The _middle point_, the truly substantive centrum, is given us here in the representation of the _Absolute_, God Himself as God, in His independent _self-subsistence_, not as yet developed to the point of motion and difference, or advanced to the active operation of and separation from what is His, but presented essentially self-absorbed in supreme divine repose and stillness, briefly the Ideal embodied in a form essentially adequate to itself, which persists in its determinate existence in correspondent identity with itself. And in order that it may appear in infinite self-subsistency the Absolute must be conceived as Spirit, as conscious Subject, but as Subject which possesses essentially itself its own adequate mode of external appearance.
As divine subject, however, which passes forth into actual reality, it has confronting it an _external_ world for environment, which, in conformity with the Absolute, must be built up to an appearance harmonious with the same, an appearance permeated with the Absolute. This environing world is then on one side the _objective_ as such, the basis, the embrace of external Nature, which, taken by itself, possesses no absolute significance for Spirit, nor any ideality such as is present to individual consciousness[18], and consequently is only able to express by suggestion the spiritual Ideal which its appearance must seek to secure by embodying its embraced content in a world of Beauty.
In opposition to external Nature we find the _ideal_ realm of _consciousness_[19], the human soul as the medium[20] for the existence and manifestation of the Absolute. Together with this subjectivity is conjoined the multiplicity and differentiation of individuality, particularization, distinction, action, and development, that is, in general terms the full and varied world of the reality of Spirit[21], in which the Absolute is known, willed, experienced, and actively present. We may already infer from what we have indicated above that the differences under which the total content of art is differentiated are in essential consonance, both for our grasp and presentation of them, with what we have previously in the second portion of our inquiry examined as the symbolical, classical, and romantic types of art. In other words symbolic art only carries the art-process to the point of marking an affinity between content and form, instead of their identity, of only suggesting the ideal significance in itself and the content which that suggestion purports to express, in other words the external appearance[22]. It furnishes consequently the fundamental type to that specific art, whose function it is to elaborate the objective world as such, Nature's environment in the beautiful conclusion given by Art to Spirit (mind), and to image by suggestion the ideal significance of what is spiritual in this external medium. The classical Ideal, on the contrary, meets the case of the presentation of the Absolute as such, in its self-subsistent external reality, its essential self-repose, while the romantic Spirit (mind) type of art is, both in content and form, identical with the internal life of the soul, and the emotional life both in its infinite aspect and its finite particularity.