Hegel develops and confirms these propositions, by following the Indian imagination in the principal points which distinguish its art, its poetry, and its mythology. He makes it apparent that, in spite of the fertility, the splendor, and the grandeur of these conceptions, the Indians have never had a clear idea of persons and events—a faculty for history; that in this continual mingling of the finite and the infinite, there appears the complete absence of practical intelligence and reason. Thought is suffered to run after the most extravagant and monstrous chimeras that the imagination can bring forth. Thus the conception of Brahma is the abstract idea of being with neither life nor reality, deprived of real form and personality. From this idealism pushed to the extreme, the intelligence precipitates itself into the most unbridled naturalism. It deifies objects of nature, the animals. The divinity appears under the form of an idiot man, deified because he belongs to a caste. Each individual, because he is born in that caste, represents Brahma in person. The union of man with God is lowered to the level of a simply material fact. Thence also the _rôle_ which the law of the generation of beings plays in this religion, which gives rise to the most obscene representations. Hegel, at the same time, sets forth the contradictions which swarm in this religion, and the confusion which reigns in all this mythology. He establishes a parallel between the Indian trinity and the Christian Trinity, and shows their difference. The three persons of this trinity are not persons; each of them is an abstraction in relation to the others; whence it follows that if this trinity has any analogy with the Christian Trinity, it is inferior to it, and we ought to be guarded against recognizing the Christian tenet in it. Examining next the part which corresponds to Greek polytheism, he demonstrates likewise its inferiority; he makes apparent the confusion of those innumerable theogonies and cosmogonies which contradict and destroy themselves; and where, in fine, the idea of natural and not of spiritual generation is uppermost, where obscenity is frequently pushed to the last degree. In the Greek fables, in the theogony of Hesiod in particular, one frequently obtains at least a glimpse of a moral meaning. All is more clear and more explicit, more strongly coherent, and we do not remain shut up in the circle of the divinities of nature. Nevertheless, in refusing to Indian art the idea of the truly beautiful, and indeed of the truly sublime, Hegel recognizes that it offers to us, principally in its poetry, “scenes of human life, full of attractiveness and sweetness, many agreeable images and tender sentiments, most brilliant descriptions of nature, charming features of childlike simplicity and artless innocence in love; at the same time, occasionally, much grandeur and nobleness.”