The Ideal in passing out of the bare image of its essential form into external or determinate existence secures for itself a reality which presents two distinct aspects. From one point of view we see that a work of art discloses necessarily in the content of the Ideal the concrete semblance of reality, that is to say it presents that content as a definite situation or particular circumstance, action, event or character, and presents it moreover in the mode of external existence. From another it is equally obvious that art makes some specific and sensuous material the vehicle of the particular content in its entirety of all that we have above summarized; it creates in short a new world sensible to eye and ear, the world of art. Under both these aspects we may further observe that art penetrates to the remotest limits of externality which are compatible with its form as the self-including unity of the Ideal and conformable to its appearance as a concrete whole permeated with the energy of spirit[369]. A work of art moreover itself may, as an object qualified by externality, be viewed in two distinct ways. We may regard it simply as an external thing, and as such only conformable to a unity that is external in the sense external objects are such. In considering it from this latter point of view we have once more to consider that relation of externality which we found it necessary to discuss in our examination of the beauty of Nature. And for this reason we shall again have to make use of those specific determinants which we previously discussed, and even then primarily in their connection with art. The modes under which external form was in the previous section exhaustively considered were then treated in a twofold way. First we analysed such conceptions as uniformity, symmetry, and conformity to rule; we then examined unity itself regarded as the simplicity and purity of the sensuous material, which art makes use of as the external medium for the existence of her expositions.