, and as such invest it with reality. When we consequently compare such still inadequate forms of art with what most obviously presents itself for comparison, that is, the true Ideal, we must be careful not to use expressions commonly applicable to works of art that are failures, which either express nothing at all, or have discovered an incompetence to express what ought to have been expressed. Rather for every form of the Idea there is a definite mode of appearance, which clothes it precisely in one of those particular forms of art to which we have adverted, adequate in every respect thereto, and the defective or perfected character of which consists entirely in the relative truth or untruth of the determinate form, under which and through which the Idea is actually realized. For the content must first be clothed with reality and concreteness before it can attain to the form wholly adequate to its essential truth. As we have already indicated in the previous division of our subject-matter, we have three fundamental forms or types of art to examine.
First, we have the symbolical. In this the Idea is still seeking for its true artistic expression, because it is here still essentially abstract and undetermined, and consequently has not mastered for itself the external appearance adequate to its own substance, but rather finds itself in unresolved opposition to the external objects in physical Nature and the world of mankind. And inasmuch as in this crude relation to objective existence it immediately surmises its own isolation, or is carried into some form of concrete existence by means, of universal characteristics which are void of all true definition, it vitiates and falsifies the actual forms of reality which it has found, and which it seizes in a wholly capricious way[3]. And, consequently, instead of being able to identify itself completely with the object, it can only assert a kind of accord, or rather a still abstract reflection of significance and figure, a mode of representation which, being neither complete in its artistic fusion, nor capable of being completed, suffers the object to emerge as reciprocally external, strange, and inadequate to itself as it was before.
Secondly, we have the form in which the Idea, here in accordance with its true notional activity, is carried beyond the abstraction and indeterminacy of general characterization[4], is conscious of itself as free and infinite subjectivity, and grasps that self-conscious life in its real existence as Spirit (Mind). Spirit, as the free subject of consciousness, is self-determined through its own resources, and even in this its conscious grasp of self-determination possesses a form of externality adequate to express it, and one in which the essential import of that consciousness can be united with an explicit reality entirely appropriate. This second type of art, the classical, is based upon such absolutely homogeneous unity of content and form. In order, however, to make this unity complete the human spirit, in so far as it makes itself the object of art, must not be taken as Spirit in the absolute significance we refer to it, where it discovers its adequate subsistence wholly in the spiritual resources of its own essential domain, but rather as a still individualized spirit, and as such charged with a certain aspect of isolation. In other words, the free individual which classical art unites to its forms appears, it is true, as essentially universal, and consequently freed from all the mere contingence and particularity both of the subjective world of mind and the external world of Nature. But it is at the same time permeated by a universality which is itself essentially individualized. For the external form is necessarily both defined and singular by virtue of its externality, which it is only capable of completely fusing with an artistic content by representing that content as itself defined, and consequently of a limited character; and, moreover, it is only Spirit that is thus particularized which can pass into an objective shape and unite itself with the same in an inseparable unity.
In this form Art has reached the fulness of its own notion to this extent, namely, that the Idea, which is here spiritual individuality, brought into immediate accord with itself in the form of its bodily presence, receives from it a presentation so complete, that external existence is no longer able to preserve its consistency as against the ideal significance which it serves to express; or, to put it in the reverse way, the spiritual content is exclusively manifested in the elaborated form within which Art clothes it for sensuous perception, and thereby affirmatively asserts itself in the same.
Thirdly, we have the form in which the Idea of beauty grasps its own being as absolute Spirit, Spirit, that is to say, in the full consciousness of its untrammelled freedom. But for this very reason it is unable any more to obtain complete realization in forms which are external; its true determinate existence is now that which it possesses in itself as Spirit. That unity of the life of Spirit and its external appearance which we find in classical art is unbound, and it flees from the same once more into itself. It is this recoil which presents to us the fundamental type of the romantic type of art. Here we find, by reason of the free spirituality which pervades the content, such content makes a more ideal demand upon expression than the mere representation through an external or physical medium is able to supply; the form on its external side sinks therefore to a relation of indifference; and in the romantic form of art we consequently meet with a separation between content and form as we previously found it in the symbolic form, with this difference that it is now due to the subordination of matter to spiritual expression rather than the predominance of externality over ideal significance. It is in this way that symbolic art seeks after that perfected unity of ideal significance and external form, which classical art in its representation of substantive individuality succeeds in communicating to sensuous perception, and which romantic art passes over and beyond through its overwhelming insistence on the claims of Spirit.
[1] Art. Hegel takes the ordinary scientific sense to describe the meaning. The word "type" would more truly express it.
[2] Für sich selber ist. That is, having arrived at one form of determination, returns upon itself and throws off another form, just as the plant germ after arriving at the leaf expands into the bud, and so on.
[3] That is, with no reference to intelligent principle.
[4] Allgemeiner Gedanken. Hegel means the bare generalizations or abstract conceptions of thought.
SUBSECTION I
THE SYMBOLIC TYPE OF ART
INTRODUCTION
OF THE SYMBOL GENERALLY
Symbol, in the signification we here attach to the word, is not merely the beginning of art from the point of view of its notional development, but marks also its first appearance in history. We may consequently regard it as only the forecourt of art, which is principally the possession of the East, and through which, after a variety of transitional steps and mediating passages, we are at last introduced to the genuine realization of the Ideal in the classical type of art. We must therefore from the very first take care to distinguish symbol where its unique characteristics provide it with an independent sphere of its own, in which it determines the radical and effective type of a certain form of art's exposition and presentment from that kind of symbolic expression which amounts to no more than a purely external aspect of form entirely without such independent significance. In the latter sense we, in fact, come across it in the classical and romantic forms of art just as certain aspects of symbolical art are not wholly without the characteristic features of the classical Ideal, or present to us the origins of romantic art. Such reciprocal interplay between the fundamental forms of art attaches, however, merely to subsidiary images or isolated traits; it has no power whatever to modify, still less to expunge, the animating principle which essentially determines the character of the entire work of art.
In such cases where we find symbol elaborated in its entirely unique and independent form it is as a general rule characterized by the quality of the sublime, because its main impression is to show us the Idea still united to measureless dimension rather than rounded in a free and self-defined content; it would fain clothe itself with form, and yet is unable to secure in the substantial appearances of the world a definite form which is entirely adequate to express the abstractness and universality of its longing. On account of this inability to attain its purpose the Idea passes over and beyond the external existence which surrounds it instead of penetrating to the core or completely making its home therein. And this flight beyond the limits of the finite and visible world is precisely that which constitutes the general character of the sublime.
But before we proceed further it will be convenient, by way of elucidating the formal aspect of our subject, to explain at once, if in quite general terms, what we understand by the expression symbol.
Generally speaking, symbol is some form of external existence immediately presented to the senses, which, however, is not accepted for its own worth, as it lies thus before us in its immediacy, but for the wider and more general significance which it offers to our reflection. We may consequently distinguish between two points of view equally applicable to the term; first, the significance, and, secondly, the mode in which such significance is expressed. The first is a conception of the mind, or an object which stands wholly indifferent to any particular content, the latter is a form of sensuous existence or a representation of some kind or other.
1. Symbol, then, is in the first place a sign. When we speak of the significant and nothing more there is no necessary connection between the thing signified and its modus of expression whatever. This manner of its expression, this sensuous thing or image, so far from being immediately called up by that for which it is the sign, rather presents itself to the imagination as a wholly foreign content to it, by no means necessarily associated with it in a unique way. So, for example, in language tones are signs of specific conditions of idea or emotion. By far the greater number of the tones of any language are, however, associated with the ideas, which are thereby expressed entirely by chance, so far as the content of those ideas is concerned, even though the history of the development of language may show us that the original connection between the two was of a different nature, and that an essential element in the difference between one language and another consists in this, that the same idea is expressed through a different sound. Another example of such bare signs are colours[5], which we used in cockades or flags in order to express the nationality of an individual or vessel. Such colours by themselves alone carry no particular quality which can be immediately related to the thing they signify, that is, the nation which they represent. In a sense such as this, where the bond between the signification and the sign is one of indifference, symbol must not be understood when we connect the expression with art. For art consists precisely in the reciprocal relation, affinity, and substantive fusion of significance and form.
2. We must consequently interpret sign in a different sense when we speak of it as equivalent to symbol. The lion is, for example, a symbol of magnanimity, the fox symbolizes cunning, the circle eternity, the triangle the Triune God. Here we find that the lion and the fox themselves possess the qualities whose import they serve to express. In the same way the circle points beyond the mere indefinite extension, or the capriciously fixed limit of a straight line, or any other line that does not return upon itself, and which at the same time is suitable as the expression of a definite period of time; and the triangle regarded as a totality possesses the same number of sides and angles as is involved in the idea of God, when the determinations under which the religious consciousness defines the Supreme Being are expressed numerically.
In the latter forms of symbol therefore the objects presented to the senses have already in their own existence that significance, to represent and express which they are used; symbol as employed in this expanded sense is consequently no purely indifferent mark for something other than itself, but a significant fact which in its own external form already presents the content of the idea which it symbolizes. At the same time it is not the concrete thing it is itself, which it should bring before the imagination, but simply that general quality of significance which attaches to it.
3. We would, thirdly, draw attention to the fact that although symbol may not, as is the case with the purely external and formal sign, be wholly inadequate to the significance derived from it, yet, in order that it may retain its character as symbol, it must on the other hand present an aspect which is strange to it. In other words, though the content which is significant, and the form which is used to typify it in respect to a single quality, unite in agreement, none the less the symbolical form must possess at the same time still other qualities entirely independent of that one which is shared by it, and is once for all marked as significant, just as the content[6] need not necessarily be a bare abstract quality such as strength or cunning, but rather a concrete substance, which on its side, too, possesses a variety of characteristics which distinguish it from the primary quality in which its symbolic character consists, and in the same way, but to a still greater degree, from everything else that characterizes the symbolical form. The lion, for example, possesses other qualities than mere strength, the fox than mere cunning, and the apprehension of God is not necessarily bound up with conceptions which imply number. The content, therefore, as thus viewed, is also placed in a relation of indifference to the symbolical form, which represents it, and the abstract quality which it typifies may quite possibly be present in countless other existing objects. In the same way a content which is thus varied in its composition may possess many qualities, to symbolize any of which other forms will equally serve where a similar correspondence with such is apparent. The same reasoning is also applicable to the external object in which any particular content[7] is symbolically expressed. Such an object, in its concrete natural existence, possesses a number of characteristics for all of which it may stand as the symbol. The most obvious symbol for strength is unquestionably the lion, but the ox and the horn of the ox may equally serve as such, and from other points of view the ox possesses many other qualities as significant. But few objects, if any, have been brought home to the imagination with such a prodigal wealth of symbolic form and imagery as that of the Supreme Being. We may conclude, then, from the above remarks that the use of the term symbol is necessarily[8] and essentially open to ambiguity.
(a) For, in the first place, no sooner do we look for some symbol than the doubt almost invariably arises whether a particular form is to be accepted as a symbol or no; and this is so, though we set on one side the further ambiguity with reference to the particular nature of the content, which a given form under all the variety of its aspects may be held to symbolize, many of which may be employed symbolically through associating links that do not appear on the surface[9].
Now what a symbol primarily offers us is generally speaking a form, an image, which of itself is the presentment of an immediate fact. Such immediate existence, or its image, a lion for example, an eagle, or a particular colour, stands there before us as it is, a valid existing fact. The question consequently arises whether a lion, whose image is set before us, merely is set there to express the natural fact, or whether in addition to this it carries a further significance, that is the more abstract connotation of mere strength, or the more concrete one of a hero or a period of the year, husbandry and anything else we choose to infer from it; whether in fact, as we say, the image is to be taken literally, or with a further ideal significance, or possibly only with the latter. The last case finds its illustration in symbolical expressions of speech and particular words such as comprehension, conclusion[10] and others of the same kind. When such signify mental activities we have simply set before us the immediate import of a mental activity and no more without any recall to our memory of the material acts, which originally were implied in the meaning of these words. When on the contrary the picture of a lion is presented us we have not merely the significance to consider which it may bear as symbol, but also the bodily shape and presence of the king of beasts before our eyes. An ambiguity of this nature can only fully disappear when the sense attached to both aspects, namely, symbolical import, and its external form, is expressly stated, and we learn by this means the exact relation which exists between them. In that case, however, the concrete fact which is set before us ceases to be a symbol in the real meaning of the term, and becomes simply an image, the relation of which to significance is expressed by the well-known form of comparison, namely, simile. In the simile, that is to say, both factors are immediately presented to us, the general conception and its concrete image. When on the contrary reflection has not proceeded so far as to hold general conceptions in assured independence, and consequently to set them forth by themselves, in that case we find that the sensuous image to which they are cognate, and in which a significance of more general[11] import is able to find its expression is not yet conceived as separate from such a significance, but both are still immediately held together in unity. And this it is which, as we shall see more closely as we proceed, constitutes the distinction between symbol and comparison. An illustration of the latter kind may be found in that exclamation of Karl Moor, as he gazes on the setting sun: "Thus dies a hero!" Here we see that the ideal significance is expressly separated from the sensuous impression while at the same time it is associated with the picture. In other cases, it is true even of similes this act of separation in relation is not so clearly marked, and the association appears to be more immediate; in such cases it must already appear manifest from the general content of the narrative, from the position assigned to the picture, or other circumstances, that viewed as merely a statement of fact, such an image is not justified, but that some special significance or other, which cannot fail to arrest our attention, is intended by it. When, for example, Luther says:
A steadfast stronghold is our God.
or we read:
In den Ocean schifft mit tausend Masten der Jungling,
Still auf geretteten Boot treibt in den Hafen der Greis[12].
we can have no doubt whatever upon the implied significance, whether it be of a protection suggested by "stronghold," the world of hopes and life-plans symbolized in the picture of the ocean and the thousand masts; or the narrowed aims and possessions with the assured plot of ground at the end, which is reflected from the boat and the haven. In the same way when we read in the Old Testament: "May God break their teeth in their mouth, may the Lord shatter the hindermost teeth of the young lions," it is obvious that neither the words "mouth," "teeth," nor "hindermost teeth of the young lions" are used in the literal sense, but are utilized as images and sensuous ideas, which carry a significance only present to the mind, and that such significance is all that matters.
This ambiguity, then, is all the more conspicuous in the case of symbolical representation for the reason that an image, which carries a particular significance, only receives the descriptive name of symbol when such significance ceases to be expressly marked by itself, or is otherwise clearly emphasized as it is in the case of the simile. No doubt the ambiguity of the genuine symbol is to this extent removed in that by virtue of this very uncertainty the fusion of the sensuous image and its significance becomes a matter more or less of convention and custom, a feature which is indispensably necessary in the case where mere signs are used, while on the other hand the simile asserts itself as something individual, discovered on the spur of the moment to assist the meaning, and is independently clear, because it emphasizes the significance alongside of that independence. At the same time, though no doubt the symbol may be clear enough to those who are habituated to its use, and whose imaginative life is at home in such a conventional atmosphere, it is a very different matter with all who are outside this native circle, or for whom it is now a thing of the Past; for such it is only the immediate sensuous representation which is in the first instance seized, and it remains for these in every way a question of doubt, whether they are to rest satisfied with that which lies openly before their eyes, or are to accept these as indicators to yet further imagery or ideas. When, for example, we gaze in Christian churches upon the triangle in some conspicuous position on the walls, we at once recognize that the intention is not to place before the view this geometrical figure simply as such, but rather to draw our attention to its spiritual significance. If, however, we were to find it elsewhere we should probably feel equally certain that such a figure had no reference whatever, either as sign or symbol, to the Trinity. On the other hand a folk strange to the ideas which have grown up in Christian countries might easily feel doubts in both cases, and it is by no means easy for ourselves to determine with equal certainty in all cases, whether a figure of this kind is to be understood as presenting us with its literal or symbolical interpretation.
(b) Moreover this ambiguity does not merely apply to isolated cases, but extends to vast areas of the entire domain of art, to the content of an almost unlimited material open to our inspection, to the content in full of all that Oriental art has ever produced. For this reason, as we enter for the first time the world of ancient Persian, Indian, or Egyptian figures and imaginative conceptions we experience a certain feeling of uncanniness, we wander at any rate in a world of problems. These fantastic images do not at once respond to our own world; we are neither pleased nor satisfied with the immediate impression they produce on us; rather we are instinctively carried forward by it to probe yet further into their significance, and to inquire what wider and profounder truths may lie concealed behind such representations. In other productions of the same kind it is apparent at the first glance that they are, just like so many fairy tales of children, merely an interplay of pictorial fancy, a strange texture of curiosities woven together at haphazard. For children delight in just such an even surface of pictures, a play of the fancy which makes no demand on effort or intelligence, but is simply a collection tumbled together. Nations on the contrary, even in their childhood, require as the food of their imaginative life a more essential content; and this is just what in fact we find in the figures of Indian and Egyptian art, although the interpretation of such problematical pictures is only dimly suggested, and we experience great difficulty in deciphering it.
Even in the province of classical art we meet now and again with a like uncertainty, though it is the essence of classical art to be throughout clear and intelligible on its own surface without the use of symbolism of any kind. And this clarity of classical art consists in this that it comprehends the true content of Art, in other words substantive[13] subjectivity, and thereby discovers at the same time the true form, which essentially expresses nothing less than this genuine content, so that what it appears to mind, the significance that is of it is just that, which is veritably expressed in the external form, both the ideal aspect and the plastic shape being entirely adequate to each other; in symbolical art, the simile, and other forms of that kind, the image always brings before perception something in addition to that significance, for which it merely serves as the picture. At the same time classical art, too, presents us with an aspect of ambiguity. In considering the mythological phantasies of antique art it is frequently a matter most difficult to decide, whether we do rightly in taking such plastic figures simply for what they are, contenting ourselves with mere wonder over the wealth and charm, which this happy play of imaginative vigour offers us, for the reason of course that mythology is generally accepted as nothing but an idle collection of fairy tales, or whether on the contrary we have still to seek for a significance of wider range and greater depth. We shall feel the insistence of such a doubt in exceptional force where the content of these fables refers directly to the life and activity of the Divine, in cases, that is, where the stories handed down to us can only be regarded as utterly unworthy of the Supreme Being, indicative of an invention as entirely inadequate as it is in the worst possible taste. When we read, for example, the twelve labours of Hercules, or, to take a stronger case, are informed that Zeus hurled Hephaestus from Olympus on to the island of Lemnos, with the result that Vulcan remained lame ever after, we are no doubt ready to believe that the entire story is nothing but a fairy tale of the imagination. It is just as possible to believe that all the love affairs of Zeus are mere freaks of a prodigal fancy. But, on the other hand, for the very reason that such stories are told about the Supreme Divinity, it is quite equally credible that meaning of more universal import is hidden under that which such myths immediately transmit to us.
