For the real content either remained essentially the natural according to its _substance_ and abstract _universality_, and consequently the _isolated_ thing in the objective world of Nature[123], although it was regarded as the real determination of that universality, was not able to present the same in a mode adequate to it, or that which is purely ideal, and only to be apprehended by spirit, in so far as it was received in the artistic content, carried with it in that which was foreign to its essential nature, namely the immediate individual and sensuous thing, the mode of its appearance that was in fact incongruent with it. And generally here significance and form only stood in the relation of mere affinity and suggestion; and however much in certain respects they could be brought together homogeneously, they as clearly fell apart again in other directions. This original unity was therefore torn asunder; this simple and abstract inwardness or ideality was imaged for the Hindoo conception of the world on the one side in the manifold reality of Nature, and on the other in finite human existence; and the imagination, in the unrest of its impetuous motion, was carried from the one to the other by turns, without being either able to deliver the ideal in its essentially pure and absolute self-subsistency, or to thoroughly infuse it with the phenomenal matter as it was presented and informed, and so reproduce it throughout that material in undisturbed union. The disorder and grotesque appearance, which arose in the commingling of elements opposed to one another, no doubt again vanished, but only to make way for an enigmatical condition equally unsatisfying, which, instead of solving the problem, was only able to prevent the problem's solution. For here, too, still was lacking the freedom and self-subsistency of content, which only thereby is rendered explicit in that the Inward is presented to consciousness as in itself a whole, and by this means as that which overlaps the externality which in the first instance is other than itself and foreign to itself. This essential self-subsistency, cognized as free and absolute significance, is self-consciousness, which has for its content the Absolute, and for its form the subjectivity of Spirit. In contradistinction to this self-determining, thinking, willing power everything else is self-subsistent in merely a relative and momentary sense. The material phenomena of Nature such as the sun, the heavens, stars, plants, animals, stones, streams and sea have only an abstract relation to themselves, and are in the eternal process of Nature bound up with other facts of natural existence, so that they can only pass as self-subsistent for the finite perception. The real significance of the Absolute is not presented in them. Nature is indeed under a mode expressed[124], but only under the mode of what is outside itself; its inwardness is not as such for itself, but poured forth into the varied show of its appearances, and consequently devoid of self subsistency. Only in Spirit as the concrete, free and, infinite self-relation, is the true and absolute significance actually disclosed, and self-subsistent under the mode of its determinate existence.