2. We must consequently interpret sign in a different sense when we speak of it as equivalent to symbol. The lion is, for example, a symbol of magnanimity, the fox symbolizes cunning, the circle eternity, the triangle the Triune God. Here we find that the lion and the fox themselves possess the qualities whose import they serve to express. In the same way the circle points beyond the mere indefinite extension, or the capriciously fixed limit of a straight line, or any other line that does not return upon itself, and which at the same time is suitable as the expression of a definite period of time; and the triangle regarded as a _totality_ possesses the same number of sides and angles as is involved in the idea of God, when the determinations under which the religious consciousness defines the Supreme Being are expressed numerically. In the latter forms of symbol therefore the objects presented to the senses have already in their own existence that significance, to represent and express which they are used; symbol as employed in this expanded sense is consequently no purely indifferent mark for something other than itself, but a significant fact which in its own external form already presents the content of the idea which it symbolizes. At the same time it is not the concrete thing it is itself, which it should bring before the imagination, but simply that general quality of significance which attaches to it. 3. We would, thirdly, draw attention to the fact that although symbol may not, as is the case with the purely external and formal sign, be wholly inadequate to the significance derived from it, yet, in order that it may retain its character as symbol, it must on the other hand present an aspect which is strange to it. In other words, though the content which is significant, and the form which is used to typify it in respect to a _single_ quality, unite in agreement, none the less the symbolical form must possess at the same time still _other_ qualities entirely independent of that _one_ which is shared by it, and is once for all marked as significant, just as the content[6] need not necessarily be a bare abstract quality such as strength or cunning, but rather a concrete substance, which on its side, too, possesses a variety of characteristics which distinguish it from the primary quality in which its symbolic character consists, and in the same way, but to a still greater degree, from everything else that characterizes the symbolical form. The lion, for example, possesses other qualities than mere strength, the fox than mere cunning, and the apprehension of God is not necessarily bound up with conceptions which imply number. The content, therefore, as thus viewed, is also placed in a relation of _indifference_ to the symbolical form, which represents it, and the abstract quality which it typifies may quite possibly be present in countless other existing objects. In the same