With regard to such facts as those above stated, there are two theories current of exceptional importance and contradictory to each other. The one accepts mythology as a collection of stories of purely external significance, which as such could not fail to be unworthy presentations of the Divine nature, though able, when regarded apart from such associations, to reveal to us much that is finely conceived, delightful, interesting, nay, even of great beauty. They offer us, however, no ground whatever for attempting to enlarge their significance. In this view mythology is in the form in which it is presented purely historical: under one aspect, that is, treating it as art, in its shapes, pictures, gods, together with all the practical activities and events it describes, it is amply self-sufficient, or rather by the way it brings before us that which is significant supplies its own elucidation; from another point of view, that is to say, its origin in history, we have to regard it as built up from local claims, no less than the chance caprice of priest, artist, and poet, the facts of history, foreign legends and traditions. The theory which is opposed to the above is unable to rest satisfied with the purely external husk of mythological form and narration, and insists on discovering beneath it a meaning of more universal and profounder import, to master which, as it breaks upon the surface, it conceives to be the main object of mythological inquiry regarded as the scientific examination of the mythos. In this view mythology must necessarily be apprehended as bound up with symbolism. And by symbolism all that is meant here is just this, that however bizarre, ridiculous, grotesque such myths appear to be, however much the adventitious caprice of a plastic imagination may contribute to their form, they are essentially a birth of Spirit; and in spite of it all contain in them significant ideas, that is, thoughts of universal significance upon the nature of God; they are, in short, Philosophemes.[14] In this latter sense the recent work of Creuzer on symbolism is particularly noteworthy; this writer has once more taken up the review of the mythological conceptions of the ancient world, not, as is so frequently the fashion, from the external and prosaic standpoint, or simply with the object of determining this artistic merit, but rather expressly to elucidate the intrinsic rationality of their substance. Such an inquiry proceeds from the presupposition that myths and fabulous tales have their origin in the human spirit, which is capable, no doubt, of playing freely with its notions of gods, but in its religious interest marks the point where it enters a more exalted sphere, in which reason itself is the discoverer of form, albeit it is charged with the defect of being unable at this early stage to exhibit the core from which it grows with commensurate power. And this assumption is essentially just. Religion discovers its fountain-head in Spirit, which seeks after its truth, dimly discovers it, bringing the same to consciousness by means of any form, which displays an affinity with this form of truth, be it a form of narrower or wider borders. But once grant that it is reason which seeks after such forms, and the necessity is obvious to recognize the work of reason. Such a recognition is alone truly worthy of human inquiry. Whoever shelves this problem makes himself master of nothing but a motley show of unrelated learning. If we, on the other hand, probe into, the truth of mythological conceptions as it presents itself to mind, without at the same time excluding from our grasp that other aspect of them, that is, the haphazard caprice therein exercised by the imagination, and all the external influences, local or otherwise, which have contributed to this creation, we shall then be in a position to justify the various systems of mythology. To justify the work of man in the imagery and forms that are the product of his spirit is a noble enterprise, of rarer worth than the mere heaping together of the external facts of history. The objection has no doubt been pressed against Creuzer that here, treading in the steps of the new Platonists[15], the wider significance he elucidates from the myths is a creation he attaches to them himself; that, in short, he discovers conceptions in them which are not merely without any historical basis to uphold them, but which it can be positively shown he must have first introduced before he could have found them; in other words it is asserted that neither the people of such times nor the poets or priests—although from another point of view emphasis is frequently laid on the occult wisdom of the priesthood—could have possessed any knowledge of such ideas, which would have been wholly incompatible with the prevailing culture. Such objections, of course, are entitled to their full weight. These peoples, poets, and priests have not, in fact, been conscious of universal conceptions in the particular form of universality which the human mind now discovers at the root of their mythological ideas, in the sense that they could have deliberately clothed such conceptions in the forms of symbolism. And as a matter of fact this is never maintained even by Creuzer. But however true it may be that the reflections of the ancient world over its mythology were entirely different from those of the modern, we are by no means therefore entitled to conclude that the conceptions of its mythology are not essentially symbolical, and as such must be fully accepted; rather our inference should be that in the times when these peoples created the poetry of their myths, from the midst of a life itself steeped in poetry, they would instinctively bring home to consciousness all that was most spiritual and profound in that life in the forms of the imagination rather than that of reflection, and fail to separate conceptions which were more universal or abstract from the concrete creations of their phantasy. That this really was the case is a fact which we have in this inquiry to accept as fundamentally established; we may, nevertheless, be equally prepared to admit that, in such a form of interpretation as the symbolical, theories are apt to slip in which are merely the product of artifice and ingenuity, much as is the case with etymological science.
(c) At the same time, however much we may find ourselves in general agreement with the view that mythology, with its tales of the gods and its circumstantial pictures of a persistently poetic imagination, includes within its borders a content, that is to say rational and profound religious conceptions, it is still open to us to ask in our examination of the symbolical form of art whether for the same reason all mythology and art is to be interpreted in a symbolical sense, in accordance with that typical assertion of Friedrich von Schlegel, to the effect that we are bound to look for an allegory in every artistic representation. The symbolical or allegorical is then understood in the sense that a general conception[16] is assumed to underlie every work of art as its motive principle and every mythological form, by bringing the universal character of which into prominence it should then be possible to expound the real significance of such a work or imaginative creation. This mode of treatment is, moreover, very commonly adopted in our own days. We find, for instance, in the more recent editions of Dante a marked tendency to interpret every canto in an exclusively allegorical sense, and no doubt the poetry of Dante contains many examples of such allegories. In the same way Heyne's editions of the classical poets evince the same disposition in their commentaries to elucidate the general significance of every metaphorical expression by means of the abstract conceptions of the understanding. Nor is this to be wondered at; for it is just this faculty which is most ready to seize upon symbol and allegory, while at the same time it separates the sensuous image from its significance, and by so doing destroys the unity of the artistic form, an aspect over which it is, in its zeal for a symbolical interpretation, which aims exclusively at setting the universal characteristic as such in relief, wholly indifferent.
Such an extension of symbolism over every province of mythology and art is by no means that which we have in view in our present consideration of the symbolical form of art. It is not any part of our labours to ascertain to what extent a symbolical or allegorical significance, in this enlarged use of the term, is applicable to the forms of art. On the contrary we shall restrict ourselves entirely to the question how far symbolism itself is entitled to rank as a form of art; and the question is raised in order that we may finally determine the precise relation which subsists between artistic significance and artistic form in so far as such a relation is symbolical and stands in contrast to other modes of artistic presentation, in particular those of the classical and romantic art-forms. We must consequently endeavour before everything else expressly to limit the field of our review to that portion where we find the symbolical is independently portrayed in its essential character and is open to our consideration as such, rather than attempt to make a symbolical interpretation co-extensive with the entire domain of art. And it is consistently with such a purpose that we have already subdivided the Ideal of art under its respective symbolical, classical, and romantic forms.
In the signification we give to the expression the symbolical disappears at the point where we find that a free subjectivity rather than purely abstract conceptions determines the content of the artistic product. In this case the conscious subject is his own self-assured significance, his own self-manifestation. All that he feels, conceives, does, and perfects, his qualities, his actions, and his character, all this he actually is himself; the entire gamut of his spiritual and sensuous manifestation has no further significance than that of declaring his subjective unity, which, in this process of expansion and development of its own wealth, brings before the eyes of all the man himself as master over the entire field of objective reality thus presented to him, the world in which he discovers his existence. Significance and sensuous presentment, inward and outward reality, fact and picture, are here no longer separate from each other, assert themselves here no longer as merely cognate, the characteristic distinction of the symbolic relation, but rather as a totality, in which the manifestation possesses no other reality, the reality no other manifestation either outside of or alongside with itself. That which declares itself and that which is declared is here posited[17] in its concrete unity. In this sense the gods of Greece, in so far, that is to say, as the art of Greece was able to represent them as free, self-subsistent, and unique types of personality, are to be accepted from no symbolical point of view, but as self-sufficient in their own persons. The actions of Zeus, for example, of Apollo or Athene are actions appropriated by Art to themselves and only themselves, and must not be allowed to stand for anything but the might and passion of such personages. If we once attempt to abstract from free individualities of this kind some general conception as the essential core of their significance, setting it alongside their concrete particularity as an interpretation of their entire and individual manifestation, we let fall or annihilate all that we have failed to observe, and it is precisely all in these figures which art seeks most to secure. For this reason artists have been unable to take kindly to such symbolical interpretations of all works of art and the mythological figures we find in them. For all that is left us in the sphere of art we have just been considering which is really compatible with an interpretation based on symbolism or allegory only affects subsidiary aspects, and is for that reason expressly limited to the attribute and the representative signs; the eagle, for example, stands by Zeus, an ox is the companion of the evangelist Luke; the Egyptians, on the contrary, beheld in the form of Apis the Divine itself.
The point so difficult to decide in connection with this manifestation of self-conscious freedom, otherwise so appropriate to artistic presentment, is just this, whether that which is placed before us as such a subject really possesses a subjective individuality of the above quality, or only carries the mere semblance of it in the form of a personified shadow[18]. In this latter case personality is nothing but a superficial form, which fails to express its vital substance in particular acts no less than bodily form, which would otherwise enable it to penetrate through all that is external in its appearance as its own possession, and instead of this still retains another inwardness for the external reality as its significance, which is not either true personality or subjective freedom. It is precisely at this point that we find the boundary which includes or excludes symbolic art.
Our interest, then, in the consideration of the symbol consists in this, that we recognize thereby that process within itself where we find the beginnings of art, in so far as the same proceeds from the notion of that Ideal which unfolds itself gradually as art in its truth, and while doing so recognizes each stage of symbolical art as successive steps which conduct us to the same consummation. However intimate the connection between religion and art may be we are not here concerned to pass in review either symbols or religion under the range which is co-extensive with the wider signification of the word symbol or emblematical conceptions; we have exclusively to consider that aspect of them, according to which they belong to art in its own right, handing over their religious aspect to the historian of mythology and symbolism.
DIVISION OF THE SUBJECT
In proceeding now to a closer determination of the several divisions of symbolic art it will be necessary, in the first place, to fix the boundary lines within which the development of the successive grades of this type moves forward. Speaking generally, as we have already observed, the entire sphere we have now to define is in principle a forecourt of art. We have here, in the first instance, significant conceptions which are purely abstract, which are still in themselves destitute of essential individuality, the immediate artistic presentment of which may be as truly described either as adequate or inadequate[19]. Our first definition of boundary consists, therefore, in determining generally the earliest modes under which artistic perception and representation work themselves out[20] into actuality; on the further side of the line at the other extreme we have real art, in the direction of which symbolic art uplifts itself as to its truth.
1. In discussing the origins of this appearance of symbolic art from the subjective point of view, we may draw attention to an observation made previously, that the artistic consciousness, no less than the religious, or rather we should say both in their essential unity, and we may even include the impulse of scientific inquiry, have originated in wonder. The man who is still unable to wonder at anything lives in a condition of crassness and obtuseness which is devoid of all interest, in which for him everything is as naught for the reason that he fails as yet to separate or unravel himself from objects around him and their own immediate and independent existence. The man, however, at the opposite extreme, whose wonder is no longer excited, is the man who contemplates the entire external world as somewhat which he has made himself clear about. It may be under the abstract conceptions of the commonsense understanding resulting in some general survey of knowledge attainable by the average mind, or it may be in the noble or profounder consciousness of his own absolute spiritual freedom and universality. In either case he has converted the bare fact of such objects and their existence into some spiritual insight of their truth brought home to himself. We may conclude, then, that wonder originates in the condition where we find that man, as conscious Spirit, torn away from his first most immediate association with Nature, and from his earliest and entirely active[21] relation to desire, steps back from Nature and his own individual existence, and seeks after and finds in the objects which surround him a universal, an essential and permanent principle. Then for the first time the facts of Nature astonish him, they become for him an other-than-himself he would fain appropriate, and within which he strives to rediscover his own substance, that is the universal, thoughts, reason. For the dim foretaste here of a higher and the consciousness of the external are still unsevered, and this though a contradiction between the objects of Nature and the Spirit which perceives them is already present, a contradiction in which these objects appear to repel him quite as much as they attract, and the feeling of which, in the force wherewith they thrust him away, is, in fact, the birth-pang of his very wonder.
The earliest result of this condition of wonder in man's vision of Nature is that on the one hand he sets himself in opposition to Nature and her objective world as a principle[22], and adores her as Power; on the other he is equally possessed with a desire, which craves satisfaction, to render objective to himself his intuition of a higher, essential, and universal somewhat, and to look upon its rehabilitated presence. In this two-fold aspect of his conscious life he is confronted by reality in the following way. The particular objects of Nature, and above all those elementary facts, sea, rivers, mountains, and constellations, are not received by him in the singularity of their immediate presentment to sense, but, carried up into the sphere of imaginative conception, assume for that faculty the form of universal and essentially self-subsistent existence. And we may trace the beginning of art in this, that it reflects these ideas of the imagination thus universalized and essentially independent, in visible representation for immediate perception, and sets them forth for mind in the individual form of the same as objects. The mere adoration of external facts, with its Nature-cult and fetish-cult, is not as yet on this account an art of any kind.
Under the aspect in which it is related to the objective world, the beginnings of art are more intimately associated with religion. The earliest works of art are of the mythological order. In religion it is nothing less than the Absolute, which breaks to consciousness through its own impulse[23], though the determinating factors of that consciousness be the most abstract and jejune conceivable. And the earliest phase in this evolution of the Absolute is the phenomenal presence of Nature, in whose existence man dimly forebodes the Absolute, and envisages the same for himself in the semblance of natural objects. In this striving Art discovers its source. We shall find, however, in this very effort art first made visible, not so much where the Absolute is descried by human eyes in the external world which immediately confronts them, a mode of Divine reality in which they rest content, but rather where man's consciousness evolves from its own substance a mode of apprehending what it conceives as the Absolute in the form of a self-subsistent externality, no less than that objective presentation which he unites with it in more or less adequate fashion. For we must remember that Art possesses a substantial content which is grasped by mind (spirit), and which, it is true, appears in external guise, but for all that in a form of externality, which is not merely immediately visible to sense, but is primarily the product of mind regarded as the existing fact which intrinsically comprehends that content as a whole and then expresses it. Art is consequently and by virtue of its power to create forms cognate with its own substance the first interpreter of the religious consciousness; it, in fact, is the first to make the prosaic view of the objective world a thing valid to itself[24], when our humanity has fought itself essentially free as the self-consciousness of Spirit from the immediacy of sense, and sets itself over against the same in the strength of the same freedom with which it accepts and understands that objectivity as simply external fact and no more. This complete separation of the subject and object of sense-perception is, however, indicative of a considerably later phase of man's spiritual history. The first knowledge of truth, on the contrary, declares itself as an intermediate state between the purely unintelligent absorption of the individual in Nature and that spiritual condition which is entirely released from it. This intermediate state, however, in which Spirit merely envisages for itself its conceptions in the plastic forms of Nature's objects because it still fails to master any form of higher significance, although it strives through such association to bring the two aspects of its experience into one homogeneous whole, is, to put it in its general terms, the attitude of art and poetry as contrasted with that of the prosaic understanding. And for this reason we find that the prosaic consciousness declares itself first in its full bloom, where, as is the case in the Roman and in later times throughout our own Christian world, the principle of the subjective freedom of Spirit is realized in its abstract and actually concrete form.
2. And, secondly, the final aim toward which the effort of symbolic art is directed, and with the attainment of which the symbolic type is dissolved, is classical art. But although we find in this latter form the true manifestation of art's essence first elaborated, it is not the first type of art. Rather it presupposes within its content all the various mediating and transitional stages of the symbolic form itself. It is quite true that the essential aim of that content is to reveal the notion as a rounded and self-defined totality, that is in its concreteness and actuality as the individuality of Spirit; but the notion is only then able to declare itself in such concrete form to conscious life after it has passed through a variety of mediatory stages forced upon it by the abstract conceptions which the nature of its own initial impulse presupposes. It is classical art, however, which brings to a close all the mere preliminary experiments of art in the direction of symbolism and the sublime[25]. And it is able to do this inasmuch as the subjective spirit finds in it, as its essential possession, a form truly adequate to its substance, and in the same way that the self-determining notion creates from its own potency the individual existence that fully expresses it. When once Art has discovered its true content, and by doing so found its true form, its search and striving after both, wherein the defect of symbolical art consists, is therewith at an end.
If we seek further for a closer principle of division of symbolic art within the limits of the boundaries on either extreme hitherto discussed, we shall find the same generally under the modes in accordance with which it contends with the genuine significances of art and their truly appropriate forms, the battle that is apparent in a content which is still striving in opposition to the truth of art, no less than in a form that is equally inadequate to express it. For both aspects, although externally united in the identity of one creation, are neither brought completely together themselves, nor permeated throughout with the notion of art in its truth; and for this reason they appear quite as much as contestants struggling to be free from the defects of their union. We may, in short, describe symbolic art throughout as a continuous war carried on between the comparative adequacy and inadequacy of its import and form[26]; and the varied gradations of symbolic art are not so much kinds of specific difference as they are stages and phases of one and the same incongruity between the spiritual idea and its sensuous medium.
At first, however, this contention is only potentially present, that is to say the incompatibility of these two sides, whose union is thus affirmed and enforced, is not yet openly present to consciousness. And this is so for the reason that it neither recognizes for itself in its universal nature the import which it seizes, nor is able to comprehend the realized form in its self-subsistent and self-exclusive existence; consequently, instead of representing to the senses both aspects in their difference, it is content to proceed upon the immediate appearance of identity which it enforces. In this original point of departure we have before us the as yet inseparable unity of the art-form and the symbolical expression it seeks after, fermenting, as it were, beneath the association of contradictory elements in mysterious guise—the unity, that is, of the real and primordial symbolism, whose plastic shapes are as yet not posited as symbols at all.
The termination of this process[27], on the other hand, is the disappearance and dissolution of the symbolic type altogether. The strife which has hitherto been merely implied in it is now brought home to the artistic consciousness. The act of symbolization in consequence becomes the conscious severation of the transparent significance, which is now recognized for what it is from the sensuous image cognate with it. In this severation, however, there still remains an express relation of reciprocity, which, however, declares itself as such no longer in the mode of immediate identity, but rather as a mere comparison between the two, in which that differentiation and separation which in the previous type was not brought clearly to consciousness still remains as conspicuous a factor. And this is the sphere of that symbolism where the symbol is recognized as such. Here we find the artistic import recognized and presented in its independent universality, whose concrete embodiment is expressly placed in subordination as an image of that presentment, and no more, and as such a comparative medium is utilized for the purpose of artistic representation.
Halfway between that starting-point above described and this termination of the symbolic type we find the art of the sublime. In this the essential import, posited as the universality of Spirit in its absolute self-exclusion, disengages itself in the first place from concrete existence, permitting the same to appear as a mere negative, external and subservient factor beside it, which it is unable to leave, in order that it may express itself in it, standing in its native self-subsistency. Rather it finds it necessary to declare it as that which is essentially defective and self-dissolving, and this, moreover, although it has naught beside as means for its expression than just this to which it opposes itself as external and nugatory. The splendour of this import of the sublime may be accepted in the order of the notional process as previous to that of the mode of genuine comparison for this reason, that the concrete particularity of natural and any other phenomena must necessarily be treated in the first place negatively, merely appropriated, that is to say, as the adornment and embellishment of the unreachable might of Spirit's absolute significance, before that express severation and discriminating comparison of external shapes cognate with, and yet at the same time distinct from, the import, whose image they reproduce, can assert itself.
3. The three principal stages[28] above indicated break up naturally on closer inspection into the following subdivisions we now summarize in the chapters which include them.
FIRST CHAPTER
A. The first stage which presents itself in this portion of our subject-matter is as yet neither to be described strictly as symbolical, nor as belonging strictly to art; it rather clears the road to both. It is the sphere of the immediately cognized and substantive unity of the Absolute regarded as spiritual significance with its unsevered sensuous existence in a form presented by Nature.
B. In the second stage we pass to the symbol in its real sense; the dissolution of the first unity above described here commences, and while, on the one hand, the significances assert themselves in their independent universality above the particular phenomena of Nature, on the other they are necessarily forced with a like insistency to present themselves to consciousness together with this preconceived universality in the concrete form of natural objects. In this primary and twofold struggle to spiritualize Nature, and to present that which is born of Spirit to sense, at this stage of the conflict between them, we meet with all the ferment and wild, tossed hither and thither medley, the entire fantastic and confused world that is to say of symbolic art, which half surmises, it is true, the incongruity of its manner of shaping, yet is unable to remedy the same save through the distortion of its figures, while straining after a purely quantitative sublimity that would fain devour all limits. In this phase consequently we find ourselves in a world steeped with poetic phantasies, incredibilities and miracle, yet fail to encounter one work of genuine beauty.
C. Owing to this strife between the spiritual significance and its sensuous presentation, we are conducted thirdly to the stage we may describe as that of the true symbol, on which the symbolic work of art for the first time appears in its complete character. The forms and shapes are here no longer those present to sense, which, as we saw on the first mentioned stage, were immediately coincident with the Absolute as their positive existence, without any further modification at the hands of art; neither, as in the second phase, are they intent on asserting their unreconciled material against the universality of the significance merely through extensions of the quantitative limits of Nature's objects, the ebullitions of a rioting fancy. Rather the symbolic form, which is here throughout apparent, is Art's own creation, a work not merely capable of expressing its own individuality, but from another point of view possessed with the power of presenting at the same time both the particular object that it is and the further universal significance with which it is associated, and which it thereby discloses to the mind, so that these very shapes stand before us as problems which we are imperatively called upon to unriddle and probe to the inward charge which they carry.
We may at once further venture the general remark with reference to these more clearly defined types of a symbolism still to be ranked as elementary that they spring from the religious attitude to existence of entire nations; for which reason it will form part of our plan to recall their position in history. Not that complete identification of specific types with a given period is wholly feasible. Rather it would be truer to say that particular modes of conception and presentation, when we refer them generally to some kind of artistic type, are mingled up together, so that we find the specific type, which we have reason to regard as the fundamental one in any particular nation's general view of existence, exemplified both in earlier and later peoples[29], though its repetition may only be discovered in subordinate and isolated cases. In general, however, we may say that we possess the more concrete manifestations and visible proofs of the first stage in the ancient Persian religion of the second in the Indian, of the third in that of Egypt.
