misfortune and overthrow of other nations, and not unfrequently find the main strength of their utterance in curses and imprecations. No doubt the elements of true beauty and art are presented to each of these points of view above noticed; but they are in the first instance brought together in haphazard and confused fashion, and are set in a false relation to each other, instead of being referred to a genuine principle of identity. For this reason the purely ideal and abstract unity of the Divine is unable to bring forth any entirely adequate art-product in the form that is characterized by real individuality; and at the same time Nature and human individuality either are manifestly not, whether we consider their inward principle, or their external mode of appearance, permeated by the Absolute, or at least not positively pervaded by it. This _externality_ of significance, which is thus made the essential content, and the determinate mode of appearance under which it is generally reproduced is finally and in the _third_ place exemplified in the _comparative activity_ of art[128]. In this type both sides have become wholly independent, and the unity that binds them together is merely the invisible subjectivity which compares. For this very reason that which is defective in such an external presentment returned in ever more emphatic degree and betrayed itself as that which was for the genuine art representation merely negative or, rather, entirely subversive. And when this dissolution is really effected the significance can no longer remain the inherently _abstract_ ideal, but the inherently determinate and self-defined ideal principle, which in this its concrete totality possesses quite as essentially the other aspect thereof, that is, the form of an inherently exclusive and determinate appearance; and consequently in its external existence, as that which is its very own, merely expresses and signifies itself.