affirm, if we will, that all women are capable of such emotion; but, at any rate, not every formal shape of feminine countenance is capable of expressing the depth of the same so consummately. (_c_) This reference, then, of all points of external existence to their spiritual significance, so that the external appearance unveils in adequate measure the spirit thereof, is just what constitutes the nature of the Ideal. It is, however, a "carrying back" into inwardness, in which we do not find the universal thus carried back to its extremest limit to the form of abstract _thought_, that is to say, but is rather suffered to rest halfway at the point in which we find the purely external and the purely inward meet together harmoniously. The Ideal is consequently the reality selected out of the mass of chance particulars, in so far as the inner core in this external totality thus raised in opposition to universality is itself manifested as _living individuality._[272] For the individual subjectivity, which not only carries in itself a substantive content, but permits the same to appear in its own external appearance, stands in this central position, that in it all that is substantially the content is not suffered in its universal aspect to appear as an abstraction of itself, but still remains enclosed within the sphere of individuality, and consequently appears associated with a determinate existence, which now for its part, freed from mere finitude and transitory condition, is gathered up in a free and harmonious expression of most intimate soul-life. Schiller, in his poem "The Ideal and Life," contrasts the reality and its pains and struggles with "the still shadowland of Beauty." Such a land of shadow is the Ideal. The _spirits_ which rise up here have lost in death immediate existence, are released from the hunger of Nature, freed from the claims which fettered them in subjection to external forces and all the changes and confusions which are linked together with finite appearance. But however much the Ideal treads under foot the mere object of sense and natural form, it draws at the same time the very wealth of it to itself, for it is art that is able to assign the very limits to all that the external appearance required for its self-preservation within which the external thing may appear as the manifestation of spiritual freedom. For this reason it is the Ideal which alone among things envisaged to sense presents a free and self-contained content reposing on its own resources, in complete sensuous enjoyment and satisfaction with itself. The music of this rapture may be heard through every embodiment of the Ideal. However far the external form may be carried the soul of the Ideal is never wholly absorbed in it. And in truth such manifestation is only beautiful in so far as its beauty not merely permeates the whole, but is a subjective unity, by virtue of which the subject-matter of the Ideal must appear