It is then that art appears; it arises from the necessity of representing this idea by sensuous images, addressed at once to the senses and the spirit. The idea of an absolute power, in religions, is manifested at first by the worship of physical objects. The Divinity is identified with nature itself. But this rude worship cannot endure. Instead of seeing the absolute in real objects, man conceives it as a distinct and universal being; he seizes, although very imperfectly, the relation which unites this invisible principle to the objects of nature; he fashions an image, a symbol designed to represent it. Art is then the interpreter of religious ideas. Such is art in its origin; the symbolic form is born with it. Let us now follow it in the successive stages of its development, and indicate its progress in the East before it attained to the Greek ideal. That which characterizes symbolic art is that it strives in vain to discover pure conceptions, and a mode of representation which befits them. It is the conflict between the content and the form, both imperfect and heterogeneous. Hence the incessant struggle of these two elements of art, which vainly seek to harmonize. The stages of its development exhibit the successive phases or modes of this struggle. At the outset, however, this conflict does not yet exist, or art is not conscious of it. The point of departure is a unity yet undivided, in whose depths the discord between the two principles ferments. Thus the creations of art, but little distinct from the objects of nature, are as yet scarcely symbols. The end of this epoch is the disappearance of the symbol. It takes place by the reflective separation of the two terms. The idea being clearly conceived, the symbol on its side being perceived as distinct from the idea, from their conjunction arises the _reflex_ symbol, or the comparison, the allegory, etc. These principles having been laid down _a priori_, Hegel seeks among the people of the East the forms of art which correspond to these various degrees of oriental symbolism. He finds them chiefly among the ancient Persians, in India, and in Egypt. 1. _Persian Art._—At the first moment of the history of art, the divine principle, God, appears identified with nature and man. In the worship of the Lama, for example, a real man is adored as God. In other religions the sun, the mountains, the rivers, the moon, and animals, are also the objects of religious worship. The spectacle of this unity of God and nature is presented to us in the most striking manner in the life and religion of the ancient Persians, in the Zend-Avesta.