A significance of this type--attempts at deciphering which are unquestionably nowadays carried too far for the reason that pretty nearly every kind of form is virtually set before us as symbolical in some relation--may very possibly from the point of view of the Egyptians themselves have been clear and intelligible as significance. But, as we insisted at the very entrance of our inquiry, the appropriate motto for the interpretation of Egyptian symbolism is _implicite multum nihil explicite._ There is a type of workmanship undertaken with the express endeavour that it shall carry its own interpretation on the forehead, but we only find there evidence of the effort; it stops short of the essential point of self-illumination. It is in this sense that we must fix our eyes on the works of Egyptian art. They contain riddles, the full solution of which is not merely withheld from ourselves, but was equally beyond the reach of the great majority of the artists who created them. (_c_) The works of Egyptian art in their excessively mysterious symbolism are therefore riddles, let us rather say the objective riddle's self. And we may summarily define the _Sphinx_ as symbol of the real significance of the genius of Egypt. It stands as a symbol for symbolism itself. In countless numbers, set forth in rows of a hundred at a time, we come across these Sphinx-forms on Egyptian soil; they are hewn from the hardest stone, polished, covered with hieroglyphics, and in the vicinity of Cairo of such colossal dimensions that their lion-claws alone measure a man's height. Their animal bodies lie in repose, above which as bust a human body rears itself; now and again we find the head of a ram, but in the most common case it is that of a woman. Out of the obtuse strength and robustness of animality the spirit of man is fain to press forward, albeit still unable to attain the perfect representation of his own freedom, or a counterfeit of his body in motion; and this is inevitable, for he is still forced to remain blended in the company of that Other which confronts himself. This straining after self-conscious spirituality, which fails to grasp itself from the truth of its own substance in a form of external reality which is alone adequate to express it, and instead envisages and brings the same home to consciousness in that which is merely cognate with it, but also that which is equally foreign to it, is, in its general terms, the symbolical; and we find it here concentrated to a point as the riddle.