(_c_) In this way the allegory is under both these aspects without vital warmth. Its general personification is empty, the definite mode of its externalization is only a sign, which taken independently has no longer any meaning, and the _centrum_, which is thus constrained to gather up the variety of the attributes into a focus does not possess the potency of a truly subjective unity which is itself self-embodied in its real and determinate existence inter-related throughout, but is rather a purely abstract form, for which the substantial filling-up with particular traits, which, as we have seen, never succeed in rising above the rank of the formal attribute, remains as something external. Consequently we may say that in so far as the allegory sets up any claim to real self-consistency, in which it personifies its abstraction and their delineation, it is not to be taken seriously. In other words, that which is both implicitly and explicitly self-substantive is unable really to conform with an allegorical being. The _Dikê_ of the ancients, for instance, is not on all fours with allegorical individualization. She is universal Necessity personified, eternal Justice, the universally potent subject, the absolute substantivity of the relations which co-ordinate Nature and spiritual Life, that is, she is the absolute Self-subsistent itself, in the train of whom all other individuals are bound, whether gods or men. Herr Frederick von Schlegel has, it is true--we have already referred to the fact--ventured the opinion that every work of art must of necessity be an allegory. Such an expression of opinion is only true if limited to the sense that every work of art must contain a general idea and a significance which is itself essentially true. What we have above, on the contrary, included under the term allegory is a mode of presentation which only conforms to the notion of art incompletely, being itself no less in content than in form subordinate to it. Every human event and development, every relation in which life is concerned, possesses no doubt intrinsically an aspect of universality, which may be emphasized as such, but abstractions of this kind are already to be found in the general contents of consciousness, and merely to assert them in their prosaic aspect of generality and external delineation, which is the point where the allegory halts, is still to fall short of the true sphere of art. Winckelmann has also written an immature work on allegory, in which he has ranged together a large number of examples, but failed for the most part to distinguish those which exemplify the symbol and allegory respectively.