The energy with which the individual embodies the singular mixture of the materials which lie before him in his age and his life determines the measure in which he possesses mythological power. Dante’s personages possess a kind of eternity from the position in which he places them, and which is eternal: but not only the actual which he draws from his own time, as the story of Ugolino and the like, but also what is pure invention, as the death of Ulysses and his companions, has in the connection of his poem a real mythological truth. It would be of but subordinate interest to represent by itself, the Philosophy, Physics and Astronomy of Dante, since his true peculiarity lies only in his manner of fusing them with his poetry. The Ptolemaic system, which to a certain degree is the foundation of his poetic structure, has already in itself a mythological coloring. If however his philosophy is to be characterized in general as Aristotelian, we must not understand by this the pure Peripatetic philosophy, but a peculiar union of the same with the ideas of the Platonic, then entertained, as may be proved by many passages of his poem. We will not dwell upon the power and solidity of separate passages, the simplicity and endless _naiveté_ of separate pictures, in which he expresses his philosophical views, as the well known description of the soul which comes from the hand of God as a little girl “weeping and laughing in its childish sport,” a guileless soul, which knows nothing, save that, moved by its joyful Creator, “willingly it turns to that which gives it pleasure:”—we speak only of the general symbolic form of the whole, in whose absoluteness, more than in any thing else, the universal value and immortality of this Poem is recognized. If the union of Philosophy and Poetry even in their most subordinate synthesis is understood as making a didactic poem, it becomes necessary, since the poem must be without any external end and aim, that the intention (of instructing) should lose itself in it and be changed into an absoluteness (_in eine Absolutheit verwandelt_), so that the poem may seem to exist for its own sake. And this is only conceivable, when Science (considered as a picture of the Universe, and in perfect harmony therewith, as the most original and beautiful Poetry) is in itself already poetical. Dante’s Poem is a much higher interpenetration of Science and Poetry, and so much the more must its form, even in its freer self-existence, be adapted to the universal type of the world’s aspect (_Weltanschauung_).