Quitting now the sphere of thought in which the identity of the Absolute and its externally envisaged existence is immediately cognized, we have, as an essential determination to start from, the severation of these two aspects hitherto united, a _cleavage_ which stimulates the effort to restore once more the visible breach by means of an elaborate fusing together of the whole thus divided by a rich use of the images of phantasy. With this attempt the essential need for art is felt for the first time. No sooner has the imagination succeeded in holding fast its envisaged content, which is no longer grasped in immediate union with the objects of sense, in isolated separation from that existence, than for the first time spirit is confronted with the task of reclothing with the material of phantasy for sensuous perception, that is, under the renewed mode of a spiritual product, these general conceptions and of creating through this activity the shapes of art. And for the reason that in the stage of our process where we now find ourselves, this task is capable of only a symbolic solution, we may easily fall under the impression that we stand already in the sphere of genuine symbolism. This, however, is not the case. What immediately faces us here are the forms of a fermenting phantasy[41], which in the restlessness of its fantastic dreams merely indicates the path which conducts us to the real centre of symbolical art. In the first appearance of the distinguishing relation between significance and the mode of its presentation, both the severation and the association are still grasped in a confused manner. This confusion is necessitated by the fact that neither of the parted aspects of difference have as yet attained a totality, capable of emphasizing the precise point in the process, which will serve as the fundamental determination of the opposed side in it, and by means of which for the first,time a really adequate union and reconciliation is rendered possible. Spirit (mind), to illustrate our difficulty further, determines by virtue of its own totality the side of the external phenomenon out of its own essential substance quite as really as it does its own spiritual content for the obvious reason that the essentially complete and independent phenomenon only receives its adequate form as the external existence of that which is spiritual. In the case, however, of this primary severation of the significances apprehended by mind, and the existent world of phenomena such aspects of significance are not those of concrete spiritual life, but abstractions, and this expression also is entirely destitute of spiritual intension, and is consequently, in an abstract sense, purely external and sensuous. This twofold impulse in the direction of disunion and union is for the same reason an unsteady gait[42], which ranges from the objects of sense in undefined and unmeasured waste immediately to the aspects of universal import, and is only able to