SECOND CHAPTER
In the second chapter that significance, which has hitherto been more or less obscured by its particular sensuous form, has at last wrested its way to freedom, and its independent character is brought clearly to consciousness. With this victory the relation of real symbolism is dissolved; we have instead, through the way in which the absolute significance[30] is cognized as the universal substance interpenetrating the entire extension of the visible world, the art of the absolute essence[31] in the form of a symbolism of the sublime; and this now takes the place of purely symbolical and fantastic suggestions, deformities, and riddles.
We have here mainly two points of view to distinguish which are based upon differences in the relation of the substantive essence, that is the Absolute and Divine, to the finitude of the apparent. Or rather we may say that this relation is capable of being twofold, both positive and negative, although in both forms, inasmuch as it is in either case universal substance, which has to appear, it is not the particular form and import of the objective facts, but their general principle of animation and their position relatively to this substance which is made visible to sense.
A. In the first phase or type this relation is so conceived, that substance, here the All and the One delivered from every form of particularity, is immanent in the determinate phenomena as the animating principle which brings them into being and is their life; and moreover, it is affirmatively and immediately present to the vision in this immanence, and is comprehended, and made the object of representation by the individual who surrenders himself to its presence through the adoring self-absorption in this indwelling essence of the entire world of contingent and material things. In this point of view we have the art of the Pantheism which possesses the Sublime as its inherent principle, an art such as we find it in its elementary stage in India, then elaborated in all its splendour in Mohammedanism and its artistic mysticism, and finally with still profounder significance reappearing in certain manifestations of Christian mysticism.
B. The negative relation on the other hand of true Sublimity we must look for in Hebraic poetry. In this poetry of the Glorious, which is only concerned to celebrate and exalt the unimaginable Lord of the heavens and the earth that it may employ His entire creation as the passing instrument of His Power, as the messengers of His Glory, as the delight and ornament of His Greatness, this service of His Creation, be it never so magnificent[32], is deliberately posited as negative, and this for the reason that it is unable to discover any adequate or positively sufficient expression for the Power and Dominion of the Highest, and is only able to attain a genuine satisfaction by means of the subjection of the creature, which in the feeling and admission of its unworthiness is alone able with adequacy to express its insignificance[33].
THIRD CHAPTER
Through this independent self-assertion of significance, made thus transparent to consciousness in its isolated simplicity, the severation of the same from the imaged appearance, whose incommensurability over against it has already been accepted, is now essentially complete; and albeit, along with the fact of this conscious separation, both form and import may still persist in the relation of an intimate affinity, a necessity which is implied in the fact of their being symbolical art, yet this relation no longer attaches to either import or form, but is placed now in a third mode of conception, which according to its own point of view, carries relations of similarity with both these sides[34], and in reliance on these relations makes visible and declares the independently transparent significance by means of the cognate and particular image.
Owing to this change the image, instead of remaining as it was previously the unique expression of the Absolute, becomes now merely an ornament, and we thereby discover a relation which ceases to correspond with the notion of beauty. In other words image and significance, instead of being moulded one within the other, confront each other as opposites, precisely, in fact, as was the case in genuine symbolism, though then the process remained incomplete. Consequently works of art which are based on this form are of subordinate rank, and their content is unable to comprise the Absolute itself, and is necessarily restricted to circumstances and occurrences of narrower range. For this reason the forms which are now under discussion are for the most part merely used occasionally and by way of diversion.
More closely considered we have in this chapter to distinguish between three principal stages of our process.
A. To the first we appropriate those types of presentation commonly known as Fable, Parable, and Apologue. In these the severation of form and significance, which constitutes the characteristic trait of the entire sphere to which this chapter refers, is not as yet expressly recognized; that is to say, the subjective aspect of the comparison is not yet fully emphasized; consequently also the representation of the particular and concrete phenomenon, through which the universal significance is finally to declare itself, still remains the predominant factor.
B. In the second stage, on the contrary, the universal import asserts its independent mastery over the elucidating form, which now appears merely as attribute, or, under the guise of an image, capriciously selected by the mind which makes the contrast. To this type belong the Allegory, Metaphor, and Simile.
C. In the third stage we meet with the visible and complete collapse of those related aspects in the symbol which previously had either been immediately joined in union, despite the fact of their relative incongruity, or in their independent severation had still persisted under a relation of affinity[35]. Out of this arises that form of content which is cognized as independent in its prosaic[36] universality, to which the art-form has become wholly an external relation; on the one hand we find it represented by the didactic poem, on the other that very aspect of its external form is accepted for what it is, and exemplified in so-called descriptive poetry. Here we find that every association and relation of symbolism has vanished; we have to look round us for some more comprehensive union of form and content, and one more truly adequate to the notion of art.
[5] So the French expression des couleurs, and our English "the colours."
[6] Hegel uses the 'technical term Inhalt in this passage to signify either (a) the quality of significance, or (b) the object which is symbolized by virtue of some selected quality. The use of it in both senses makes the passage somewhat difficult to follow.
[7] Inhalt here evidently is the abstract quality.
[8] Necessarily because such ambiguity is implied in the idea (seinem Begriff nach).
[9] This, I think, is the sense. The language literally is, "Which a form under several possible significations, as symbol of any of which (deren) it can be employed often through connecting links (Zusammenhänge) more remote, may be taken to symbolize."
[10] The German words are Begreifen and Schliessen, which in their original sense are "to grasp with the hand" (prehendo) and "to shut" or "lock up." The English words in a still fainter form carry the same significance through the Latin language. The symbolism of language at this stage is obviously only apparent to the student of language.
[11] That is, more abstract.
[12] Or in English: /# Forth on the ocean is shipped Youth with his thousand sails: Silent in bark barely saved steals into harbour old age. #/
[13] Substantielle, that is, an artistic consciousness which is aware of its own essential nature—Spirit, and the object of pure intelligence—the Ideal.
[14] Perhaps we should rather say a Theosophy.
[15] The Alexandrine School, of which Plotinus and Philo are leading names.
[16] Ein allgemeiner Gedanke. The reference throughout this paragraph to the universality of the ideas of reflection as contrasted with the sensuous image is rather a reference to the abstract conceptions of the analytical mind, that is, which are usually understood as universals in the sense of generic conceptions, than any fuller grasp of concrete reality such as possesses a truly ideal significance. So in its application to the metaphor I imagine what is meant is that we have here the process of dry analysis which merely destroys its significance as metaphor, that is, its synthetic unity for our aesthetic sense.
[17] Ist aufgehoben, here not in the sense of being cancelled, but raised to the expression of concrete unity.
[18] Als blosse Personification, that is, an individualization which impersonates the subjective identity without possessing its concrete substance, a personified shadow like the sphinx. Such appears to be the sense.
[19] Because the content for which such shapes (Gestaltung) are given is itself incoherent, and therefore incompatible with adequate expression.
[20] Sichhervorarbeiten. Our word "elaborate" is here insufficient. Hegel means the mode in which the Idea of art works itself free from entirely potential obscurity into a living force, a real energeia. We cannot say "emerges into daylight," however, because the highest grasp of symbolic art is still only a twilight. It is like the growth of the plant-germ, still underground, or partially so.
[21] Pracktischen. Not matter-of-fact relation, but rather a relation that asserts itself exclusively in action.
[22] Als Grund, that is, as a fundamental unity of the real.
[23] Die erste näher gestaltende Dollmetcherin, lit., the first interpreter which supplies forms more nearly cognate with itself.
[24] It is valid (geltend) because it introduces there its own spiritual nature.
[25] The previous statement of Hegel must not be overlooked, however, and it may be considerably amplified, that there is much in romantic art which is related to symbolism and the sublime. Take the case of the celebrated sculpture of Michael Angelo typifying Night, Day, Dawn, and Twilight, or such modern pictures as those of Watts's "The Minotaur" and "The Spirit of Christianity."
[26] Or rather "between those aspects of its import and form which are reciprocally homogeneous and those which are not."
[27] This process of symbolic art.
[28] Hauptstufen. The word signifies either the phase or grade of a process of development, or to take the metaphor used by Hegel above (Stadien) may perhaps be better translated by "stage," as though indicating the successive stages of a journey.
[29] I think Völkern rather than Zeiten must be here understood, and the sense appears to be that the confusion indicated refers to a mingling of forms appropriate to a nation in one historical period with those that are more cognate with a people at any earlier or it may be later period. But unquestionably this attempt to identify a type as between different nations with historical periods that will harmonize with Hegel's own classification is a difficult matter as we may see by the fact that Egypt, the oldest example of all, represents the third stage. On the other hand, if the confusion referred to is applied to the particular development of any one people, the examples given by Hegel do not bear on the difficulty they illustrate.
[30] Or rather "the import of the Absolute."
[31] Substantiality, called below die Substanz; the word signifies the real essence of the Absolute.
[32] The principal clause of this sentence has no end as printed. The auxiliary must be omitted either before in diesem Dienste or eine positive. I prefer the first alternative.
[33] The relative here agrees, I think, with die Dienstbarkeit rather than die Kreatur or die Poesie. Hegel says "compatible with itself and its significance," we should rather say "its sense of its own insignificance."
[34] Hegel's words are sondern in einem subjectiven Dritten, welches in beiden Seiten nach seiner subjectiven Anschauung, etc. This "subjective third" is, as explained below, the way in which the relation between the image and the absolute significance ceases to be regarded as identical.
[35] This sentence as it stands is ungrammatical; there is a change in the construction as it proceeds.
[36] The prosaic universality is the prose of its form separated from content. It is prosaic because it is unrelated to the vitality of the notion.
CHAPTER I
UNCONSCIOUS SYMBOLISM
Now that we pass to the consideration of the several distinctions of symbolical art in more detail, we have to make a beginning with the identical beginning of art as it proceeds out of the notion of art itself. This commencement, as we have seen, is the symbolical form of art in its still immediate form wherein the appearance, as purely image or likeness, is neither brought to consciousness nor presupposed—unconscious symbolism, that is to say. Before, however, we shall be in a position to consider this form in its genuine symbolical character, it will be necessary to review several presuppositions which the notion of symbolism itself determines in order that we may utilize them for the basis upon which the symbol may unfold itself for scientific apprehension.
The point from which we make a start may be defined more closely as follows:
The fundamental root of the symbol is, regarding it from one aspect, the immediate union of the universal and thereby spiritual significance with the form which may at the same time be described as adequate and inadequate, an inadequacy, however, which is as yet unperceived. This association, however, must, on the other hand, receive a form from the imagination and art, and must not merely be conceived as a Divine reality exclusively immediate to sense. By this means the symbolical originates in the first instance with the severation of a universal import from the immediate presence of Nature, in whose existence the Absolute is contemplated as actually present. These two aspects supply us with the preliminary stages for the genuine forms of symbolic art.
The first presupposition consequently—we may call it the coming into being of the symbolical—is not that union which is the product of art, but rather just that immediate unity of the Absolute and True and its existence, which is discovered in the visible world apart from art's mediation.
A. IMMEDIATE UNITY OF SIGNIFICANCE AND FORM
In this identity of the Divine immediately envisualized, a Divine, which is brought home to consciousness as the union of its determinate existence in Nature and humanity, Nature is neither taken simply for that which it is in isolation by itself, nor is the Absolute severed from it and posited in an independent self-subsistence. Consequently it is wholly beside the point to speak of a distinction here between the Inward and the External, the significance and the form, and this for the reason that the Inward is not as yet released in its independence as significance from its immediate reality in the object of sense. When we apply here the expression import[37], such merely emphasizes our own reflection upon it, which is due to the necessity for ourselves personally to regard the form, which contains that which is spiritual and inward under the mode of sense-perception, generally as something external to us, through which we are desirous of penetrating into the Inward, that is, its animating life and significance, in order that we may understand it. For this reason we are under the necessity from the very first, when dealing with such general impressions of sense-perception, of making an essential demarcation between those cases in which the peoples, who in the first instance experienced them, themselves were clearly conscious of this Inward itself as such, that is, as a spiritual significance, and those in which the use of such expressions is only applicable to ourselves, who now and only now recognize an import of this kind in the content of that external expression of sense-envisagement.
In this primary unity such as the latter cases involve, there is no such distinction between soul and body, notion and reality, as is implied in the former. That which we describe as corporeal and sensuous, natural and human, is not merely an expression for a significance which proceeds at the same time to a point of distinction from it[38]; but the phenomenon is itself conceived as the immediate reality and presence of the Absolute, which does not in addition possess some other mode of self-subsistent existence, but is confined exclusively to the immediate presence of an object of sense, which is God or the Divine. In the service of the Lama, for example, this particular, actual human being is immediately known and adored as God, just as in other natural religions the sun, mountains, rivers, the moon, particular animals, such as the bull, ape, and so on, are looked upon as immediately Divine existences and worshipped as sacred. We may observe a similar directness, if under a mode of profounder application, even now in many aspects of the Christian consciousness. According to Catholic doctrine, for example, the consecrated bread is the real body, and the wine the real blood of God, and Christ is immediately present therein; nay, even according to the Lutheran faith, both bread and wine are converted into such real body and blood by virtue of the faith of the recipient. In this mystical union it is not merely a symbolism which is expressed, a point of view which comes into prominence as the result of it for the first time in later doctrines of the reformed Church, where we find as a result the spiritual significance is expressly severed from the sensuous object, and the external medium is then accepted as merely pointing to an import which is distinct from itself. In the same way the power of this Divine is held to operate in the miracle-working images of the Virgin as a Divine force that is immediately present within them, and not merely under symbolical guise through the significant import of such pictures.
We find, however, the most thorough and universal exemplification of this absolute and immediate unity of sense-perception in the life and religion of the ancient Zend-people, whose conceptions and institutions are preserved for us in the Zend-Avesta.
1. In other words the religion of Zoroaster beholds Light in the form of its natural existence, the sun, stars, and fire in the luminous activity and flames which proceed from them, actually as the Absolute, without separating this Divine independently from that Light either as its expression and image or the sensuous medium thereof. The Divine, the significance, is not thus severed from its determinate existence in the form of lights, however displayed. For even when light is accepted here in the sense of Goodness and Justice, and through such significance is extended to all that is rich in blessing, support, and life, it is still not taken as the mere image of such things, but Light is itself the Good. And the same view applies to the opposite of light, namely, obscurity and darkness when identified with that which is unclean, hurtful, evil, destructive, and deadly.
This point of view may be more closely defined and considered as follows:
(a) In the first instance the Divine, as the essential purity of Light[39], and the Darkness and Unclean are, it is true, personified under the names of Ormuzd and Ahriman respectively. This personification is, however, throughout entirely superficial. Ormuzd is no essentially free individuality devoid of all relation to external objects[40] as was the God of the Jews, or truly spiritual and personal as is the God of Christianity when conceived as truly personal and self-conscious Spirit; rather Ormuzd, despite the fact that he is described also as king, great spirit and judge, remains inseparable from such external existence as Light and its illuminations. He is exclusively this universal characteristic of all particular existences, in which light and thereby the Divine and Pure are realized, without any additional power to withdraw himself in a spiritual universality and independence into his own substance from that which is thus immediately presented. His consistence rests in the particular facts of existence precisely in an analogous way to that of the genus in the species. It is true that regarded as this universal he is superior to all that is wholly particular, and is the first, most supreme, the kings of kings glorious in his gold, the purest and so forth; but he retains his existence none the less exclusively in all that is luminous and pure as Ahriman in all that is obscure, evil, destructive, and charged with disease.
(b) As a result this mode of vision is at the same time extended to the conception of an empire of light and darkness, and the strife between these forces. In the empire of Ormuzd it is in the first place the Amschaspands, as the seven principal lights of heaven, which receive adoration as Divinity, inasmuch as they are the essential particular existences of Light, and for this reason constitute as a pure and spacious empeopled heaven, the existence of the Divine itself. Every Amschaspand, to which Ormuzd belongs, has assigned to it days of precedence, blessing, and beneficence. The Izeds and Ferners carry the conception still further into specification, which it is probable enough are personifications of Ormuzd himself, albeit they add to him no further shape that we may envisage as human, so that neither the spiritual nor the bodily mode of subjectivity, but simply the existence as light, appearance, illumination, splendour, remains the essential characteristic of the object envisaged.
In the same way also the particular objects of Nature, which themselves do not exist in external form as lights and luminous bodies, such as animals, plants, and so forth, no less than the forms which characterize the human world, whether we view it under its spiritual or bodily presentment, in other words the particular activities and conditions of it, the entire life of the state, the king with the seven great men who support him, the division of classes, cities, the various provinces with their governors, all that is warranted by experience as typical of the best and purest for the protection of the rest—the entire reality, in fact, of this life is regarded as an existence of Ormuzd. For everything that carries within itself and promulgates what has solidity, life, and substance is an existence of Light and Purity, and consequently an existence of Ormuzd; every particular truth, excellence, love, justness, every individual example of life, beneficence, protection, spiritual power and enjoyment or benignity is, according to Zoroaster, regarded as essentially Light and Divine. The empire of Ormuzd is the Pure and Illuminating of visible reality; and conformably to this there is no distinction between the phenomena of Nature or Spirit, just as Light and Goodness, the spiritual and the sensuous quality, are inseparably blended in the conception of Ormuzd himself. The splendour of a creature is consequently for Zoroaster the very substance of spirit, force, and life-exhalations of every kind, in so far, that is, as they tend to actual conservation and to the removal of everything positively evil and hurtful, for that which is the Real and the Good, whether in beast, man, or vegetable life, is Light, and it is according to the measure and mode of display of this luminousness that the relative power or weakness of the splendour of all objects is determined.
An articulation and graduated division of similar character is found in the empire of Ahriman, merely with the difference that what is spiritually or naturally evil, and generally the destructive and actively negative principle asserts itself in actual masterdom. But the might of Ahriman must not be suffered to spread; the aim of the entire world is consequently assumed to be that of annihilating the Empire of Ahriman, in order that the life, presence, and dominion of Ormuzd may prevail throughout creation.
(c) To this exclusive object the entire life of humanity is consecrate. The life-task of every man consists exclusively in a purification of soul and body, and in the extension of this blessing and this conflict with Ahriman throughout all the conditions and activities of the life of man or Nature. The highest and most sacred duty is consequently to glorify Ormuzd in his creation, and to love, honour, and conform oneself to all that proceeds from his Light and is essentially pure. Ormuzd is the beginning and end of all adoration. Above all else the Parsee is moved to summon the life of Ormuzd in thought and speech; he is the main object of his prayers. And in the exaltation of him, from whom the entire world of the Pure has streamed in its splendour, the devotee is in duty bound to accommodate his adoration of particular objects according to the measure in which they proclaim his majesty, worth, and perfection. So far as they are good and ring sound, to that extent, the Parsee reasons with himself, is Ormuzd alive within them; he loves them as the children of his purity, yea, rejoices over them as in the beginning of his substance, forasmuch as through him was everything brought forth in newness and purity. And for the same reason is all prayer directed first and foremost to the Amschaspands as the most intimate reflections of Ormuzd, as the primates of supreme splendour who surround his throne and advance his dominion. Such prayer to these heavenly spirits is immediately directed to their qualities and activities, and in the case of stars at the time of their uprising. The sun is invoked by day, and always with the changes appropriate to his own motion through sunrise, noonday, or sunset. From morning till noonday the devotion of the Parsee centres in this that Ormuzd may exalt his splendour; at evening he prays that the sun may through Ormuzd and the protecting care of every Tzed perfect the course of his life. But principally we find honour paid to Mithras, who, as the fruit-bringer to the Earth and the wilderness, pours forth the fermenting sap over all Nature, and as mighty champion against all the Devas of contention, war, confusion, and destruction, is the author of peace.
In addition to this the Parsee, in his generally single-toned songs of praise, exalts his ideals, that is, the purest and most veritable examples of human life, the Ferver conceived as pure human spirits, on whatever portion of the Earth's surface they live or have lived. In the chief place prayer is offered to the pure spirit of Zoroaster, and after him to the leading lights of all classes, cities, and provinces; and already in this religion, we find that the spirits of all mankind are contemplated as united together with a sufficient bond in that they are members in the living association of Light, which hereafter in Gorotman shall receive a yet more perfect union.
Finally, not even the animals, mountains, and vegetable world are forgotten, but are appealed to as embodiments of Ormuzd; all that is good and serviceable in them to mankind is extolled, and especially the first and most excellent of its kind is adored as the present existence of Deity. And over and above this worship of Ormuzd and of every form of selected excellence among the pure and beneficent objects of his creation the Zend-Avesta is insistent upon the practice of goodness and the purity of thought, word, and deed. The Parsee is to be in the entire display of his external and inward man as Light, as Ormuzd, the Amschaspands, and the Izeds, as Zoroaster and all good men live and do. Such live and have lived in the Light, and all their deeds are Light; therefore shall every man make them an example to his eyes and follow after the same. The more purity of light and goodness man expresses in his life and accomplishment, the nearer he stands to those spirits of heaven. As the Izeds throw the blessing of their beneficence over everything, are a source of life and fruitfulness and friendship, so, too, he must seek to purify Nature, to ennoble her, and to reach abroad the light of life and the joy of plenteousness. In accordance therewith he shall feed the hungry, tend the sick, offer the drink of consolation to the thirsty, give roof and shelter to the wanderer, provide pure seed for the Earth, delve clean channels of water, plant the waste with trees, nourish to the best of his power their growth, care for the sustenance and fructification of things alive, keep pure the lambency of fire, remove from sight the dead and unclean beast, establish marriages, and in the doing thereof the holy Sapandomad, the Ized of the Earth, herself rejoices, averting the harm which the Devas and the Darvands are busy to prepare.
