It is in this sense that the Sphinx in the Greek mythos, which itself again is open to symbolic interpretation, appears as the monster which propounds its riddle. The sphinx asked here the famous and problematical question: "Who is it, who walks in the morning on four legs, at noon upon two legs, and in the evening on three?" Oedipus discovered the simple answer that it was man himself, and hurled the sphinx from the rocks. The resolution of the symbol consists in the illumination of all that is implied in the significance of one word, Spirit, just as the famous Greek inscription cries out to mankind: "Know thyself." The light of consciousness is that clarity, which suffers its concrete content to shine all luminous through the form which is wholly adapted to unfold it, and in its positive form of existence simply reveals that which it is in truth. [Footnote 37: _Bedeutung_.] [Footnote 38: What Hegel means is that calling an aspect of sense bodily or natural itself implies a distinction from that which is spiritual, or only cognized by mind, and this distinction is not present to the earliest human cognition of Divine reality.] [Footnote 39: _Das Lichtreine._] [Footnote 40: Except in the conceptions of the Hebrew prophets this is only true subject to qualification even of the God of Israel. For he was evidently associated with the thunder, to take but one case--the deliverance of the tables of stone on Sinai.] [Footnote 41: _Phantasie_ may often be translated by the word imagination, but here the element of caprice and dependence on sensuous image rather than creative impulse directed by a principle of selection is to be emphasized.] [Footnote 42: _Ein Taumel_, _i.e._, the dance as of intoxication.] [Footnote 43: This is obviously a difficult passage to follow. The main thing to remember is that Hegel is here describing the movement of a dialectical process, that is the purely objective, rather than the point of view of personal or even national experience. Such vivid expressions as _Taumel_ and _schamlos hineinrücken_ remind one of the Platonic dialectic.] [Footnote 44: Hegel's editor has Brahman here, but according to a passage lower down (p. 59) it should rather be Brahmâ.] [Footnote 45: _Hinaufschrauben_, lit., a screwing up to--a screwing that in fact crews the head off.] [Footnote 46: _Verdumpfens._ Either Hegel wrote _Verdummens_, or more probably _Verdampfens._ The idea of "becoming mouldy" makes no sense.]