its _claim to existence_[72] is exhibited as a part of the goodness of the Creator, which not only veritably affirms the impotence of that which is essentially nothing apart from Himself, but thereby asserts His substance as the source of all Power. It is this relation, so far as it is set forth by art as the fundamental relation, both of content and form, which brings before us the art-type of the real _Sublime._ The Beauty of the Ideal and Sublimity no doubt present features of contrast. In the Ideal the Inward transpierces external reality, whose inward essence it really is under the mode at least, that both aspects are adequate to each other, and consequently appear to be in perfect fusion with one another. In the Sublime, on the contrary, the external existence, in which substance is envisaged for sense, is deposed in its opposition to that substance, such deposition and vassalage constituting the only mode, by means of which the God who is in His own seclusion without form, and in His positive essence incapable of being expressed by aught that is of the world and finite, can be envisualized by artistic means. The Sublime pre-supposes the significance in the self-subsistence of One, in relation to which externality is defined as in subjection, in so far as that Inward substance fails to appear, but its transcendent character is so asserted, that in the end nothing can be represented save just this essential and active transcendency[73]. In the symbol the mode of the _external form_ was the main point emphasized. It must possess a significance, and yet fail completely to express it. In contrast to symbol of this kind and its obscure content we have now a _significance_ in the absolute sense of the term conjoined with its full recognition. A work of art is now the actual discharge of pure essence conceived as the intensive purport of everything, of an essence, however, which deliberately affirms that very incompatibility of form to significance, which was only implicitly present in the symbol, to be the actually transcendent significance of God Himself within the sphere of worldly existence, and above all that is contained therein.