2. If we ask ourselves once more, after this delineation in outline of the fundamental conceptions of this system, what is the symbolical character of the same there can be but one reply, namely, that there is no trace here of anything we have previously described as symbolical. On the one side, no doubt, we have light in its obvious natural form, and on the other it possesses the further significance of all that is rich in goodness, blessing, and permanence. It is, therefore, possible to contend that the actual existence of light is merely an image cognate with this universal significance, which interpenetrates every part of the world of Nature and mankind. If we apply such an interpretation to the conception of Parsees themselves we shall find such a separation of existence and its import to be false; for these the Light as Light is actually the Good, and is so apprehended that it is in the form of light present and active in everything that is good, vital, and positive. The universal and Divine is carried no doubt through the distinctions of the world of particular objects, but in this its differentiated and particularized existence, the substantial and inseparable unity of import and form remains constant, and the distinctions that are involved in this unity do not affect the difference of significance quâ significance, and its manifestation, but only the distinguishing features of particular objects, such as stars, organic life, human opinions and actions, in which the Divine as Light or Darkness is immediately open to sense.
In the further embrace of such conceptions there are no doubt points of connection with incipient symbolism, but we get out of them no real type of that mode of viewing things in its completeness; they will only pass muster as isolated traits in its direction. To such effect Ormuzd is on one occasion made to say of his beloved one Dschemschid: "The holy Ferver of Dschemschid, the son of Vivengham, was great before me. His hand received from me a dagger, whose sharpness was gold, and whose shaft was gold. Therewith Dschemschid marked out three hundred portions of the Earth. He split up the Earth-realm with his gold-plate, yea, with his dagger and spake: 'Let Sapandomad rejoice.' He spake the holy word with prayer to the tame cattle and the wild and unto men. So his passing through was happiness and blessing for these lands and animals of the home and the field, and men ran together into great dwellings." Here we find in the dagger, and the cleaving of the Earth-soil an image which may be interpreted as significant of agriculture. Agriculture is still no essentially spiritual activity, and just as little is it a purely natural one; it is rather a universal occupation of mankind, which results from reflective thought and experience, and which has point of association with all the relations of life. It is no doubt never expressly stated in this conception of the passing of Dschemschid that this splitting of the Earth with the dagger indicates agriculture; nor is there a single word added of any increase of the fruits of the field by virtue of this division; for the reason, however, that in this particular act more appears to be included than the mere turning over and loosening of the soil, we are led to look for a further significance beneath it. The same observations apply to more recent conceptions, such as we find exemplified in the later elaboration of the worship of Mithras, where Mithras is represented as a youth who in the dusk of a grotto raises on high the bull's head and plunges a dagger in his neck, whereon a serpent licks up the blood, and a scorpion gnaws his genitals. This symbolical account has received an astronomical and other interpretations. We may, however, find in it a still more universal and profounder meaning, and take the bull generally to personify the principle of Nature, over which man, as essentially spirit, secures the victory, and this though astronomical associations may also be implied in it. That, however, such a revolution as the victory of Spirit over Nature is contained in it is also suggested by the name of Mithras, or mediator, more especially if we refer it to a later period when such uplifting over Nature was already a necessity present to the national consciousness. Symbols such as the above, however, as already observed, only incidentally come to the fore in the conceptions of the ancient Parsees, and do not in any way constitute a principle for their fundamental type of thought.
Still less can we describe the cultus, which the Zend-Avesta inculcates, as one of symbolical tendency. We find no trace here, for example, of symbolical dances in celebration or imitation of the interlaced revolutions of the stars; as little any other forms of activity which may pass as the suggestive counterfeit of universal conceptions; rather all actions which are prescribed to the Parsee as imperative in a religious sense are matters directly concerned with the actual enlargement of his purity, either of soul or body, and appear as directed with one intent and one object of realization, namely, that of increasing the actual dominion of Ormuzd over men and the objects of Nature, an object consequently which is not merely symbolized in such activity, but entirely carried out.
3. For the reason, then, that a genuine symbolic type fails absolutely when applied to this religious system, it is equally destitute of a true artistic character. No doubt we may generally describe its mode of conception as poetical for the particular facts of Nature are just as little as the particular sentiments, circumstances, acts, and affairs of men treated in their immediate and consequently haphazard and prosaic relation which is void of all significance, and are rather contemplated essentially in the Absolute as very Light; or to put it the other way, the universal essence of the concrete reality of Nature and mankind is not conceived in the universality which is without existence or form, but this universal and that particular is envisaged and expressed in immediate union. Such a mode of viewing existence may possibly claim a certain beauty, breadth, and largeness of its own, and in contrast to gross and senseless idols Light is no doubt as the essentially pure and universal element, an adequate image of Goodness and Truth. But for all that we find that poetry here fails to pass beyond a general conception; it never reaches either art or the works of art. For the Good and the Divine are neither essentially defined, nor is the consistency and form of this content a creation of mind (Spirit); but rather, as we have already found, the thing which is immediately present to sense, namely, the actual sun, stars, fire, organic nature, throughout its vegetation, animal and human life, is conceived as the appropriate form of the Absolute in this its existent and immediate shape. The sensuous representation is not, as Art requires, the plastic product of mind, shaped and discovered by the same, but immediately identified with and expressed by the external existent shape as its appropriate counterfeit. It is quite true, in another aspect, the particular thing is, by means of the imagination, also fixed in an independent relation to its reality, as, for instance, in the Izeds and Fervers, that is, in the genii of particular men; the poetic invention, however, discovered in this incipient severation is of the weakest kind for the reason that the distinction remains entirely of a formal character, so that the genius, Ized or Ferver, neither includes nor is able to include any real characteristic content of its own, but, instead of this, either repeats one identical content or possesses nothing more than the purely empty form of the subjectivity, which the existing individual already possesses. The product of the imagination here is consequently neither an other and profounder significance nor the self-subsistent form of an essentially richer individuality. And when we moreover find particular objects envisaged on the wider plane of general conceptions and generic types, to which, as appropriate to such types, the imagination vouchsafes a real existence, even here also this uplifting of multiplicity into the sphere of an all-comprehending and essential unity, regarded as the basic core and substance of the individuals that constitute the same species and genus, can only in a yet more indefinite sense be accepted as an activity of the imagination, no real exemplification of either poetry or art. So we have, for instance, in the holy fire of Behram the essence of fire; and in the same way there is a water that underlies all existent water. So, too, Horn is esteemed as the first, purest, and most stalwart among trees, the primordial tree from which the life-sap full of immortality flows; and among all mountains Albordsch, the sacred mountain, is set before us as the primaeval root of the Earth, erect in the splendour of the Light, from which the good deeds of all men proceed, who have possessed the knowledge of Light, and on whom the sun, moon, and stars repose. In general, however, we may affirm that the universal is visibly known in immediate union with the actual objects of sense, and it is merely now and again that universal conceptions are embodied in the particular image.
In yet more prosaic fashion does the cultus of this religion make as its principal object the dominion of Ormuzd a reality which interpenetrates all things, merely requiring this one essential condition to the adequacy of every object, namely, its purity, and without attempting therewith to construct from such any existent form of art that is based upon immediate life, as, for example, the warriors and wrestlers of Greece were so ready to do in their artistic elaboration of physical perfection.
From whatever side, then, or whatever may be the point of view from which we regard this first unity of spiritual universality and sensuous reality, we only get from it the basis of symbolical art; it still fails to possess a real symbolism of its own, and is unable to produce works of art. In order that we may attain this object, which is the next in view, we must pass away from the union we have just considered, and examine modes of conception where the difference and conflict between significance and form is more really emphasized.
B. FANTASTIC SYMBOLISM
Quitting now the sphere of thought in which the identity of the Absolute and its externally envisaged existence is immediately cognized, we have, as an essential determination to start from, the severation of these two aspects hitherto united, a cleavage which stimulates the effort to restore once more the visible breach by means of an elaborate fusing together of the whole thus divided by a rich use of the images of phantasy. With this attempt the essential need for art is felt for the first time. No sooner has the imagination succeeded in holding fast its envisaged content, which is no longer grasped in immediate union with the objects of sense, in isolated separation from that existence, than for the first time spirit is confronted with the task of reclothing with the material of phantasy for sensuous perception, that is, under the renewed mode of a spiritual product, these general conceptions and of creating through this activity the shapes of art. And for the reason that in the stage of our process where we now find ourselves, this task is capable of only a symbolic solution, we may easily fall under the impression that we stand already in the sphere of genuine symbolism. This, however, is not the case. What immediately faces us here are the forms of a fermenting phantasy[41], which in the restlessness of its fantastic dreams merely indicates the path which conducts us to the real centre of symbolical art. In the first appearance of the distinguishing relation between significance and the mode of its presentation, both the severation and the association are still grasped in a confused manner. This confusion is necessitated by the fact that neither of the parted aspects of difference have as yet attained a totality, capable of emphasizing the precise point in the process, which will serve as the fundamental determination of the opposed side in it, and by means of which for the first,time a really adequate union and reconciliation is rendered possible. Spirit (mind), to illustrate our difficulty further, determines by virtue of its own totality the side of the external phenomenon out of its own essential substance quite as really as it does its own spiritual content for the obvious reason that the essentially complete and independent phenomenon only receives its adequate form as the external existence of that which is spiritual. In the case, however, of this primary severation of the significances apprehended by mind, and the existent world of phenomena such aspects of significance are not those of concrete spiritual life, but abstractions, and this expression also is entirely destitute of spiritual intension, and is consequently, in an abstract sense, purely external and sensuous. This twofold impulse in the direction of disunion and union is for the same reason an unsteady gait[42], which ranges from the objects of sense in undefined and unmeasured waste immediately to the aspects of universal import, and is only able to discover for the inward content of consciousness the absolutely opposed form of sensuous shapes. And it is this very contradiction which is set forth as a means of really uniting elements which contradict each other. The result is that instead of so doing it is first driven from one side of the opposition into the other, and then again is hurled in its ceaselessly alternating dance into the former extreme, while it believes that in this rocking to and fro of its strain it has found the means to lull itself to repose. Instead of getting, therefore, a true satisfaction we have the contradiction merely affirmed as its genuine resolution, and in addition the union most incomplete of all is set forth as that which art really requires. We must not therefore expect to find in such a field of confusion worse confounded the true forms of beauty. In this restless leap from one opposed extreme to the other all that we find from one point of view in the sensuous material that is absorbed, regarding the same in its singularity no less than as it constitutes its elementary appearance to sense, is that the breadth and potency of every import of universality is associated therewith in what must consequently be a wholly inadequate way. From another aspect that which is most universal, as soon as the process has passed from the same, is shamelessly plunged under the reverse treatment into the very heart of the sensuous present; and if any feeling of the incompatibility of such an effort is consciously perceived, the imagination here is only capable of rendering assistance by means of distortions which carry the particular shapes over and beyond their own secure boundaries, adding to their extension, making them ever more indefinite, by an imaginative leap which mounts to the immeasurable, breaks up every bond of union, and in its very strain after reconciliation reveals each opposing factor in its most unmitigated hostility[43].
These earliest and still most uncontrolled attempts of imagination and art we meet most signally among the ancient races of India, the main defect of whose productions, when viewed relatively to their particular position at this stage of our classification, consists in this, that they are neither able to seize the profounder aspects of significance in independent clarity, nor grasp the reality of sense-perception in its characteristic form and meaning. The Hindoo race has consequently proved itself unable to comprehend either persons or events as parts of continuous history, because to any historical treatment a certain soberness is essential of accepting and understanding facts in their true and independent form, and subject to their mediating links, grounds, causes, and objects, being empirically ascertained. The natural impulse to refer all and everything back to the Divine is hostile to this prosaic reasonableness, no less than its tendency to prefigure for itself in the most ordinary or most sensuous of objects a presence and reality of godhead created by its own imagination. These peoples consequently, through their confused intermingling of the Finite and the Absolute, in which the logical order and permanence of the prosaic facts of ordinary consciousness are disregarded altogether, despite all the profusion and extraordinary boldness of their conceptions, fall into a levity of fantastic mirage which is quite as remarkable, a flightiness which dances from the most spiritual and profoundest matters to the meanest trifle of present experience, in order that it may interchange and confuse immediately the one extreme with the other.
If we concentrate our attention more closely upon the more conspicuous features of this continuous bout of intoxication, this craze and condition of craze, what we are concerned with is not to trace religious conceptions as such, but merely to emphasize the points of prominence which relate such modes of conception with art. These may be indicated as follows:
1. One extreme of the consciousness of the Hindoo is the consciousness of the Absolute, here regarded as the essentially and absolutely Universal, undifferentiated and consequently wholly indefinite. This supreme of abstractions, inasmuch as it is neither in possession of a particular content, nor is conceived under the mode of concrete personality, is, from whatever side you may look at it, no object at all that the imagination acting through the senses can reclothe for art. Brahman[44], taken in a general sense as this supreme Godhead, is absolutely removed from the sensuous and sense-perception, or rather is not even an object for Thought. For self-consciousness is inseparable from thought, which posits itself as an object of Thought, in order that it may thus come to self-knowledge. Every act of intelligence is an identification of the ego and object, a reconciliation of that which is severed outside from this relation of recognition; what I do not understand remains as something strange and foreign to myself. The mode of union, under the Hindoo conception, of human personality with Brahman is nothing more nor less than a continually ascending process of exhaustion[45] in the direction of this supreme of abstractions, in which not merely the entire concrete content, but also self-consciousness itself, must be eliminated before the final consummation is realized. Or, to put the same thing another way, the Hindoo recognizes no reconciliation and identity with Brahman in the sense that the spirit of humanity becomes conscious of this union. The unity rather consists in this, that both consciousness and self-consciousness, and with them the entire content of the objective world and personality totally disappears. This emptying and annihilation to the point of absolute vacuity is treated as the supreme condition under which man is capable of identity with highest Divinity, that is Brahman. An abstraction of this sort, one of the barest it is possible to imagine, whether we consider it from the point of view of the Absolute, as Brahman, or from the human aspect of a purely theoretically conceived cultus that consists in man's self-evaporation[46] and self-annihilation, is in itself no object either for the imagination or art; all the latter can do is to profit by such opportunity as various imaginary representations of what happens by the way to this goal may offer for their exercise.
2. Conversely the Hindoo view of existence launches itself with just the same immediacy over this very abstraction from all sense into the wildest flood of it. Inasmuch, however, as the immediate and consequently unbroken identity of both sides is in this view cancelled, and instead of this the element of difference within this identity has become the basic principle of the type itself, this very contradiction plunges us with no mediating connections from the Finite into the Divine, and again from this latter into what is most transitory of all; and we live and move among simulacra, which rise up entirely as the growth of this alternating process, a kind of witches' world, where the definition of every shape eludes our grasp as we endeavour to seize it, is converted all at once into its opposite, or straddles away into mere inflated enormities.
The general modes under which Hindoo art manifests itself may be summarized under the three following points of view:
(a) In the first place we find the full hugeness of the content of the Absolute is imposed by the imagination upon the sensuous in its aspect of singularity in such a way that this particular thing is itself, in its own form and station, taken completely to represent such a content and to exist as such for the imaginative sense. In the Râmâyana, for example, the friend of Râma, namely, the prince of apes Hanuman, is a principal personage, and he accomplishes the bravest of exploits. And generally we may observe that among the Hindoos the ape is revered as Divine, and we find, in fact, an entire city of apes. In the ape, as this point of singularity, the infinite content of the Absolute is envisaged and adored. It is just the same with the cow, Sabalâ, which in the Râmâyana during the episodic treatment of the expiations of Visvamitra, appears clothed with immeasurable power. If we take a glance on higher planes we find entire families in India—even though the individual here be merely a vacant and monotonously vegetating life-unit—in whom the Absolute itself, as this concrete reality, is adored in its immediate life and presence as God. This same coincidence is found in Lamaism. Here, too, a single individual receives the highest worship due to the present God. In India, however, this honour is not exclusively paid to one man. Every Brahmin proves at once his claim from the day of his birth in his own caste to be ranked as Brahman, and possesses that second birth of the Spirit which identifies his humanity with God, in the way of Nature through his actual bodily birth, so that the crown of the most Divine itself is immediately referred back upon the entirely commonplace fact of physical existence. For although the Brahmin is under the most sacred obligation to read the Vedâs, and attain by this means an insight into the secrets of Deity, this duty can be actually carried out in the most perfunctory way without detracting in the least from the Brahmin's own divinity. In a similar manner it is one of the modes most common to the representations of Hindooism to have the primordial God set forth as the procreator or begetter, as we find Eros is in the case of Greek mythology. This procreation as Divine activity is further worked into all kinds of representations in a wholly material way, and the private parts, both male and female, are treated as sacred in the highest sense. And in a reverse way, and to no less extent, the Divine, when it passes over in its independent Divinity to the plane of existing reality, is suffered in a wholly trivial manner to get mixed up with everyday details. We may take an example of this from the commencement of the Râmâyana, where Brahmâ has come on a visit to Vâlmîkis, the mythical bard of the Râmâyana. Vâlmîkis receives him entirely in the common Hindoo fashion, pays him a compliment or two, places a stool before him, and supplies him with water and fruits. Brahmâ sits down just like anybody else and constrains his host to do likewise: and there they sit on and sit on until at last Brahmâ orders Vâlmîkis to compose the poem of the Râmâyana.
Modes of conception such as these are still not symbolic in the strict sense; for although we find that here, as the symbol requires, forms are taken from the material of sense and diverted to the use of conceptions of more universal import, we still find the further condition of this requirement wanting, namely, that the particular existences must not actually exist for sense-perception as this absolute significance, but merely suggest the same. For the Hindoo imagination the ape, the cow, and the particular Brahmin are not merely a cognate symbol of the Divine, but are contemplated and represented as the Godhead itself, as existences adequate to that Godhead.
It is the contradiction inherent in this immediacy which is the motive force of another feature in the conceptions of Hindoo art. For while, on the one hand, that which is absolutely severed from sense, the spiritual significance out and out, is conceived as the actually Divine, yet, on the other, the particular facts of concrete reality are immediately envisaged by the imagination, even in their sensuous existence, as Divine manifestations. They are no doubt partly only taken to represent particular aspects of the Absolute; but even so the particular thing in its immediacy is still incompatible with the universality, which it is, as adequate to the same, introduced to express; and it appears in all the more glaring contradiction to it for the reason that the significance is here already conceived in its universality, yet, despite of this, an express relation of identity is immediately set up by the imagination between it and the most particular of material facts.
(b) The most obvious way in which Hindoo art endeavours to mitigate this disunion is, as we have already suggested, by the measureless extension of its images. Particular shapes are drawn out into colossal and grotesque proportions in order that they may, as forms of sense, attain to universality. The particular form of sense, which is taken to express not itself and its own characteristic meaning as a fact of external existence, but a universal significance which lies outside it, fails to satisfy the imagination until it has been torn out itself into vastness which knows neither measure nor limit. This is the cause of all that extravagant exaggeration of size, not merely in the case of spatial dimension, but also of measurelessness of time-durations, or the reduplication of particular determinations, as in figures with many heads, arms, and so on, by means of which this art strains to compass the breadth and universality of the significance it assumes. The egg, for example, contains the bird within it. This particular fact is enlarged to the measureless conception of a world-egg secreting the universal life of all creation, and in which Brahmâ, the procreating God, accomplishes without effort the year of creation, until by virtue of his thought alone the the two halves of the egg fall asunder. And, in addition to natural objects, human individuals and events are exalted that they may express the significance of truly Divine action in such a way that we can neither hold fast the Divine or the human in their independence, but both seem to run in a continual confusion backwards and forwards into one another. As a striking illustration of such a mode of conception, we have the incarnations of certain Hindoo gods, principally Vishnu, the conserver of life, whose exploits figure largely in the great epic poems. Râmas is, for instance, himself the seventh incarnation of Vishnu (Râmatshandra). From a review of particular demands, actions, circumstances, modes of appearance, and traits of demeanour, we are led to infer from these poems that this content is in great measure borrowed from actual events, that is from the exploits of ancient kings who exercised a powerful influence in creating new conditions of law and order; we find ourselves surrounded by a thoroughly human atmosphere and on the firm ground of reality. But then again, in a converse direction, the entire scene expands, reaches out into the nebulous, playing over and beyond it with universal conceptions, so that we lose the vantage ground we had gained and are robbed of all our bearings. We are treated in just the same way in the Sakuntala. At first we have set before us the most gentle and odorous realm of Love, in which everything goes on its way in an entirely human fashion; and then we are all at once snatched from the wealth of this genuine world, and transported into the clouds of the heaven of Indra, where everything suffers change, and our formerly circumscribed sphere is inflated to the measure of the universal import of Nature's life in its relation to the Brahmin and the power of Nature's gods, which is vouchsafed to man in return for his severe self-mortifications.
