The _third_ mode we have to discuss in its contrast to the fable, parable, proverb, and apologue, is the _metamorphosis._ This is no doubt of a kind which is both symbolical and mythological; it sets forth, however, expressly furthermore the natural in its opposition to the spiritual. That is to say, it confers on an object immediately present to sense such as a rock, animal, flower, or spring the peculiar significance of being a _delapsus_ and a _punishment_ of spiritual existences. Such are the examples of Philomela, the Pieredes, Narcissus, and Arethusa, all of whom, through some false step, passion, transgression or the like, became subject to irreparable guilt or pain, and for this reason were deprived of the freedom of spiritual life, and united to the substance of physical nature. From one point of view Nature is not regarded merely under its external and prosaic aspect, simply, that is, as mountain, river-source, tree and so forth, but it further receives a content which is bound up with some action or event of spiritual life. The rock is not simply stone, but Niobe herself, who weeps for her children. From the other point of view this human action implies guilt of some kind, and this metamorphosis into the physical phenomenon is accepted as a degradation of Spirit. It is therefore necessary to distinguish these metamorphoses of human individuals or gods very sharply from the genuine type of _unconscious symbolism._ To return to Egypt, for example, the Divine is here in part immediately envisaged in the mysterious and secluded intension of animal life, partly, too, the real symbol is here a natural form which is immediately associated with a wider significance cognate to it, despite the fact that this form is unable to supply the determinate existence fully commensurate with it; and this is so for the reason that neither in respect to its form or its content has unconscious symbolism arrived at the free outlook of Spirit. Metamorphosis, on the contrary, emphasizes the essential distinction between Nature and Spirit, and by doing so marks the _passage_ from that which is both symbolical and mythological to that which is in the _strict sense_ mythological, under, that is to say, a conception of the latter, which, albeit that it proceeds in its myths from a concrete fact of Nature such as sun, sea, rivers, trees, earth, and the like, nevertheless, further and expressly sets this purely natural aspect on one side and apart, divesting such natural phenomena of their inner content and individualizing the same as a spiritual Power in the adequate artistic form of gods clothed in the lineaments of humanity, whether we regard them as external shape or spiritual activity. In this sense Homer and Hesiod have given to the Greeks their mythology, a mythology which by no means merely consists in the revelation of the significance of such gods, by no means is merely an exposition of moral, physical,