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.