Such modes of representation are also not to be termed in a strict sense symbolical. That is to say the true symbol suffers the determinate shape, which it applies, to remain under that original definition, because its purpose is not to envisage therein the immediate existent of the significance in its universality, but to point to that import merely through the qualities of the object which are cognate to it. Hindoo art, however, although it severs universality from the singular existing fact, still adds the further requirement that both sides shall be immediately united through the imagination, and is consequently forced to divest determinate existence of its specific limitations, and, albeit in a material fashion, to enlarge in the direction of indefiniteness and generally to change and reconstitute. In this melting down of all clear definition, and in the confusion which results from it, so that that form is always set down as highest for everything, whether phenomena, events, or actions, which in the mode of their figuration can neither for themselves assert nor intrinsically possess and express any control over such content, we may rather seek for features analogous to the type of the sublime than see any illustration of real symbolism. For in the Sublime, as we shall see for ourselves further on, the finite phenomenon only expresses the Absolute, which it would previsage for conscious sense to the extent that in so doing it escapes from the world of appearance, which fails to comprehend its content. This is just its treatment of eternity. Its idea of it is sublime when it has to be expressed in terms of time-duration, precisely through the emphasis it lays on the fact that no number, however great, is sufficient. In this strain runs the text: "A thousand years in Thy sight are even as a day." Hindoo art contains much of the same or similar nature. It strikes the opening notes of "the Sublime" symphony. The main difference, however, between it and the true Sublimity consists in this, that the Hindoo imagination does not in the wild exuberance of its images bring about the essential nothingness of the phenomena which it makes use of, but rather through just this very measurelessness and unlimited range of its visions believes that it has annihilated and made to vanish all difference and opposition between the Absolute and its mode of configuration. In this extreme type of exaggeration, then, there is ultimately little of real kinship with either true symbolism or Sublimity: it is equally remote from the true sphere of beauty. It offers us no doubt, more particularly in its more sober delineation of that which is exclusively human, much that is endearing and benign, many gracious pictures and tender emotions, the most splendid and seductive descriptions of Nature, the most childlike traits of Love and naïve innocence, and withal much too that is magnanimous and noble; but, none the less, if we review it generally according to the fundamental import of all it expresses, we shall find that the spiritual is throughout rooted in sense, the meanest objects are placed on the same plane as the highest, true definition is wrecked, the Sublime is lowered to the conception of mere immeasurability, and that which is the original material of mythos for the most part vanishes before our eyes in the fantastic dreams of a restless and inquisitive imaginative power, and modes of shaping the same devoid of all intelligent purpose.
(c) In conclusion, the purest form of representation which we meet with at this stage of imaginative conception is that of personification, as it generally applies to the human figure. For the reason, however, that the significance on this plane is not as yet grasped as the free subjectivity of Spirit, but rather either under a determination of abstract universality or as a mode of natural existence, one that contains, for example, the life of rivers, mountains, stars, or sun, for this reason it is only employed as means of expression for this kind of content under a mode which really detracts from the full worth of the human form. For the human body, if we view it in its true definition, no less than the form of human activities and events, expresses simply concrete Spirit and a spiritual content, which is self-contained and subsistent in this its reality, and possesses therewith no mere symbol or external sign.
From one point of view consequently this personification, albeit the significance, which it is invoked to represent, is taken to belong to the spiritual no less than the natural, yet, on account of the abstractness which clings to this form of significance, is on this stage of thought still of a superficial nature, and needs yet many other modes of representation to be rendered clear to the closer inspection, forms with which it is here confusedly mingled and thereby itself made obscure. And, moreover, taking it under another aspect, it is not the subjectivity here and its form which supplies the characterization, but rather its expressions, actions, and so forth; for it is in deed and action that the more defined line of severation first asserts itself, which can be brought into relation with the specific content of the universal significances. In that case, however, we are again face to face with the defect that it is not the conscious subject, but merely its means of expression, which supply the signification, no less than the confusion of thought, that events and deeds, instead of constituting the reality and the existence of the subject as determinately self-realized, preserve its content and significance elsewhere. A series of such actions is able therefore very possibly to carry with it a certain result and consequence, which is derived from the content which such a series subserves as its expression. This consequent result is, however, to an extent equally great, liable again to be interrupted and in part suspended by that which is central in the personification and the man[47], because subjective activity is also a stimulus to capricious action and its manifestation, so that both that which is significant and that which is destitute of this quality keep up their varied and irregular interplay just in so far as the imagination is unable to unite their significant characteristics and the forms which are appropriate to them in one substantial and secure mode of association. And, moreover, if it is the purely natural aspect of such facts which is exclusively accepted as the unified content, in that case the material must inevitably prove itself inadequate to support the human form, just as this, being only fully adapted as a means of expressing Spirit, is on its side incapable of representing what is wholly natural. In all these respects such a mode of personification as the one we are examining fails to express a true mode; for the truth of art requires, as the truth universally requires, that there should be a complete concordance between the inward and the outward, that is, the notion and its reality. Greek mythology, for example, personified the Pontine sea; Scamander possesses its river gods, nymphs, dryads, and so forth. In other words it builds up Nature in the most various forms as the content of its human divinities. It does not, however, suffer its personification to remain purely formal and superficial, but creates thereby real individuals, in whom the purely natural significance fades into the background, and the human element, on the contrary, which has taken up and absorbed such material out of Nature, becomes the prominent factor. Hindoo art, on the other hand, is unable to advance beyond a grotesque intermingling of these two sides of Nature and humanity, so that neither is treated according to its rightful claim, and both are merely given the forms which are appropriate to the other.
Speaking in a general way we cannot consider even these personifications to be as yet strictly symbolical, for the reason that owing to their formal superficiality they do not stand in any essential relation to or mode of association more truly intimate with the more determinate form which they are presumed to express. At the same time we may note here, with respect to other particular modifications and attributes, with which such personifications appear to be intermingled, and which are taken to express the more defined qualities generally attached to Divinities, an impulse in the direction of symbolic representation, for which the personification then stands merely as the universal type of widest connotation.
If we turn now to the more important examples of the imaginative sense on the plane we are now considering, we have first to draw attention to Trimûrtis, the triformed Godhead. This Deity includes in the first place Brahmâ, the activity which brings forth and procreates, the creator of the world, Lord of all the gods and much more beside. On the one hand he is to be kept distinct from Brahman (as Neuter), that is from the ultimate Being, and is the first-born of such. In another aspect, however, he again seems to fall into union with this abstract Godhead, as generally happens with Hindoo thought where the lines of difference are rarely held secure, and part are allowed to vanish and the rest simply to get confused with each other. The form with which he is most closely identified has much that is symbolical about it; he is formed with four heads and four hands, and with the latter are his sceptre and ring[48]. He is of a red colour, an obvious suggestion of sunlight, since these Divinities invariably carry qualities which are of universal significance in Nature and which are thus personified in them. The second Deity of this triune Trimûrtis, is Vishnu, the preserving Godhead, the third Sivas, the destructive Power. The symbols employed to represent these gods are countless. For by reason of the universality of the significances they express they comprehend an infinite number of varied activities. In part these are related to particular phenomena of Nature, mainly the elementary, such as, for example, the quality of "fiery,"[49] which is an attribute of Vishnu, and frequently we have set before us shapes of the most antagonistic description.
In the conception of this triform god we have the fact at once brought home to us in the clearest way that the form of Spirit is not yet able to assert itself in its Truth if for no other reason than this, that here it is not the spiritual which constitutes the truly permeating significance. That is to say, this trinity of gods would only be Spirit if the third god were an essentially concrete unity, a unity which returned upon itself from the differentiation and reduplication of its substance. For God, according to the true conception of Godhead, is Spirit as this active and absolute self-differentiation and Unity, a conception which is generally what constitutes the notion of Spirit. In this Trimûrtis, however, the triune God is not by any means such a concrete totality, but merely a passage from this to that, a metamorphosis, a procreator, a destroyer, and so forth. We must be accordingly very careful not to imagine that we have discovered the highest Truth in these most primordial gropings of man's reason, and in this one note of concord which, no doubt, as mere rhythmic expression[50], contains the triune form of Deity, that is, the fundamental conception of Christian theology, believe that we already have before us a recognition of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.
Starting from such fundamental conceptions as those of Brahman and Trimûrtis, Hindoo imagination expatiates still further without let in a countless number of the most varied formed Divinities. For those primary significances of universal application which are apprehended as essential Deity are of such a kind that they may be rediscovered in an infinite number of phenomena, which are again personified and symbolized as gods, and each and all combine in throwing the greatest obstacles in the way of any intelligible system by reason of the indefinite character and confusing volubility[51] of this type of imagination, which fails utterly to grasp the real nature of anything that it discovers, and merely wrests everything that it touches from its own appropriate sphere. For these gods of subordinate rank, at the head of which we may place such a Divinity as Indrus, who represents the Air and the Heavens, the chief material is furnished by the general forces of Nature, such as stars, rivers, and mountains conceived in the various phases of their activity, their change, their influence on mankind, whether beneficent or hurtful, preservative or destructive. One of the most important subjects, however, of Hindoo imagination and art is the origin of gods and the rest of creation, in other words its Theogony and Cosmogony. For this type of imagination is generally rooted in the continual effort to carry over that which is most removed from sense into the very heart of the external world, or in the reverse process once more to expunge that which stands nearest to sense and Nature by means of the barest abstraction. Consequently the origin of the gods is referred back to the primordial Godhead[52], and at the same time the workings and existence of Brahmâ, Vishnu, and Sivas are represented as actual in mountains, streams, and human events. A cosmological content of this kind can, on the one hand, contain an independent and specific order of Deities, while on the other these gods are made to merge in those universal significances of the supremest type of Godhead. Such theogonies and cosmogonies are numerous and of every conceivable variety. When anyone ventures, therefore, to say that the Hindoos have thus or thus portrayed the creation of the world or the origin of Nature, such a statement can only be taken to apply to a particular sect or book; you can very easily find a perfectly different account of these events elsewhere. The imagination of this people in the pictures and images they have created is exhaustless.
A mode of conception which is conspicuous throughout the entire series of these creation stories is the constantly repeated presentation of the creative act not in the form of spiritual fiat, but of a purely natural process of generation. Only after having made ourselves thoroughly conversant with this mode of imaginative vision shall we discover the key to unlock the meaning of many representations which at first totally confound all our feelings of shame, shamelessness being here apparently driven to its furthest limits, and in its utter sensuousness carried beyond all belief. A striking example of this mode of imaginative treatment is offered us by the notoriously popular episode from the Râmâyana, known as the descent of Gangâ. This tale is narrated on the occasion when Râmas happens by chance to come to the Ganges. The wintry and ice-covered Himavân, the prince of the mountains, was father by the slender Menâ of two daughters, Gangâ, the elder, and the beautiful Umâ the younger one. Certain gods, more particularly Indras, beseech the father to send them Gangâ, in order that they may institute the sacred rites, and as Himavat proves himself quite ready to accede to their request Gangâ mounts on high to the blessed gods. After this follows the further story of Umâ, who after accomplishing wonderful actions of humility and penitence, is espoused to Rudras, that is, Sivas. From this union spring up wild and unfruitful mountains. For a hundred years long Sivas lay with Umâ in the bridal embrace, without intermission, so that the gods aghast at the procreative power of Sivas, and full of anxiety for the productive child, beseech him that he will divert the stream of his strength on the Earth. This passage the English translator has not ventured to translate literally, for the reason that it flings too much for him every shred of shame or modesty to the winds. Sivas hearkens to the beseechings of the gods, and staying his former procreative ardour, that he may not utterly confound the universe, he loosens the seminal flood over the Earth. Out of this, transpierced with fire, rises up the white mountain which separates India from Tartary. Umâ, however, falls into scorn and anger at this complaisance, and thereon curses all wedlock. In this section of the tale we have what are mainly fearful and distorted pictures which run so entirely counter to our ordinary notions of imagination and intelligent senses that the most we can do is to observe what they would appear to offer in default of either. Schlegel has omitted to translate this section of the episode and merely added in his own words how Gangâ descends once more on the Earth. And this took place in the following way. A certain forebear of Râmas, Sagaras, was father of a bad son, and by a second wife he was father of no less than 60,000 sons, who came into the world in a pumpkin, were, however, raised up into stalwart men on clarified butter in pitchers[53]. Now it chanced one day that Sagaras was of a mind to sacrifice a steed, which was, however, seized from him by Vishnu in the form of a serpent. On this Sagaras sends forth his 60,000 sons. But no sooner had they come to Vishnu after great hardships and a long searching than a breath of hers burns them all to ashes. After a weary waiting a certain grandson of Sagaras, by name Ansumân the Shining, son of Asamaschas, set forth to find his 60,000 uncles and the sacrificial steed. He actually comes upon both the steed Siwas and the heap of ashes. The king of birds, Garudas, however, notifies to him the fact that unless the stream of the holy Gangâ flows down from heaven over the heap of ashes his relations will be unable to return to life. Whereupon the stalwart Ansumân endures for 32,000 years on the mountain-top of Himavân the sternest mortifications. All in vain. Neither his own chastisements nor those of yet another 30,000 years of his son Dwilipas are of the slightest avail. At last the son of Dwilipas, the glorious Bhagîrathas, succeeds in accomplishing the feat, but only after mortifications which last 1,000 years. Then the Gangâ plunges down; but in order that the Earth may not thereby shiver in pieces, Siwas now bows his head so that the water runs into his mane. Thereupon yet further mortifications are enjoined upon Bhagîrathas, in order that Gangâ may be free to stream forth from these locks. Finally she is poured forth in six streams; the seventh Bhagîrathas conducts after mighty privations to the place of the 60,000, who mount up to heaven, and therewith Bhagîrathas rules for yet many a year over his people in peace.
Other theogonies such as the Scandinavian and the Greek are very similar in type to the Hindoo. The principal feature of them all is this of physical generation and production; but not one of them plunges so headlong into the subject or in general displays such caprice and impropriety in the images of its invention as the Hindoo. The theogony of Hesiod is in particular far more intelligible and succinct, so that at least one knows where one is, and is clear as to the general significance; and this is so because the impression is far more pronounced that the form and external embodiment of the myth is set forth by the narrator as something external. The mythos starts in this case[54] with Chaos, Erebos, Eros, and Gaia. The Earth (Gaia) brings forth Uranos of her own accord, and then is mother by him of the mountains, sea, and so forth, also of Cronos and the Cyclops, Centimani[55], whom Uranos, however, shortly after birth incarcerates in Tartaros. Gaia thereupon induces Cronos to castrate Uranos. The deed is accomplished. And from the blood that falls on the Earth spring to life the Erinnyes and the Giants. The castrated member is caught by the sea, and from the sea's foam arises Cytherea. In all this description the outlines are more clearly and decisively drawn. And we are thereby carried beyond the circle of mere gods of Nature.
3. If we endeavour now to seize some point where the transition is emphasized to the stage of real symbolism, we shall find the same already in the first beginnings of Hindoo imagination. That is to say, however preoccupied the Hindoo imagination may be in its efforts to contort the sensuous phenomenon into a plurality of Divinities, a preoccupation which no other people has displayed with anything like the same exhaustless scope and countless transformations, yet from another point of view in many of its visions and narratives it remains throughout constant to that spiritual abstraction of a God supreme over all, in contrast with whom the particular, sensuous, and phenomenal is undivine, inadequate, and consequently is apprehended as something negative, something which has finally to be cancelled. For, as we have from the first noticed, it is precisely this continual involution of one side on the other which constitutes the fundamental type of the Hindoo imagination, and makes it for ever incapable of finding a true principle of reconciliation. The art is consequently never tired of representing, in every imaginable way, the surrender of the sensuous and the power of spiritual abstraction and self-absorption. Of this kind are the representations of toilsome mortifications and profound meditations, of which not merely the most ancient epical poems, such as the "Râmâyana" and the "Mahâbhârata," but also many other works of art furnish most important examples. No doubt many of these self-chastisements are undergone on grounds of ambition, or at least with a view to definite objects, which do conduct the devotee to the highest and most final union with Brahman, and to the mortification of everything carnal and finite. An object of this kind is the endeavour to secure the power of a Brahmin; but even in this there is always the fact present to consciousness that the expiation and the continuance of a meditation that is ever more and more diverted from the objects of sense will raise the devotee over his birth-place in a particular caste, no less than help him resist the power of Nature and the gods of Nature. For this reason, that prince of Divinities of this class, Indras, opposes most signally strenuous aspirants, and strives to entice them away; or, in the case where all his seductions fail, he invokes assistance from the supreme gods lest the entire heaven fall into confusion.
In the representation of mortifications of this kind and the several kinds and grades according to which they are ranked, Hindoo art is almost as fertile in its invention as in its system of Divinities, and it pursues the theme with the most thorough earnestness.
This, then, is the point from which we may now extend our survey in a forward direction.
C. REAL SYMBOLISM
In the case of symbolical, no less than that of Fine Art, it is necessary that the significance which it seeks to embody should not merely be set forth, as is the case in Hindoo art, from the first immediate unity of the same with its objective existence, such as obtains before any severation or distinction has as yet been emphasized, but that this significance should itself be independent and free from the immediate sensuous content. This deliverance can only so far assert itself as the sensuous and natural medium is both grasped and envisaged as itself essentially negative, as that which has to be and has been absorbed. It is a further requirement, moreover, that the negativity, which is successful in making its appearance as the passing off and the self-dissolution of the Natural, should be accepted and receive embodiment as the absolute import of the object generally, as a phase, that is to say, of the Divine. But with a fulfilment of such claims we are already beyond the limits of Hindoo art. It is true that the consciousness of this negative side is not wholly absent from the Hindoo imagination. Sivas is the destroyer no less than the producer. Indras dies, nay, more, the Destroyer Time, personified as Kâla the terrible giant, confounds the entire universe and all gods, even Trimûrtis, who passes away at the same time in Brahman, just as the individual in his self-identification with the highest form of Divinity suffers his Ego and all his wisdom and will to vanish away. In these conceptions, however, the negative element is in part merely a transformation and change, in part only an abstraction, which allows all definition to drop away, in order that it may thrust its path to an indefinite and consequently vacuous and content-less universality. The substance of the Divine on the other hand persists through change of form, passage over and advance to a system of many Deities, and the abrogation of that system once more in the one highest form of God unalterably one and the same. It is not that conception of the one God, which itself essentially possesses, as this unity, the negative aspect as its own determination, both necessary and appropriate to its own essential notion. In an analogous way the destructive and hurtful element is placed according to the Parsee view of existence outside the personality of Ormuzd in Ahriman, and consequently only makes a contradiction and conflict manifest belonging under no form of relation to Ormuzd, as a distinct phase of his own substance.
The actual point in the advance which we have now to make consists, therefore, in this that, on the one hand, the negative aspect, fixed by consciousness in an independent relation as the Absolute, is, however, on the other, merely regarded as a phase of the Divine, as a phase, however, which is not only as outside the true Absolute incidental to another Godhead[56], but is to be so ascribed to the Absolute, that the true God appears as a process in which He negates Himself, and thereby contains this negative element as an inherent self-determination of His own substance.
Through this enlarged conception the Absolute is for the first time essentially concrete, that is self-determination, and thereby essential unity, whose particular antitheses, as parts of a process, appear to consciousness as the different determinations of one and the same God. For the necessity of giving essential definition to the absolute significance is just that which at this stage it is felt to be of first importance to satisfy. All the significances up to this point persisted by virtue of their abstract character as absolutely undefined and consequently void of content, or were merged, when in a converse direction they tended to clear distinction, immediately in the Being of Nature, or fell into a conflict in respect to their configuration which gave them no repose and reconciliation. This twofold defect we have now to remove, both by showing the advance of Thought regarded as itself an ideal process, and by illustrating that advance by means of particular facts of the mind and institutions of nations on the objective plane of history.
