The _third_ sphere of content attached to the riddle and the allegory consists in the _imaged thing_ generally. The riddle veiled the still independently cognized significance and the mode of its shaping in cognate, albeit heterogeneous and distantly placed traits of definition was still of most importance. Allegory on the contrary emphasized the perspicuity of the significance so strongly as the predominant aim, that the personification and its attributes appear deposed to the rank of mere signs. The imaged thing now connects this clarity of allegorical expression with that impulse of the riddle to envisage the significance which stands out clearly before the mind in the form of an externality cognate with it; the result, however, is not that it gives rise to problems which have first of all to be solved, but rather that the imaged shape appears, by means of which the preconceived conception is revealed with absolute transparency, notifying itself as that which it really is. (_a_) _The Metaphor_ The _first_ point we have to draw attention to in the _metaphor_ is this, that it may be accepted at once as essentially a simile, in so far as it expresses clear and self-subsistent significance in a similar phenomenon of reality comparable with it. In the comparison as such, however, both sides of the comparison, that is the real meaning and the image, are definitely kept apart from each other, while on the contrary in the metaphor this separation, albeit it is essentially present, is _not_ as yet clearly _posited._ For this reason Aristotle long ago distinguished comparison and metaphor by his statement that a "how" is added to the former which is absent from the latter. In other words the metaphorical expression specifies but _one_ aspect, the image. In the context, however, to which the image is attached, the real significance which is intended lies so near that it is at the same time immediately asserted without any direct separation of it from the image. When it is said, for example: "the Spring-time of these cheeks," or "a sea of tears," we are inevitably forced to accept such an expression as an image rather than an actual fact, an image whose significance the context at the same time expressly designates. In the symbol and allegory the relation of actual meaning to external form is not asserted either so immediately or necessarily. From the fact that an Egyptian staircase consists of nine stages, and a hundred other circumstances of similar pregnancy, it is only the adept, the connoisseur, and the professor who will derive a symbolical significance, and doubtless will scent out and discover much that is both mystical and symbolical into the bargain, which is so much ingenuity of research thrown away for the reason that what is discovered is not there. This may have happened often enough to my honoured friend Creutzer, no less than our latter-day Platonists and the commentators of Dante.