Apart from such considerations, however, the artistic types referred to belong to the _forecourt_ of artistic symbolism, inasmuch as they are generally incomplete, and to that extent _merely_ a search after art in its truth. Such a movement no doubt presents the essential ingredients of a genuine mode of configuration, but it lays hold of them in their aspect of finitude, separation, and purely relative propinquity; it fails consequently to rank on the same level. When we discuss, therefore, the fable, apologue, and the rest we must treat these forms not as though they belonged to _poetry_ in the specific sense, as it differs among other things from music no less than the plastic arts, but only with the view of pointing out the relation in which they stand to the _generic_ types of art. It is only thus their specific character can be elucidated. To such an object the notion of the genuine types of the art of poetry, whether epic, lyric, or dramatic, will not assist us. We propose now to differentiate these forms in the following order; we shall begin with the _fable_, proceed after that to discuss the _parable_, _apologue_, and _proverb_, and conclude our inquiry with the _metamorphosis._ 1. THE FABLE Hitherto we have throughout merely dwelt upon the formal aspect of the relation of an expressed significance to its embodiment; we have now furthermore to elucidate the content, which declares its suitability for such a mode. In our previous consideration of the various aspects of the _Sublime_ we saw that at the point where we have now arrived, it is no longer a matter of any importance to envisualize the Absolute and One in its indivisible Power by means of the nothingness and impotency of the created thing to rise up to that infinite transcendency. We are now on the plane of the finite consciousness, and have only to concern ourselves with a finite content. If we direct our attention conversely to the genuine symbolical type, to which the comparative is under a certain aspect equally related, we find that here that _inward_ aspect, which stands in opposition to the form up to this point always immediately presented, the natural shape, that is to say, is the spiritual, a truth that even in Egyptian symbolism received ample illustration. To the extent, however, that everything natural is left standing, and preconceived in its position of isolated _solidarity_, the spiritual is also something both _finite_ and _defined_, that is to say man and his finite aims and the natural maintains a certain, albeit theoretical[81], relationship to these objects, a significant suggestion and revelation of the same to the use and weal of mankind. The phenomena of Nature, storms, flight of birds, the constitution of the intestines of animals and so forth, in the significance they possess for human interests, are now accepted in a totally different sense to that they figured in the conceptions of Parsees, Hindoos, or