And in the first place we may observe a more intimate bond of association is set up between the Inward and Outward aspect of consciousness in the increased recognition that every determination of the Absolute is already essentially an inchoate movement in the direction of expression. For every determination is essentially distinction[57]. The External, however, is as such always defined and distinct, and consequently there is thus an aspect immediately presented, according to which the External is manifested in a form more adequate to the significance than was possible under the modes of conception as yet examined. The first definition, however, and essential negation of the Absolute inevitably falls short of the free self-determination of Spirit as Spirit. It is merely the immediate negation of itself. This immediate and consequently natural negation in its most comprehensive form of statement is Death. The Absolute is consequently apprehended now in a way that it is compelled to submit itself to this form of negation as a part of the essential determination of its own notion, in other words it is obliged to enter the path of extinction, and we observe consequently the glorification of Death and grief in the first instance made present to the national consciousness as the death of the dying sensuous material. The death of Nature is cognized as a necessary part[58] of the life of the Absolute. The Absolute, however, on the one hand, in order to be subject to this phase of Death, must be posited already as determinate existence; and, equally from another point of view, must not be suffered to remain in the annihilation of Death, but must be held to re-establish itself in an essentially positive unity on a yet higher plane of existence. Death is consequently not accepted here as constituting the entire significance, but merely one aspect of the same. And though no doubt the Absolute is in one sense viewed as a cessation of its immediate existence, a passage over and beyond and a passing away, yet it is quite as much in the reverse sense conceived as a return upon itself, as a resurrection, as an eternal process of Divine realization rendered possible by virtue of this evolutional principle of negation. For Death is capable of a twofold meaning. Under the first it is the immediate passing away of the natural; under the second Death is the extinction of the exclusively natural and thereby the birth of a higher type, that is, spiritual, from which the merely natural falls away in the sense, that Spirit possesses in itself this phase as an essential phase of its own substance.
For this reason, secondly, the form of Nature can no longer be accepted in the immediacy of sensuous existence as adequate to the significance referred to it, because the significance of the External consists just in this, that it must die in the form of its real existence and rise again.
On the same ground, thirdly, the mere conflict between significance and form and that ferment of the imagination, which was the fantastic product of Hindoo conceptions, drop away. The significance is, it is true, even now not yet fully and with absolute clarity cognized in its pure unity free from all sense-presented reality, so that it could be set forth in real contrast with the form of its actual embodiment; conversely, however, the form itself, this particular, object, that is, whether in its glorified shape of grandiosity or in any other more conspicuous form of caricature, as an image of animal life, a human personification, event or action, is not taken to envisage for immediate sense an adequate existence of the Absolute. This corrupt form of identity is already surpassed as fully to the extent that it still falls behind that other complete deliverance. And in the place of both of these extremes we have asserted that kind of representation, which we have above already described as the real symbolical. On the one hand it is now able to appear for the reason that the Inward, or that which is conceived as significance, is no longer something which merely, as in Hindoo conceptions, comes and passes away, at one moment is absorbed immediately in externality, at another is withdrawn from the same into the solitude of abstraction, but it begins to make itself independently secure against the mere reality of Nature. And on the other hand the symbol is now forced to seek some form of plastic shape. That is to say, although the significance, identical in every way with that which has hitherto obtained, possesses as a phasal condition of its content the negation of the Natural, yet the true Inward now for the first time shows a definite tendency to wrest its way from that Natural, and is consequently itself still swallowed up within the external mode of appearance, so that it is unable independently to be brought home to consciousness in its clear universality without having previously had to comply with the form of external reality.
Now the kind of configuration which is implied by the notion of that which generally constitutes the fundamental significance in symbolism, may be described in the following terms, namely, we find in it that the definite forms of Nature, human activities and so forth, neither—to express one aspect of it—represent or signify merely themselves severally in their isolated natural characteristics, nor—to emphasize the other aspect—bring their immediate form to consciousness as the Divine actually visible to sense. They are rather employed to suggest that same Divine through qualities which they possess cognate with a significance of more comprehensive range. For this reason it is just that universal dialectic of Life, its origin, growth, collapse in and awakening from Death, which also in this connection supplies the appropriate content for the true symbolic type; and this is so because we find in almost every province of natural and spiritual life certain phenomena, which presuppose this process as the basis of their existence, and consequently can be utilized as means of giving a visible body to such significant aspects and of pointing by suggestion to the same, a real affinity being actually inherent between the two sides. Thus plants spring from their seed, sprout, grow, bring forth fruit; the fruit corrupts and produces fresh seed. In the same way the sun rises to a low elevation in winter; in Spring he mounts on high, until we have his meridian reached in summer; it is then that he pours forth his richest blessing or exerts the greatest destructive force; after that he inclines once more towards the horizon. The various stages of human life, too, childhood, youth, maturity, and old age, illustrate precisely the same universal process. But in a special sense specific localities such as the Nile-valley are adapted to the closer particularization in the direction indicated.
In so far, then, as that which is purely fantastic is displaced by these more fundamental traits of affinity and the more intimate applicability of the expression to the import it expresses there arises a thoughtful process of selection with reference to the comparative congruity or incongruity of the symbolizing forms, and the intoxicated eddy to and fro which prevailed is laid to rest in a more intelligent circumspection.
We consequently observe that a union more at one with itself reappears in the place of that which we found in the first stage of our process, subject, however, to this characteristic difference, that the identity of the significance with its objectively real existence is no longer one immediately envisaged, but one that is set up out of the difference and consequently not one previously discovered, rather we should say a mode of union that is the product of mind (Spirit). That which, in its most general terms, we call the Inward begins at this point to assume the solidity of self-subsistence, to be conscious of itself; it seeks for its counterfeit in the objects of Nature, which on their part possess a similar reflection in the life and destinies of Spirit. Out of this eager movement to recognize the one side in the other, and by means of the external to bring for itself visibly to sense and the imaginative faculty the significance, as also to envisage by virtue of that Inward the significance of the external shapes through a union in which both sides are associated, we get that vast impulse of art which finds its satisfaction through means which are purely symbolical. Only when the Inward is free and is driven forward to make clear to the imaginative vision in real form what it essentially is, and to have before itself this very vision, moreover, in the form of an external work, do we find that the genuine impulse of art, and the particularly plastic arts, begins to be a living fact. Then it is that the necessity is felt to clothe the Inward with a form not merely previously discovered from the resources of spiritual activity, but rather one that is minted out of spirit (mind) for the first time. In the symbol, then, there is a second form created, which, however, is not independently valid for itself as its main purpose, but is rather employed to envisage the significance, and stands consequently in a dependent relation to the same.
It were possible to apprehend the above relation in such a way as though the significance were that point from which the artistic consciousness starts on its journey, and that only after having found this it begins to look round for means to express its universal conceptions through external phenomena cognate in their affinity to such conceptions. This, however, is not the way that real symbolic art proceeds. For its characteristic distinction consists in this, that its penetration fails as yet to grasp the significances in their independent consistency, independent, that is, from every mode of externality. For this reason its point of departure is rather from that which is immediately presented and its concrete existence in Nature and Spirit. This it thereupon, in the first instance, expands to the measure of the universality of such significances, whose determination such objective real existence contains only under more restricted conditions, adding this wider range in order that it may create a form from Spirit, which is to make that universality visible to consciousness in this particular reality when once it is set forth clearly before perception. Regarded as symbolical forms, therefore, the images of art have not as yet attained a form truly adequate to Spirit, inasmuch as Spirit itself is not as yet at this stage essentially clear and thereby free Spirit; but we have at least here embodiments, which essentially proclaim the fact to us, that they are not merely selected to represent simply themselves, but are intended to point to significances of profounder intension and more—comprehensive range. That which is purely natural and sensuous asserts itself as fact and nothing beside; the symbolical work of art, however, whether it be the phenomena of Nature or the human figure that it makes visible to the eye, points at the same time over and outside such facts to something further, which, however, must possess an intimate root of affinity with the images that are thus displayed, and an essential bond of relation with them. This association between the concrete form and its universal significance may conceivably be present in many different ways. At one time the emphasis will be laid on the external aspect, and it will consequently be more obscure; at another, however, the basis of affinity will be more pronounced as in the case when the universality, which is to be symbolized, constitutes, in fact, the essential content of the concrete phenomenon. In this case naturally it is a much simpler matter to grasp the symbolic character of the object.
The most abstract mode of expression in this respect is number, which, however, it is only possible to use as an indication of a further meaning beyond that it ordinarily elucidates when this significance is itself, essentially numerical. The numbers seven and twelve are frequently met with in Egyptian architecture, because seven is the number of the planets, and twelve is that of the lunar revolutions or the number of feet that the water of the Nile must necessarily rise in order to fructify the land. Such a number is then regarded as sacred in so far as it is present as a determinant in the great elementary relations, which are revered as forces in the whole life of Nature. Twelve steps or seven pillars are to this extent symbolical. The same kind of numerical symbolism has an extensive influence upon the form of widely famous mythologies. The twelve labours of Hercules, for example, appear to contain a reference to the twelve months of the year; for if Hercules under one aspect of the myth is no doubt presented to us as the thoroughly human impersonation of a hero, in another he unquestionably indicates a significance of Nature under a symbolized form, and, in fact, is a personification of the course of the sun.
In a further and more complete sense symbolical configurations of space, labyrinthine passages, and such like carry a symbolical image of the course of the planets, just as dances, too, in virtue of their complex evolutions symbolically express the motion of the great elementary bodies.
And further, on a higher plane, the bodies of animals are utilized as symbols, but most succinctly of all the human figure, which, even at this stage, as we shall see later on, appears to be elaborated in modes more compatible with its intrinsic worth for the reason that even now Spirit in general makes a real movement to embody itself from out the mere swaddling clothes of Nature in a shape more adequate to its own self-subsistent personality. Such, then, constitutes our general concept of the true form of symbolism and the necessity under which art labours to express the same. And in order that we may discuss the more concrete exemplifications of this type of symbolism, it will be necessary in dealing with this first plunge of Spirit into the wealth of its own resources to leave the East and direct our attention mainly on the West.
As a symbol of universal import to indicate the point of view where we now stand, we may perhaps first and foremost fix before our eyes the image of the Phoenix, which is its own funeral pile, yet ever is rejuvenated out of the flames of its death and rises from the ashes. Herodotus informs us (II, 73) that at least in representations he saw this bird in Egypt, and, in fact, it is the Egyptian people who also supply us with a focus for the type of symbolical art. Before, however, we proceed to the closer consideration of Egyptian art we will mention several other myths, which form, as it were, the passage to that national symbolism which we find most elaborate, no matter from what direction we approach it. Such are the myths of Adonis, that of his death, and the lament of Aphrodite over him, the funeral festivals, etc., conceptions and rites which find their original home on the Syrian coast. The service of Cybele among the Phrygians possesses the same significance, which also finds its echo in the myths of Castor and Pollux, Ceres and Proserpina.
As the essence of such significance we find in the above quoted examples, before everything else, that phasal condition of negation we have already alluded to, the death, that is, of the natural regarded as a basic and absolute condition of the Divine process, emphasized as such, and made visible in its independence. It is in this sense that we can explain the funeral festivals that celebrate the death of the god, the excessive lamentations over his loss, which is once more made good through his rediscovery, resurrection, and rejuvenescence, making it possible for the festivals of joy to follow. This universal significance contains further its more definite relation to Nature. In winter the sun loses his force, while in spring he returns once more, and with that Nature regains her youth, she dies and is reborn. In examples such as these the Divine, personified as a human event, discovers its significance in the life of Nature, which then from a further point of view becomes a symbol for the essential character of the negative condition generally, in spiritual things no less than natural.
It is in Egypt, however, that we have to look for the perfect example of symbolical representation in its systematic elaboration of characteristic content and form. Egypt is the land of symbol, which proposes to itself the spiritual problem of the self-interpretation of Spirit, without being able successfully to solve it. The problems remain without an answer; and such solution as we are able to supply consists therefore merely in this, that we grasp these riddles of Egyptian art and its symbolical productions as this very problem which Egypt propounds for herself but is unable to solve. For the reason that we find that Spirit here still endeavours in the external objects of sense, from which again it strains to free itself, and further labours with unwearied assiduity, to evolve from itself its essential substance by means of natural phenomena no less than to embody the same in the form of spirit for the vision of the senses, rather than as the pure content of mind, this Egyptian people may, in contrast to all the instances previously examined, be described as the nation Art claims for herself[59]. Its works of art, however, remain full of mystery and silence, without music or motion; and this is so because Spirit here has not yet truly found its own life, nor has learned how to utter the clear and luminous speech of mind. In the unsatisfied stress and impulse, to bring before the vision through her art, albeit in so voiceless a way, this wrestle of herself with herself, to give shape to the Inward of her life, but only to become conscious of her own Inward, no less than that which universally prevails[60], through external forms which are cognate with it—we have in a sentence the characterization of Egypt. The people of this wonderful land was not merely agricultural, but also constructive, a folk which tossed up the soil in every direction, delved lakes and canals, and exercised their artistic instincts not merely in giving visible shape to buildings of enormous solidity, but in carrying works themselves of vast dimension to a like extent into the bowels of the earth. To erect buildings of this kind was, as we have long ago learned from Herodotus, a principal occupation of this people, and one of the chief exploits of their kings. The buildings of the Hindoo race are also unquestionably of colossal size; we shall, however, find nowhere else a variety which can compare with that of Egypt.
1. Reviewing now the general conceptions of Egyptian art with a closer attention to particular aspects of it, we may in the first place define the fundamental principle of so much of it as follows, that we find here the Inward is securely held in its independent opposition to the immediacy of external existence. And what is more, this Inward is conceived as the negation of Life, in other words the dead thing, not as the abstract negation of the evil and hurtful thing, such as Ahriman in contrast to Ormuzd, but as form essentially substantive.
(a) To illustrate this thought further, the Hindoo merely subtilizes his life to the most empty of abstractions, that is in result one that therewith negates every form of concrete content. Such a Brahm-becoming process is not to be found in Egypt; rather we find here that the invisible possesses a fuller significance; the corpse secures the content of the living body itself, which, however, as torn away from immediate existence, in its retirement from actual life[61], still possesses its relation to that which is alive, and in this concrete form is maintained as self-subsistent. It is a well-known fact that the Egyptians embalmed and revered cats, dogs, hawks, ichneumons, bears, and wolves (Herod., II, 67), but most of all the dead human body (Herod., II, 86-90). By them the honour paid to the dead is not that of burial, but its preservation from age to age as a corpse.
(b) And moreover we may observe that the Egyptians do not merely remain constant to this immediate and still wholly natural permanency of the dead. That which is preserved in its physical or natural aspect is also conceived to endure in a form present to the imagination. Herodotus informs us that the Egyptians were the first who held the doctrine that the human soul is immortal. We consequently find that they are the first who present to us a more exalted mode of this resolution of the natural and spiritual, a mode that is to say, under which it is not merely the natural body which secures an independent self-subsistence.
The immortality of the soul is a conception which borders closely upon the freedom of Spirit. The Ego is here apprehended as removed from the purely natural mode of its existence, reposing on its own substance. This knowledge of itself, however, is the principle of freedom. No doubt we are not justified in asserting that the Egyptians grasped the notion of spiritual freedom in its profoundest sense. We must not imagine that their belief in the immortality of the soul is identical with our own form of that belief; but they already possessed the power to retain securely that which was separated from Life under a form of existence visible only to the imagination, no less than one in which it was identical with the bodily material. They have thereby made possible the passage to the full emancipation of Spirit, albeit it was but the threshold of the temple of freedom that they passed over. This fundamental conception of theirs is further expanded to a unified and substantial Kingdom of the Departed set up in contrast to the immediate presence of the real. A Court of Justice of the Dead is held in this invisible state over which Osiris as Amenthes presides. One of similar character is also instituted in the sphere of immediate reality, justice being executed even among men over the dead, and after the decease of a king every one was entitled to submit his grievances to that court.
(c) If we now proceed to inquire what is the symbolical form of art, which is given to such conceptions, we must look for this among the characteristic features of Egyptian architecture. The form of this architecture is twofold; there is one type that is superterraneous, while the other is subterraneous.
On the one hand we find underground labyrinths, gorgeous and extensive excavations, passages half a mile in length, dwellings covered with hieroglyphics elaborated with every possible care. On the other we have piled above their level those amazing constructions among which we may first and foremost reckon the pyramids. For centuries men have ventilated various notions as to the precise meaning and significance of these pyramids. It is now, however, assured beyond dispute that they are nothing more or less than the enclosures of the graves of kings or sacred animals, such as the Apis, the Cat, or the Ibis. In this way we have before our eyes in the pyramids the simple prototype of symbolical art. They are enormous crystals which secrete an Inward within them; and they so enclose an external form which is the product of art, that we are at the same time made aware they stand there for this very Inward in its severation from the mere actuality of Nature, and that their entire significance depends on that relation. But this kingdom of Death and the Invisible, which here constitutes the significance, possesses merely the one and, what is more, the formal aspect appropriate to the true type of art, that is its dissociation from immediate existence; it is for this reason primarily but a Hades, not yet a Life, which, although raised above sensuous existence as such, is none the less at the same time essentially a defined existence, and thereby intrinsically free and living Spirit. Consequently the embodiment for such an Inward still remains in relation to the determinacy of the same's content quite as much a wholly external form and envelopment. Such an external environment, in which an Inward reposes under a veil, are the pyramids.
2. In so far, then, as the Inward can be generally envisaged as an external object to immediate perception, the Egyptians in their relation to the aspect opposed to this externality have come to worship a Divine existence in living animals, such as the bull, the cat, and various others. That which is alive is on a higher plane than the purely inorganic object, inasmuch as the living organism possesses an Inward, to which the external shape points, which, however, persists as an Inward and consequently a realm of mystery. This sacred cult of animals must consequently be understood as the vision of a secreted soul[62], which as Life is a power superior to that which is merely external. To us no doubt it can only appear as a repugnant fact that animals, dogs and cats, are held sacred instead of that which is truly spiritual.
This worship, moreover, has nothing symbolical in it viewed simply as such; for it is the actual living animal, Apis or the like, which is here itself revered as the existence of God. The Egyptians, however, have used the shapes of animals in a symbolical way. In that case they are no longer valid, simply for what they are, but it is further assumed that they express a more universal import. We find the most ingenuous illustration of this in the use of animal masks, which we find more particularly under representations of embalming, at which process certain individuals, who take an active part, either in opening the corpse or removing the intestines, are depicted wearing such masks. It is obvious that the animal's head is not taken to present the animal itself, but a significance at the same time distinct from it and more universal. The forms of animals are also utilized in other ways than this in admixture with the human form. Human figures are to be found with heads of lions, which have been interpreted as images of Minerva; then there are heads of the hawk, and in the heads of Ammon we find the horns still retained. Examples such as the above obviously imply symbolical relations. In a like sense the hieroglyphical writing of the Egyptians is in great measure symbolical, for it either endeavours to make its meaning comprehensible through the images of real objects which do not stand for themselves, but a universality which is cognate with them, or, as is still more frequently the case, in the so-called phonetic aspect of this style of writing, it signifies particular letters by means of the specific mark of some external object, whose initial letter possesses in speech the same tone as that which it is the intention to express.
3. And generally it is the fact that in Egypt pretty nearly every conformation is symbolical and hieroglyphical, expressing not itself but indicative of something more, with which it possesses affinity, or in other words a cognate relation. The truest forms of the symbol, however, are only completely illustrated in such cases where we find that this relation is of a more profound and fundamental character than those we have just adverted to. We will now briefly enumerate a few constantly recurring examples of this more important type of affiliation.
(a) Precisely as Egyptian belief[63] surmises a mysterious Inwardness of content in the animal form, we find the human figure represented in such a way that the most characteristic intension[64] of subjectivity is still asserted through an external relation, and consequently is unable to unfold into the freedom of Beauty. Particularly remarkable in this respect are those colossal figures of Memnon which, reposing on themselves, motionless, with arms glued to the body, feet close together, inflexible, stiff and lifeless, are set up face to face with the sun, waiting for his ray to strike them, animate them, and make them resonant. Herodotus, at any rate, informs us that these Memnonic figures emitted a musical note on the sun's rising. The higher criticism has no doubt expressed itself as sceptical on the latter point; the fact, however, of a distinct note has recently been once more established both by Frenchmen and Englishmen; and though it appears that this echo is no result of previous mechanical ingenuity, we have an explanation of it in the fact that, as sometimes happens with minerals which make a crackling noise in water, the tone of these images of stone is actually produced by the collective action of the dew, the morning cool, and the subsequent impact of the sun's rays, to the extent, that is, that tiny fractures appear in the stone which then again disappear. In any case we may attribute to these colossal shapes the symbolical import, that they do not possess the spiritual principle of Life free in themselves, and consequently require that their animation should be brought to them externally by Light, which alone is able to unbar the music of their life, instead of having the power to accept the same from that real soul of Inwardness, which essentially carries with it measure and beauty. In contrast to them the human voice is the echo of personal feeling and the soul's self, without any external stimulant, just as the height of human art generally consists in the fact that the Inward of Spirit supplies the form thereof from its own substance. The Inward or soul of the human form is in Egypt still a mute, and in its animation it is the relation to external nature which alone commands attention.
