But as to that which concerns fundamental conceptions in their totality, the spiritual cannot disengage itself from the sensuous. We encounter the most insipid triviality in connection with the most elevated situations—a complete absence of precision and proportion. The sublime is only the measureless; and as to whatever lies at the foundation of the myth, the imagination, dizzy, and incapable of mastering the flight of the thought, loses itself in the fantastic, or brings forth only enigmas which have no significance for reason. 3. _Egyptian Art._—Thus the creations of the Indian imagination appear to realize only imperfectly the idea of the symbolic form itself. It is in Egypt, among the monuments of Egyptian art, that we find the type of the true symbol. It is thus characterized: In the first stage of art, we started from the confusion and identity of content and form, of spirit and nature. Next form and content are separated and opposed. Imagination has sought vainly to combine them, and is successful only in making clear their disproportion. In order that thought may be free, it is necessary that it get rid of its material form—that it destroy it. The _moment_ of destruction, of negation, or annihilation, is then necessary in order that spirit arrive at consciousness of itself and its spirituality. This idea of death as a _moment_ of the divine nature is already contained in the Indian religion; but it is only a changing, a transformation, and an abstraction. The gods are annihilated and pass the one into the other, and all in their turn into a single being—Brahma, the universal being. In the Persian religion the two principles, negative and positive—Ormuzd and Ahriman—exist separately and remain separated. Now this principle of negation, of death and resurrection, as moments and attributes of the divine nature, constitutes the foundation of a new religion; this thought is expressed in it by the forms of its worship, and appears in all its conceptions and monuments. It is the fundamental characteristic of the art and religion of Egypt. Thus we see the glorification of death and of suffering, as the annihilation of sensuous nature, appear in the consciousness of peoples in the worships of Asia Minor, of Phrygia and Phoenicia. But if death is a necessary “moment” in the life of the absolute, it does not rest in that annihilation; this is, in order to pass to a superior existence, to arrive, after the destruction of visible existence, by resurrection, at divine immortality. Death is only the birth of a more elevated principle and the triumph of spirit.