_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.