(b) A further type of symbolical conception is to be found in Isis and Osiris. Osiris is an object of procreation and birth, and is done to death by Typhon. Isis seeks for the scattered members, finds, collects, and buries them. This mythos of the god has, then, in the first place as its content purely natural significance. From one point of view, that is to say, Osiris is the sun, and his life-history stands as symbolic for his yearly course; from another, however, he signifies the rise and fall of the Nile, which is necessarily the source of all fruitfulness in Egypt. For in Egypt there may not be a drop of rain for years together, and it is the Nile which primarily waters the land by its floods. In winter time it flows but a shallow stream within its bed; then, however, with the summer-solstice ("Herod.," II, 19) it begins for a hundred days to rise, pours over its banks and streams far and wide over the land. Finally the water dries up beneath the sun's heat and the scorching desert winds, and once more retires to its course. Under such conditions the tillage of the soil is carried out with ease; the most luxurious vegetation springs up. Everything buds and ripens. The sun and Nile, and the way both of them become weak or strong, these are the conspicuous forces of Nature in this land, which the Egyptian has symbolically depicted under a human form in the myths of Isis and Osiris. To this type of symbolism, too, belongs the symbolical representation of the zodiac, which is associated with the year's course, just as the number of the twelve gods is bound up with the months. Conversely, however, Osiris typifies under another aspect the entirely human. He is held sacred as the founder of agriculture, of the division of the soil, property and laws, and his worship is consequently to an equal extent related to human activities, which are connected in the closest manner with ethical and judicial functions.
In the same way he is judge of the Dead, and secures as such a significance wholly released from the mere life of Nature, an import under which the symbolical tends to pass away for the reason that here the Inward and Spiritual is of itself content of the human form, which, under such a mode of relation, begins to conserve the Inward essentially belonging to it, one, that is, which through its external form signifies merely its own substance. This spiritual process, however, assumes again in equal measure as its content the external life of Nature, and, for example, in temples, number of steps, floors, and pillars, in labyrinths and their passages, windings and chambers, represents the same in an external manner. Osiris is thus quite as much the natural as he is the spiritual life in the different phases of his process[65] and its transformations; and his symbolical embodiments are partly symbolic of the elements of Nature; while again in part these changes of Nature are themselves merely symbols of spiritual activities and their various phases. For this reason, too, the human form persists here as no mere personification, such as we found to be the-case previously, because here the natural aspect, albeit from one point of view it appears as the real significance, yet from another is itself merely asserted as a symbol of the Spirit; and, generally speaking, at this stage of conception, where we find that the Inward struggles to come forth from the sense-vision of Nature, it is in a position of subordinance.
For the same reason we find here that the human figure already receives an entirely different type of elaboration, attesting thereby a real effort to penetrate the arcana of true Inwardness and Spirit, though this endeavour also fails as yet to attain its object, that is, the essential freedom of the Spiritual. And it is by reason of this very defect that the human figure remains before us with neither freedom nor serene clarity, colossal, brooding, petrified, legs, arms, and head glued straitened and tight to the rest of the body, without the grace or motion of Life. Thus it is that art is first ascribed to Daedalus, in that he loosed arms and feet from their fetters, and endowed the body with movement.
On account of this alternative aspect of symbolism above referred to symbolism in Egypt is, in addition to its other characteristics, a totality of symbols in the sense that what in one respect is asserted as significance is employed as symbol in a sphere cognate with it. This ambiguous association of a symbolism which makes significance and form intertwine, which is further actually typical or suggestive of much, and thereby is already concurrent with that inward subjective sense, which alone is capable of following such indications in a variety of directions[66], is the characteristic distinction of these images, albeit by reason of this ambiguity the difficulty of interpreting them is of course increased.
A significance of this type—attempts at deciphering which are unquestionably nowadays carried too far for the reason that pretty nearly every kind of form is virtually set before us as symbolical in some relation—may very possibly from the point of view of the Egyptians themselves have been clear and intelligible as significance. But, as we insisted at the very entrance of our inquiry, the appropriate motto for the interpretation of Egyptian symbolism is implicite multum nihil explicite. There is a type of workmanship undertaken with the express endeavour that it shall carry its own interpretation on the forehead, but we only find there evidence of the effort; it stops short of the essential point of self-illumination. It is in this sense that we must fix our eyes on the works of Egyptian art. They contain riddles, the full solution of which is not merely withheld from ourselves, but was equally beyond the reach of the great majority of the artists who created them.
(c) The works of Egyptian art in their excessively mysterious symbolism are therefore riddles, let us rather say the objective riddle's self. And we may summarily define the Sphinx as symbol of the real significance of the genius of Egypt. It stands as a symbol for symbolism itself. In countless numbers, set forth in rows of a hundred at a time, we come across these Sphinx-forms on Egyptian soil; they are hewn from the hardest stone, polished, covered with hieroglyphics, and in the vicinity of Cairo of such colossal dimensions that their lion-claws alone measure a man's height. Their animal bodies lie in repose, above which as bust a human body rears itself; now and again we find the head of a ram, but in the most common case it is that of a woman. Out of the obtuse strength and robustness of animality the spirit of man is fain to press forward, albeit still unable to attain the perfect representation of his own freedom, or a counterfeit of his body in motion; and this is inevitable, for he is still forced to remain blended in the company of that Other which confronts himself. This straining after self-conscious spirituality, which fails to grasp itself from the truth of its own substance in a form of external reality which is alone adequate to express it, and instead envisages and brings the same home to consciousness in that which is merely cognate with it, but also that which is equally foreign to it, is, in its general terms, the symbolical; and we find it here concentrated to a point as the riddle.
It is in this sense that the Sphinx in the Greek mythos, which itself again is open to symbolic interpretation, appears as the monster which propounds its riddle. The sphinx asked here the famous and problematical question: "Who is it, who walks in the morning on four legs, at noon upon two legs, and in the evening on three?" Oedipus discovered the simple answer that it was man himself, and hurled the sphinx from the rocks. The resolution of the symbol consists in the illumination of all that is implied in the significance of one word, Spirit, just as the famous Greek inscription cries out to mankind: "Know thyself." The light of consciousness is that clarity, which suffers its concrete content to shine all luminous through the form which is wholly adapted to unfold it, and in its positive form of existence simply reveals that which it is in truth.
[37] Bedeutung.
[38] What Hegel means is that calling an aspect of sense bodily or natural itself implies a distinction from that which is spiritual, or only cognized by mind, and this distinction is not present to the earliest human cognition of Divine reality.
[39] Das Lichtreine.
[40] Except in the conceptions of the Hebrew prophets this is only true subject to qualification even of the God of Israel. For he was evidently associated with the thunder, to take but one case—the deliverance of the tables of stone on Sinai.
[41] Phantasie may often be translated by the word imagination, but here the element of caprice and dependence on sensuous image rather than creative impulse directed by a principle of selection is to be emphasized.
[42] Ein Taumel, i.e., the dance as of intoxication.
[43] This is obviously a difficult passage to follow. The main thing to remember is that Hegel is here describing the movement of a dialectical process, that is the purely objective, rather than the point of view of personal or even national experience. Such vivid expressions as Taumel and schamlos hineinrücken remind one of the Platonic dialectic.
[44] Hegel's editor has Brahman here, but according to a passage lower down (p. 59) it should rather be Brahmâ.
[45] Hinaufschrauben, lit., a screwing up to—a screwing that in fact crews the head off.
[46] Verdumpfens. Either Hegel wrote Verdummens, or more probably Verdampfens. The idea of "becoming mouldy" makes no sense.
[47] This I think is the sense, though Hegel expresses it by using words such as das Personificieren und Vermenschlichen, and lower down das Subjektiviren. But previously he has rather contrasted that false kind of personification which seeks for the significant in the expression of the subject, his deeds and acts, rather than in grasping the motive centre of personality, the subjective principle itself, and it appears more intelligible in a passage, which is sufficiently hard to follow in any ease, to preserve that contrast.
[48] There is apparently only one ring and sceptre, but the words used are capable of the interpretation that would attach one for each of the hands.
[49] Hegel cites Wilson's Lexicon, s.v. 2.
[50] Dem Rhythmus nach, that is, the Hindoo conception is entirely superficial, and expresses rather a rhythmic order than a profound spiritual truth which this number expresses, a truth which as Hegel has previously observed may be expressed under other determinations than the numerical.
[51] Unstätigkeit, instability, flightiness, detachment from a fundamental principle.
[52] That is Brahmâ apparently.
[53] The order of the words would strictly mean that the sons were in the pitchers and it is quite possible that this is the meaning.
[54] That is, in Greek cosmogony.
[55] What: Centimanen refers to I do not know, possibly a name for Arges, Ceropes, and Brontes.
[56] The sense is "which is not merely (to take the obvious case of opposition which is, however, not the one here described) totally outside the Absolute and incidental to," etc. Hegel's words would admit of the interpretation that this was part of the conception he is describing. But this is obviously not so, for, in that case, the negative would be ascribed to both the Absolute and the "other God."
[57] Ist Unterscheiden, is that which involves differentiation. To posit a quality is to distinguish from other qualities. A fundamental, aspect of Hegelian logic.
[58] Glied, part of one organic totality.
[59] Hegel uses an expression somewhat similar to Milton's "Among the faithless faithful only he." Den Bisherigen refers primarily, of course, to the Persian and Hindoo peoples.
[60] Wie des Innern überhaupt, i.e., the Inward with its significance as the Absolute.
[61] In seiner Abgeschiedenheit vom Leben. In other words the corpse was preserved as still the only appropriate external form of Life. Though Hegel separates the two aspects of Egyptian belief they were necessary concomitants of each other.
[62] I have translated Innerem here by "soul," but it expresses of course too much if taken strictly in its most personal sense.
[63] Aberglaube, not "superstition" so much as belief that is intuitive, not rationally deduced. The emphasis is on ahnt.
[64] Hegel puts it in the rather obscure and contradictory way that the human figure is represented as "still having the most unique form of subjective intensity (Das eigenste Innre der Subjectivität) outside it."
[65] That is, the mythological history of the God.
[66] Lit., "Which alone is able to apply itself (that is, to the work of interpretation) in a variety of directions."
CHAPTER II
THE SYMBOLISM OF THE SUBLIME
The perspicuity that has no riddles to expound, which is the object of symbolic art and veritably the mark of Spirit self-clothed to the perfect measure of its own substance, can only be attained on condition that first and foremost the significance be presented to consciousness distinct and separate from all the phenomena of external existence. To the union of both immediately envisaged we have traced the absence of art among the ancient Parsees. The contradiction involved in their severation, followed by the association which it then stimulated under the mode of immediacy, was the source of the fantastic type of Hindoo symbolism. Finally, we have seen that in Egypt, too, the free and unfettered recognition of the Inward principle and a significance essentially independent from the phenomenon was lacking; and this resulted in the mystery and obscurity of a symbolism still more complete.
The first decisive act of purification, or, in other words, express separation of the essential substance[67] from the sensuous present, that is from the empirical facts of external appearance, we must accordingly seek for in the Sublime, which exalts the Absolute above every form of immediate existence, and thereby effects that initiatory mode of its abstract liberation which is the basis of the spiritual content. As Spirit in its concreteness the significance is not yet apprehended; but it is, however, conceived as an Inwardness essentially existent, reposing on its own resources, and of such a nature that purely finite phenomena are alone inadequate to express its truth.
Kant has raised a very interesting distinction between the idea of the sublime and the beautiful; and indeed all that he discusses in the first part of his critique of the Judgment from the twentieth section to the end—in spite of its considerable prolixity and its reduction of every form of determination to a fundamentally subjective principle, whether it be the content of feeling, imagination, or reason—still possesses a real interest. We may in fact recognize this very reduction on the ground of its general principle of relation to be just[68]; in other words, to borrow Kant's own expressions, if the matter of our consideration is primarily the Sublime in Nature, it is not in any fact of Nature, but only in the content of our emotional life that such a Sublime is to be discovered, and, further, only in so far as we are conscious of a Nature peculiar to ourselves which involves the added assumption of one that lies outside of us. The statement of Kant is to be taken in this sense where he says: "The true sublime cannot be enclosed in any sensuous form; it is only referable to the ideas of reason, which, albeit no truly adequate representation can be given them, are excited and awakened to life within the human soul by just this very incompatibility of the permissibly sensuous representation with its object[69]." The sublime is, in short, generally the attempt to express the infinite, without being able to find an object in the realm of phenomenal existence such as is clearly fitted for its representation. The infinite, for the very reason that it is posited independently as invisible and formless significance in contrast to the complex manifold of objective fact, and is conceived under the mode of inwardness, so long as it remains infinite remains indefinable in speech and sublimely unaffected by every expression of the finite categories.
The earliest content, then, which the significance secures at this stage consists in this, that in contrast to the totality of the phenomenal it is the essentially substantive One, which itself being pure Thought is only present to thought in its purity. Consequently it is no longer possible to inform this substance under the mode of externality, and to that extent all real symbolical character disappears. If, however, an attempt is made to envisage this essential unity for sense-perception, such is only possible under a mode of relation according to which, while retaining its substantive character, it is further apprehended as the creative force of everything external, in which it therefore discovers a means of revelation and appearance, and with which it is accordingly joined in a positive relation. At the same time it is an essential feature in the expressed content of this relation that this substance is asserted above all particular phenomena as such, no less than above their united manifold; from which it then follows as a still more consequential result that the positive relation is deposed for one that is negative; and the negative consists in this that a purification of the substance is thus effected from the phenomenal taken as any particular thing, that is, in other words, that which is also not appropriate to it and which vanishes within it.
This mode of giving form, which is annihilated by the very thing which it would set forth, so that it comes about that the exposition of content affirms itself as that which renders the exposition null and void is in fact the Sublime. We have therefore not, as we found to be the view of Kant, to refer the Sublime exclusively to the subjective content of the soul, and the ideas of reason which belong to it, but rather form our conception of it as having its fundamental source in the significance represented, in other words the one absolute substance. We must, then, further deduce our classification of the art-type of the Sublime from this twofold relation of the substantive unity regarded as significance to the phenomenal world.
The characteristic which is held in common by both aspects of this relation, whether we view it positively or negatively, consists in this that the substance is posited above the particular appearance, in which it is assumed to have found a representation, although it can only be declared thereby under the form of a relation to the phenomenal in its general terms, for the reason that as substance and ultimate essence it is itself essentially without form and out of the reach of concrete external existence. We may describe pantheistic art as the first or affirmative mode of conception at this stage, a type of conception which we come across partly in India, and also to some extent in the liberal atmosphere and mysticism of the more modern poets of Persian Mohammedanism, and finally in the still profounder intensity of thought and emotion which characterizes it when it reappears in western Christianity.
Generally, defined substance is cognized at this stage as immanent in all its created accidents, which for this reason are not as yet deposed to a mere relation of service, viewed simply, that is, as an ornament of glory to the Absolute, but are affirmatively conserved by virtue of the indwelling substance; and this is so albeit it is the One and the Divine alone which is set forth and exalted in all particularity. By this means the poet, who contemplates and reveres this unity in all things, and sinks his own individuality, no less than every other object in this contemplation, is able to maintain a positive relation to the substance, with which he associates all other objects.
The second or negative celebration of the Power and Glory of the one God is that genuine type of Sublimity which we find in Hebrew poetry. In this the positive immanence of the Absolute in the created phenomena is done away with, and in place thereof we have the one substance independently affirmed as sovereign Lord of the world, who subsists over against the universe of His creations, which are posited under a relation to this Supreme Being of essential and evanescent powerlessness. If under such a view any representation is attempted of the Power and Wisdom of this Unity under the form of the finite objects of Nature and human destinies, we find nothing here that resembles the Hindoo's distortion of such objects by the unlimited accretion to their measure. The Sublimity of God is rather brought home to our senses by means of a representation whose entire object is to show us that all that exists in definite guise, with all its splendour, embellishment and glory, is a loyal accident in His service, a show that vanishes before the Divine essence and consistency.
A. THE PANTHEISM OF ART
Anyone who makes use of the word pantheism nowadays exposes himself thereby to the grossest misunderstanding. For, to take but one aspect of the difficulty, this word "all" signifies generally in our modern acceptation of the term "all, and everything in its wholly empirical particularity." We have at once recalled to us, for example, this particular box with all its attributes, its specific colour, size, form and weight, or that particular house, book, animal, table, stool, oven, streak of cloud and so on, to the end of the list. When we consequently find the charge advanced by not a few of our modern theologians against philosophy, that it makes a God of everything in general, it is quite obvious that this "everything" is taken in the sense we have just adverted to, and this it is which is thus bodily thrust upon her shoulders. In one word the complaint which attaches to it is absolutely unwarranted. Such a conception of pantheism only exists in the heads of stupidity, and is not discoverable in any form of religion whatever, not even in those of the Iroquois and Esquimaux, to say nothing of any philosophy. The "Everything" in what has been termed pantheism is therefore neither this nor that particular thing, but rather "Everything" in the sense of the "All," that is the One substantive essence, which no doubt is immanent in particular things, but is cognized in abstraction from their singularity and its empirical reality, so that it is not the particular as such, but the universal animating essence or soul, or to adopt a more popular way of speaking, it is the true and the excellent, both equally a real presence in this particular thing, which are here affirmed and indicated.
This it is which constitutes the real meaning of pantheism, and we shall only have occasion now to employ the expression in this sense. It applies first and foremost to the Orient, whose type of conception is based on the thought of an absolute unity of Godhead and of everything else as subsisting in this Unity. As such Unity and All the Divine can only be presented to consciousness by means of the ever recurrent evanescence of the limited number of particular objects, in which its Presence is expressed. On the one hand we have here the Divine envisaged as immanent in the most diverse objects, whether it be life or death, mountain or sea, and with still closer intimacy no doubt as the most excellent and pre-eminent among and in all determinate existence. On the other hand, inasmuch as the One is this and again that other and that other beyond it, and in short is discharged into everything, all particular existence appears for that reason to be a thing which is cancelled and vanishes, for no particular is alone this One, but this One is this manifold of particulars which pass away before semi-perception, as such particulars into the universe which comprises them. For if the One is Life, it is also at another point Death, and is to that extent not merely life, so that it is neither as life nor the sun nor the sea that these or any other objective realities constitute the Divine and One. At the same time we do not find here, as in the genuine type of the Sublime, that the accidental is expressly posited in the negative relation of mere service. So far from this being so, substance is essentially identified with one particular and accidental existence, inasmuch as it is this One in everything. Conversely, however, this very particular, because it is equally subject to change, and the imagination does not restrict substance to one definite existence, but moves over every definition, letting it fall that it may advance to another, is thereby relegated in its turn to the accidental, over which the One is superposed in the sublimity thus conjoined with it.
Such a way of viewing existence therefore can only be expressed in art through poetry; the plastic arts are closed to it, inasmuch as they bring before the vision the definite and particular, which in their contrast to the substance present in the objects of Nature has to be given up in a determinate and persistent form. Where we find pantheism in its purity no plastic art is found as a mode of its presentation.
