The universal of morality and the abstract freedom of personality, both in its ideal and external aspect, remains in accordance with the principle of Greek life in undisturbed harmony, and during the time in which, even in real existence, this principle asserted itself in still unimpaired purity, the self-substantiality of the citizen did not stand forth in relief in contrast to a morality which was to be distinguished from it: the substance of political life was so far merged in the individual, as he on his part sought his own liberty absolutely in the universal ends of the entire civic life. The feeling for beauty, the significance and spirit of this joyous harmony interpenetrates all productions, in which the freedom of Greece is self-conscious, and in which she has made visible to herself her being. Consequently her view of the world is just the midway ground on which beauty commences its true life and breaks open its serene dominion; the intermediate realm, that is, of free vitality, which is not merely a fact at once immediate and natural, but one which is the creation of a spiritual point of view revealed by art, the realm, that is, of a culture of reflection, and at the same time of an absence of reflection, which neither isolates the individual nor on the other hand is competent to bring back again its negativity, pain, and unhappiness to a positive unity and reconciliation--a realm, however, which, just as in the case of Life itself, is at the same time only a point of passage, however true it be that it scales at this point the summit of beauty, and in the form of its plastic individuality is so spiritually concrete and rich, that all tones have their interplay within it, and also, too, that which is for its own standpoint what lies behind it, albeit it is no longer present as an absolute and unqualified principle, is nevertheless felt as that which accompanies it--a kind of background to it. In this sense the Greek nation has also, in the representation of its gods, made its spirit visible to the perceptions and the imaginative consciousness, and bestowed on them, by means of art a determinate existence, which is entirely conformable with their true content. By virtue of this homogeneous form, which is alike consistent with the fundamental notion of Greek art and Greek mythology, art became in Greece the highest expression for the Absolute, and Greek religion is the religion of art itself, whereas romantic art, which appeared later, although it is undoubtedly art, suggests a more exalted form of consciousness than art is in a position to supply.