What we encounter at first are the productions of an imagination which is in a state of complete ferment and agitation. In the first attempt of the human spirit to separate the elements and to reunite them, its thought is still confused and vague. The principle of things is not conceived in its spiritual nature; the ideas concerning God are empty abstractions; at the same time the forms which represent Him bear a character exclusively sensuous and material. Still plunged in the contemplation of the sensuous world, having neither measure nor fixed rule to determine reality, man exhausts himself in useless efforts to penetrate the general meaning of the universe, and can employ, to express the profoundest thoughts, only rude images and representations, in which there flashes out the opposition between the idea and the form. The imagination passes thus from one extreme to the other, lifting itself very high to plunge yet lower, wandering without support, without guide, and without aim, in a world of representations at once imposing, fantastic and grotesque. Hegel characterizes the Indian mythology, and the art which corresponds to it, thus: “In the midst of these abrupt and inconsiderate leaps, of this passage from one excess to another, if we find anything of grandeur and an imposing character in these conceptions, we see afterwards the universal being, precipitated into the most ignoble forms of the sensuous world. The imagination can escape from this contradiction only by extending indefinitely the dimensions of the form. It wanders amid gigantic creations, characterized by the absence of all measure, and loses itself in the vague or the arbitrary.”