In the Ideal, however, it is precisely the particular individuality which ought to persist in inseparable co-ordination with the substantive reality, and to the full extent that freedom and the self-subsistency of the subjective principle may attach to the Ideal the world-environment of conditions and relations should possess no essential objectivity independent of the individual in the subjective aspect above referred to or already presupposed. For the ideal individual is a self-enclosed totality, which already includes the objective principle, and it must not be permitted to have independent motion and development apart from the individuality of the subject; otherwise the subject falls back into a purely subordinate position in contrast to a world whose independence is already assured. Consequently the universal must indeed be actual in the individual as that which is in a unique sense its own, but not so as the property of the individual, as a _thinker_, but as that of his _character_ and _temperament._ To put the same truth in another way, what is required for this unity of the universal and individual in art as opposed to the mediation and differentiation of thought, is the form of _immediacy_; and the self-subsistency which we claim here is the form of immediate self-subsistency. With that, however, the element of _contingency_ is associated. That is to say, so long as the universal and effective[301] constituents of spiritual life, such as the self-subsistency of individuals exhibits, are only presented to us in the immediate guise of subjective feeling, temperament, and disposition of character, and debarred any other category of existence, such are thereby already given over to the contingency of volition and its realization. All we have left us, then, is what is peculiar to each individual viewed as such and his sensuous experience. Such a possession of what is nothing more than personal idiosyncracy is unable to assert for itself any further potency or necessity; it appears simply as inclusion of content, fixed achievement and at the same time arbitrary commitment of the wholly self-dependent subject to the influence of feeling, disposition, energy, general ability, cunning, and talents, instead of carrying out its realization over and over again according to a principle of universal import and acknowledged stability. This type of contingency, then, is the characteristic quality of the condition which we required for the ground upon which all the varied wealth of the Ideal is to appear. (_β_) In order to make more clear the actual character of the reality which is most adapted to artistic treatment we will contrast it with that aspect of existence which is not so adapted.