In this identity of the Divine immediately envisualized, a Divine, which is brought home to consciousness as the union of its determinate existence in Nature and humanity, Nature is neither taken simply for that which it is in isolation by itself, nor is the Absolute severed from it and posited in an independent self-subsistence. Consequently it is wholly beside the point to speak of a distinction here between the Inward and the External, the significance and the form, and this for the reason that the Inward is not as yet released in its independence as significance from its immediate reality in the object of sense. When we apply here the expression import[37], such merely emphasizes our _own_ reflection upon it, which is due to the necessity for ourselves personally to regard the form, which contains that which is spiritual and inward under the mode of sense-perception, generally as something external to us, through which we are desirous of penetrating into the Inward, that is, its animating life and significance, in order that we may understand it. For this reason we are under the necessity from the very first, when dealing with such general impressions of sense-perception, of making an essential demarcation between those cases in which the peoples, who in the first instance experienced them, themselves were clearly conscious of this Inward itself as such, that is, as a spiritual significance, and those in which the use of such expressions is only applicable to ourselves, who now and only now recognize an import of this kind in the content of that external expression of sense-envisagement.