1. Once more we may adduce, as a first example of such pantheistic poetry, the literature of the Hindoos, which along with its fantastic symbolism has also elaborated the type of art under discussion with distinction. In other words the Hindoo race, as we have seen, proceed in their conceptions from the point of most abstract universality and unity, which is then carried forward to the specific shaping of gods such as Trimûrtis, Indras, and the rest. This process of definition, however, is not adhered to with constancy; but to a like extent is suffered once more to break up, so that we find inferior gods are absorbed in superior gods, and the highest of all in Brahman. From this it is sufficiently obvious that this Universal constitutes the one persistent and unalterable basis of all. And if, as we freely admit, the Hindoos evince the twofold impulse in their poetry, namely, either to exaggerate the particular existence, in order that it may appear to the senses compatible with the significance of the Absolute, or, in the converse case, to suffer every form of definition to pass as mere negation when contrasted with the one abstraction of Being, yet at the same time there is another aspect of their literature, in which we also find artistic representation under the purer mode of imaginative pantheism we have just described, a mode in which the immanence of the Divine is exalted above all particular existence in which it is presented to sense and which as such disappears. We may no doubt be rather inclined to recognize in this later mode of conception a certain similarity with that type of the immediate unity of pure thought which we found to be characteristic of the religious consciousness of the Parsees. Among the Parsees, however, the One and Excellent is conserved in its independence as itself a fact of Nature, that is, Light. With the Hindoos, on the contrary, the One, or Brahman, is merely the formless One; and this it is which in its transformations through the infinite variety of the phenomenal world, first gives rise to the pantheistic mode of representation. So we read of Krishna (Bhagavad-Gita, Lect. VII, II. 4 et seq.): "Earth, water and wind, air and fire, reason and egoity are the eight pieces of my essential force; yet knowest thou somewhat more in me, a more exalted essence, which animates the earthly and supports the world. In it all existences have their origin. Ay, verily, thou knowest I am the origin of the entire universe as also its annihilation. Aught higher than myself is not; in me is this All conjoined together, as a chaplet of pearls on a thread. I am the taste of sweetness in all that flows; I am the splendour in the sun and moon, the mystic Word in the sacred writings, manhood in man, the clean savour in the Earth, brightness in flame, in all Being Life, meditation in all who repent. In that which has Life the Power of Life, in the wise Wisdom, in the glorious Glory. Everything that is true of its kind, and everything that is specious and obscure proceeds out of me. I am not in them, but they are in me. Through the illusion of these three qualities all the world is made foolish, and knows me not who am unalterable. Moreover also the Divine illusion, even Mâya, is my own illusion, which is hard indeed to surpass, albeit all who follow after me step over this illusion." In this passage we have indicated in the most striking terms just such a substantive unity as the one above discussed, not merely from the point of view of its immanence in immediate sense, but also from that of its advance beyond and over all singularity.
In a similar manner Krishna affirms of himself that He is the most Excellent among all the different forms of existence (Lect. X, 21): "Among the star's I am the radiant sun, among the human signs the moon, among the sacred Books the Book of Hymns, among the senses the spiritual, Meru among the tops of the mountains, the lion among animals, the vowel A among all letters, among the seasons of the year the blooming spring-time, etc."
This enumeration, however, of superlative excellence, and we may add the description of that which is merely a change of forms, among which it is always one and the same thing that is envisaged, despite any superficial appearance such may give us at first of a prodigal imagination, is none the less, by reason of this very equality of content, extremely monotonous and in general empty and tedious.
2. Under a higher mode and in a freer manner from the subjective point of view we find, secondly, oriental pantheism is elaborated in Mohammedanism more particularly among the Persians.
And here we are confronted with a relation of some singularity when we direct our attention expressly to the point of view of the individual poet.
(a) To explain this more fully we would point out that so long as the poet yearns to behold the Divine in everything, and really so beholds it, he also surrenders his own personality; but, while doing so, he realizes quite as vividly the immanence of the Divine in his spiritual world thus expanded and delivered; and consequently there grows up within him that joyful ardour of the soul, that liberal happiness, that revel of bliss, which is so peculiar to the Oriental, who in freeing himself from his own particularity seems wholly to sink himself in the Eternal and Absolute, and henceforth to know and feel the image and presence of the Divine in all things. Such a self-absorption in the Divine, such an intoxicated life of bliss in God borders closely on mysticism. Under this aspect no volume is more famous than the Oschelaleddin-Rumi, of which Rückert, with the help of his marvellous powers of expression, which enable him to make light of both words and rhymes with all the wealth and freedom of the phantasy that comes so natural to the Persian poet, has supplied us with the fairest examples. Love to God, with whom man identifies himself in most boundless surrender, beholding Him as the One through every part of His Universe, with whom and to whom every and each thing is related and referred—this it is that gives us the focus of this type of thought, a centre which radiates in every direction.
(b) And, further, while in the true type of the sublime, as will appear shortly, the most excellent objects and the most glorious shapes are employed merely as the ornament of God, and as servants to celebrate the splendour and majesty of the One, being set before our eyes to do Him honour as Lord of all creation, in pantheism, on the contrary, it is the immanence of the Divine in external fact which exalts the determinate existence itself of the world, Nature, and humanity to its own self-substantial glory. The identical Life of Spirit in the phenomena of Nature and all human relations animates and spiritualizes the same in their own nature, and is further the source of that characteristic attitude of subjective feeling in the soul of the poet toward the objects he celebrates in his song. Suffused with the animating influx of this glory the soul is essentially serene, independent, free, secure in its comprehension and greatness; and in this positive identification of itself with such qualities it penetrates imaginatively with its life into the very heart of objective existence, sharing the restful unity that it finds there, and grows up in most blissful, most blithesome intimacy with the natural world and its munificence, with the drinking-booth no less than the beloved, and, in short, all that is held worthy of praise or affection. We find, no doubt, the same kind of self-absorption in the romantic temperament of the West. Generally speaking, however, and more particularly in the North, it is not so gladsome, spontaneous, or free from yearning; or, at least, it remains more exclusively shut up in itself, and is consequently selfish and sentimental. A spiritual mood of this type, in its depression and gloom, finds its most forceful outlet in the popular songs of barbarous peoples. The spontaneous and joyful emotional atmosphere is, on the contrary, congenial to the East, and particularly characteristic of the Mohammedan Persians, who openly and gladly surrender themselves with all their soul to the Divine influence, and indeed to everything that appears to merit such devotion, while they do not fail to retain the freedom of independence in such surrender, and consciously to preserve the same in their attitude to the world and all that surrounds them. We may, in fact, observe in the ardour of this passion, the most expansive ecstasy and parrhesia[70] of the emotional life, through which, in its inexhaustible wealth of gorgeous and splendid images, one emphatic note of joy, beauty, and happiness rings again and again. If the Oriental suffers or is unfortunate he takes his reverses as the unalterable fiat of Destiny, and falls back upon the strength of his own resources without any increase of depression, sensitiveness, or vexation of spirit. In the poetry of Hafis we hear often enough of the lover's woes and laments[71], as of many another kind, but our poet persists through grief, no less than in happiness, as free of care as ever. This is the mood of that sometime refrain:
For thanks, in that the present glow
Of friendship circles thee,
Light strong the taper e'en in woe,
And joyful be.
The taper teaches us both to laugh and to weep; it laughs through the flame of shining merriment, albeit it melts at the same time in hot tears; in the act of consumption it spreads wide the brightness of joviality. This is also the general character throughout of this type of poetry.
Among the objects frequently referred to in Persian poetry we may mention flowers and jewels, and, above all, the rose and the nightingale. It is a matter of frequent occurrence to represent the nightingale as bridegroom of the rose. This gift of personality to the rose and love to the nightingale may be abundantly illustrated from Hafis. "Out of gratefulness, O rose," he sings, "that thou art the sultana of Beauty, see to it that thou settest not a proud face to the love of the nightingale." The poet himself speaks of the nightingale of his own soul. When we of the West, on the contrary, refer in our poetry to roses, nightingales, or wine, and such matters, we do so in a wise much nearer to prose. The rose merely serves us for ornament, as in the expression, among others, "garlanded with roses." If we listen to the nightingale it is but to follow the bird with our own emotions; we think of the grape-juice, and call it "the breaker of our cares." Among the Persians, however, the rose is no mere image or ornament, no symbol, but itself appears to the poet as possessed with a soul, as loving bride, and he transpierces with his spirit the rose's very heart. Precisely the same character of a gorgeous Pantheism is still impressed on the most modern Persian poems. Herr von Hammer, for instance, has given us a description of a poem which was forwarded, among other gifts of the Shah, to the Emperor Francis in the year 1819. It contains an account of the exploits of the Shah in 33,000 distiches, who made a present of his own name to the Court poet in question.
(c) Goethe, too—here in contrast with the more perturbed atmosphere and the concentrated emotion of the poetry of his youth—was carried away in advanced age by the breadth of this careless and blithesome spirit; and though already a veteran, swept through by the breath of the East, dedicated the evening glow of his poetic passion, in a flood of extraordinary fervour to this freedom of emotion which, even where controversy is the sub ect-matter, still retains the beauty of its careless temper. The songs of his Westöstlicher Divan, are by no means the mere play of trivial social urbanities, but originate in a precisely similar spirit of free and unrestrained emotion. In a song of his to Suleica they are thus described by himself:
Pearls from the poet,
Thine is the treasure,
Thine was the big swell
Of passion tumultuous,
Which strewed them on desolate
Strand of his life.
Gold-tips I call it,
Pierced with bright jewels,
Tenderly conned o'er
By tapering fingers.
"Take them," he exclaims to his beloved:
Circle thy neck with them,
Close, close to thy breast!
These raindrops of Allah
The meek shell hath ripened.
Poetry such as this is the product of an experience of the widest range, a sense which has held its own in many storms, a depth and also, too, a youth of the heart—in other words:
World of Life's own drift of forces,
World, the wealth of whose wave-roll
Caught afar the bulbul's passion,
Won the song which shook the soul.
3. In this unity of pantheism, moreover, if emphasized in its relation to personal life, which feels itself united with God thereby, and the Divine as this presence intuitively cognized, we have, speaking generally, that type of mysticism which, under this more intimate mode, has also been elaborated in the pale of Christendom. We will adduce but one example, namely, that of Angelus Silecius, who, with the greatest audacity and depth of conception and emotional fervour, has expressed the essential presence of God in objective Nature, the union of the self with God, and the Divine with human personality, with an extraordinary power of mystical presentment. The more genuine type of Oriental pantheism, on the contrary, is inclined to insist more upon the vision of the One substance in all phenomena and the self-surrender of the individual, who thereby secures the most supreme expansion of conscious life no less than the bliss of absorption into all that is most noble and excellent by virtue of the absolute release from all finitude.
B. THE ART OF SUBLIMITY
The One substance, however, which is here conceived as the real significance of the entire universe, is only truly posited as substance where we find it suffered to retire into itself as pure Inwardness and substantive Power out of its presence and realization beneath the shifting forms of the phenomenal, and thereby is set forth in self-consistency as against all finitude. It is not till we come to this intuitive vision of the essence of God as absolutely Spiritual and apart from all image, and thus opposed to the things of the World and Nature, that the Spiritual is completely wrested from all that pertains to mere sense-perception and Nature, and delivered from determinate existence in the finite. While conversely, however, the absolute substance still maintains a relation to the phenomenal world from which it is reflected back upon itself. In this relation is now asserted that negative aspect already adverted to, which consists in this, that the entire universe, despite all the fulness, power, and glory of its phenomenal contents, is expressly affirmed in its relation to substance as that which is essentially of a purely negative subsistence, a creation of God, subject to His power and service. The world is therefore envisaged as the revelation of God, and He is the Goodness which permits the created thing that has no essential claim to exist, none the less to exist in relation to Himself, nay, further to have independent existence and thereby freely to conserve Him. This conservation on the part of the finitude, however, is without real substance, and in opposition to God the creature is here assumed to be that which passes away and is powerless, so that at the same time its claim to existence[72] is exhibited as a part of the goodness of the Creator, which not only veritably affirms the impotence of that which is essentially nothing apart from Himself, but thereby asserts His substance as the source of all Power. It is this relation, so far as it is set forth by art as the fundamental relation, both of content and form, which brings before us the art-type of the real Sublime. The Beauty of the Ideal and Sublimity no doubt present features of contrast. In the Ideal the Inward transpierces external reality, whose inward essence it really is under the mode at least, that both aspects are adequate to each other, and consequently appear to be in perfect fusion with one another. In the Sublime, on the contrary, the external existence, in which substance is envisaged for sense, is deposed in its opposition to that substance, such deposition and vassalage constituting the only mode, by means of which the God who is in His own seclusion without form, and in His positive essence incapable of being expressed by aught that is of the world and finite, can be envisualized by artistic means. The Sublime pre-supposes the significance in the self-subsistence of One, in relation to which externality is defined as in subjection, in so far as that Inward substance fails to appear, but its transcendent character is so asserted, that in the end nothing can be represented save just this essential and active transcendency[73].
In the symbol the mode of the external form was the main point emphasized. It must possess a significance, and yet fail completely to express it. In contrast to symbol of this kind and its obscure content we have now a significance in the absolute sense of the term conjoined with its full recognition. A work of art is now the actual discharge of pure essence conceived as the intensive purport of everything, of an essence, however, which deliberately affirms that very incompatibility of form to significance, which was only implicitly present in the symbol, to be the actually transcendent significance of God Himself within the sphere of worldly existence, and above all that is contained therein.
It is a significance which is therefore sublime in the work of art, which is exclusively concerned to express the same as thus explicitly declared. We may no doubt with justice accept the description of "sacred," as applicable generally to symbolical art, in so far as it accepts the Divine as comprised in the content of its productions; but the art of the Sublime alone can make good its claim to the distinction without any deduction, for it is here alone that God receives all the honour. In this sphere, owing to the fundamental character of the significance implied, the content is generally of a more restricted nature than that we find in genuine symbolism, whose relation to the Spiritual is that of an effort and nothing more, and which in the continuously shifting nature of its relations to to the world offers such a wide field, either for transformations of that which is spiritual into natural images, or of that which is essentially material under accordant fusion with the Spirit.
We find as nowhere else this art of the Sublime, as a mode of its original appearance, in the religious conceptions of the Hebrew race and their sacred poetry. We say poetry advisedly, because plastic art cannot possibly be in question here, where it is assumed that no image whatever is adequate to express the nature of the Divine, and that the part of poetry alone by means of the spoken or written word can be employed for such a purpose. A closer examination of this type of religious conception will secure to us the following points of view most worthy of our general attention.
1. If we look at the content of this poetry under the aspect of its most universal import, one of our first conclusions will be that God, as Lord of a world created to serve Him, is not conceived as incarnated in any form of the external, but rather as personality withdrawn from all determinate and worldly existence into the solitude of His pure Unity. For this reason that[74] which in genuine symbolism was still associated with supreme Unity, falls apart under the view we are considering into its twofold aspect, on one side the abstract subsistency of God, on the other the concrete existence of the world.
(a) Now God Himself as this pure self-subsistency of the One substance is essentially without form, and under this abstract conception cannot be brought closer to the envisagement of sense. That which therefore the imagination is able to seize at this stage is not the Divine content viewed under the aspect of its pure essence, inasmuch as this latter precludes the possibility of artistic representation under any form adequate to it whatever. The only content therefore that is left open to it is that of the relation of God to His created world.
(b) God is the creator of the universe. This is the purest expression of the Sublime itself. In other words we find that here for the first time all those fanciful conceptions of generation and purely physical procreation of external fact by God disappear. Each and all give place to the thought of creation by virtue of spiritual power and activity. "God spake: Let there be Light, and there was Light." A sentence dong ago cited, as a striking illustration of the Sublime by Longinus. And such indeed it is. The Lord of all, the One substance, proceeds, it is true, under the mode of self-expression; but the type of this bringing forth is the purest, nay, a mode of expression, aetherial so to speak, and without material form, the Word that is to say, the medium of thought as the ideal Power, in conjunction with whose mandate that it shall exist, the existing thing is veritably and immediately posited under the relation of tacit obedience.
(c) Into this created world, however, God is not conceived to pass over as into His reality; rather He abides withdrawn behind Himself, albeit this opposition supplies no secure ground for a logically developed dualism. For that which has been brought into being is His work, possesses no self-consistency as apart from Him. It is solely a witness to His Wisdom, Goodness, and Justice in general, just that and no more. The One is Lord over all; His dwelling is not in the facts of Nature. They are solely the accidents of His Greatness, without potency in themselves, which can indeed suffer the show of His essence to appear, but are unable to make the reality of it visible[75]. And this it is which constitutes the Sublime in its reference to the Divine.
2. Moreover, inasmuch as the one God is thus severed from the concreteness of the phenomenal world and posited in isolated fixity, while the externality of determinate existence is on its side defined and placed in subordination as the finite, both natural and human existence are now viewed under the novel aspect that they cannot be conceived as manifesting the Divine without at the same time making visible their essential finiteness.
(a) The most direct way of bringing home to ourselves the significance of the above contrasted relations may be expressed in the statement that here for the first time we have Nature and the human form set before us cut off from the Divine, prosaic fact in short. It is a Greek tale that when the heroes of the Argonautic Expedition passed in their ships through the straits of the Hellespont, the rocks which hitherto had crashed open and shut like shears suddenly came to a standstill rooted firmly for evermore in the ground. In a manner somewhat similar the process of the finite toward stability in intelligible definition, as contrasted with the infinite essence, moves onward in the sacred poetry of the Sublime, while in the conceptions of symbolism, where we have the finite overturned in the Divine and the latter quite as frequently thrust forth from its own substance into temporal existence, nothing is permitted to keep its due position. If we turn, for example, from ancient Hindoo poetry to the Old Testament we find ourselves at once in a totally different atmosphere, one in which we feel ourselves thoroughly at home, however much we may discover in the circumstances, events, actions, and characters an environment either alien or different to that in which we live. From a world of tumble and confusion we are transported to another, and have human figures presented to us, which appear as natural as those we see with our eyes, characters with the stable outlines of patriarchal life, which in the truth of their delineation stand so near that they receive an immediate assent from our intelligence.
(b) In a general view of existence such as the above which is able to grasp the natural process of life and to accept as valid the claim of natural laws, wonder for the first time is a really active force. In Hindooism everything is a wonder and consequently is no longer wonderful. No wonder can enter a world where the intelligible connection of facts is invariably broken, where everything is wrested from its place and turned topsy-turvy. For the wonderful presupposes the rational sequence of events no less than the clear perceptions of ordinary consciousness which, when it meets with some example of causal effect produced by a higher law breaking the customary chain of events now for the first time notifies the exception as a wonder. Wonders of this kind, however, are no real or specific expression of the Sublime, for the reason that the ordinary course of natural phenomena is conceived as quite as much the product of the Will of God and evidence of Nature's submission as such interruption of the same.
(c) We must rather look for the real Sublime in the fact that under this view the entire created world is limited in time and space, with no independent stability or consistency, and as such an adventitious product which exists solely to celebrate the praise of Almighty God.
3. This recognition of the nullity of objective fact and the exaltation and extolment of God are at this stage the source of man's own self-respect, and in these he looks for his own consolation and satisfaction.
(a) In this connection the Psalms supply us with classical examples of the genuine Sublime, and are set forth as a precedent for all times of what our humanity at the highest point of its spiritual exultation has superbly expressed as the reflection of its religious consciousness. Nothing in the world can here make good its claim to independent subsistence, inasmuch as everything exists and subsists simply through the Power of God, and only exists as in duty bound to extol His mightiness no less than to acknowledge its own essential nothingness. In the imagination of pantheism, which mainly unfolded in the direction of material substance an infinite extension of range was most remarkable: what we most are amazed at here is the power of spiritual exaltation which suffers everything else to fall away that it may declare the unique Almightiness of God. An extraordinarily forceful illustration of this temper is the 104th Psalm, "The Light is Thy mantle which Thou wearest; Thou spreadest out the heavens like a carpet, etc." Light, heavens, clouds, the pinions of the winds, each and all are here nothing by themselves, merely an external vesture, the chariot or messenger in the service of God. A further expansion of the same idea is the extolment of the Wisdom of God, which has ordained all things. The springs, which leap from their sources, the waters, which flow between the hills, by the banks of which the birds of the air sit and carol among the branches; the grassy vine, which gladdens the heart of men and the cedars of Lebanon which the Lord hath planted; the sea, and its swarms without number; the whales which sport therein, all these hath the Lord made. And all that God has created He also preserves. "Thou hidest Thy Face, and they are affrighted; Thou takest their breath away and they are gone and become again as dust." The 90th Psalm, that prayer of Moses, the man of God, insists expressly on the nothingness of man, where we read: "Thou sufferest them to pass away like a brook; they are like as a sleep, even as the grass, which is soon withered, and in the evening is cut down and dried up. Thy scorn maketh us to pass away; Thou showest Thine anger and we are gone."
(b) Two ideas are therefore associated together with the Sublime, if viewed in its relation to the human soul, first, that of man's finiteness, and secondly, that of the insurmountable aloofness of God.
(α) For this reason the idea of immortality is not to be found where this mode of conception obtains in its original purity; for this idea involves the assumption that the individual self, the soul, the spirit of man is essentially a self-subsistent entity. In the religion of the Sublime it is only the One that is apprehended as imperishable; opposed to that all else merely subsists and passes away, is neither essentially free nor infinite.
(β) And, further, on a similar ground man is conceived in his absolute unworthiness before God; his exaltation consists in the fear of the Lord, in a trembling before His scorn. Over and over again, with a directness which tears aside every veil and opens the very depths, we have the cry of the soul to God depicted, the sorrow over the sense of its nothingness, increasing lament and groanings unutterable.
(γ) On the other hand if the individual persist in his finiteness of opposition to God, this deliberately willed persistence is wickedness, which as evil and sin belongs only to the natural and human condition, and is conceived as remote from the One undifferentiated substance as pain and everything else that is essentially negative.