The distinction between the _old_ and the _new_ divinities marks still more this progress of moral liberty. Among the former, who personify the powers of nature, a gradation is already established. In the first place, the untamed and lower powers, Chaos, Tartarus, Erebus; then Uranus, Gea, the Giants and the Titans; in a higher rank, Prometheus, at first the friend of the new gods, the benefactor of men, then punished by Jupiter for that apparent beneficence; an inconsequence which is explained through this, that if Prometheus taught industry to men, he created an occasion of discords and dissensions, by not giving them instruction more elevated,—morality, the science of government, the guarantees of property. Such is the profound sense of that myth, and Plato thus explains it in his dialogues. Another class of divinities equally ancient, but already ethical, although they recall the fatality of the physical laws, are the Eumenides, Dice, and the Furies. We see appearing here the ideas of right and justice, but of exclusive, absolute, strict, unconscious right, under the form of an implacable vengeance, or, like the ancient Nemesis, of a power which abases all that is high, and re-establishes equality by levelling; a thing which is the opposite of true justice. Finally, this development of the classic ideal reveals itself more clearly in the _theogony_ and _genealogy_ of the gods, in their origin and their succession, by the abasement of the divinities of the previous races; in the hostility which flashes out between them, in the resolution which has carried away the sovereignty from the old to place it in the hands of the new divinities. Meanwhile the distinction develops itself to the point of engendering strife, and the conflict becomes the principal event of mythology. This conflict is that of nature and spirit, and it is the law of the world. Under the historic form, it is the perfecting of human nature, the successive conquest of rights and property, the amelioration of laws and of the political constitution. In the religious representations, it is the triumph of the moral divinities over the powers of nature. This combat is announced as the grandest catastrophe in the history of the world: moreover, this is not the subject of a particular myth; it is the principal, decisive fact, which constitutes the centre of this mythology. The conclusion of all this in respect to the history of art and to the development of the ideal, is that art ought to act like mythology, and reject as unworthy all that is purely physical or animal, that which is confused, fantastic, or obscure, all gross mingling of the material and the spiritual. All these creations of an ill-regulated imagination find here no more place; they must flee before the light of the Soul. Art purifies itself of all caprice, fancy, or symbolic accessory, of every vague and confused idea.