Classical art and its religion of beauty does not consequently wholly satisfy the depths of Spirit. However essentially concrete it may be, it still remains abstract for humanity because, instead of movement and reconciliation obtained by the contradiction we have adverted to of that infinite subjective process, it merely possesses as its life that undisturbed harmony of the free individuality determined in its adequate existence, this repose in its reality, this happiness, this content and greatness in itself, this eternal blitheness and bliss which even in unhappiness and pain does not lose its secure reliance on itself. Classical art has not worked its way to the full contradiction which is fundamentally involved in the notion of the Absolute and overcome that contradiction. For this reason it does not recognize the aspect which is in close relation to this contradiction, that is the essential obduracy of the subject as opposed to that which is ethical and of absolute significance, namely, sin and evil, no less than the waste of individual life in its own subjective aims, the dissolution and incontinence of that world which we may summarily describe as that of the entire sphere of its divisions, which is productive on the side both of sense and spirit of distortion, ugliness, and the repulsive. Classical art fails to cross the pure territory of the genuine Ideal. 2. In so far as the _historical_ realization of classical art is concerned, it is hardly necessary to observe that we must seek for that among the Greeks. Classical beauty, with its infinite range of content, material and form, is the gift bestowed on the Greek people; and this folk is entitled to our respect on the ground that it has produced art in its highest form of vitality. The Greeks, if we regard the form of their realized life immediately presented us, lived in that happy middle sphere of self-conscious and subjective freedom and substantive ethical life. They did not persist, on the one hand, in the unfree Oriental unity, which is necessarily bound up with a religious and political despotism for the reason that the individuality of the subject is overwhelmed in a universal substance, or, in some particular aspect of the same, because it has essentially as personality no right, and consequently no ground to stand on; neither, on the other, did they pass beyond to that subjective penetration, in which the particular subject separates itself from the whole and the universal, in order to make itself more explicit in its ideality; and only through a higher return to the ideal totality of a purely spiritual world, succeeds in its final purification of the substantive and essential. On the contrary, in the ethical life of Greece, the individual was self-substantive and essentially free, without disengaging himself from the general interests of the realized State immediately visible to him and the positive immanence of spiritual freedom in the temporal condition.