The Greek artists received their material from the popular religion in which already that which had been brought over to Greece from the Orient had begun to receive a form of its own. Pheidias borrowed his Zeus from Homer, and other tragedians also did not create the fundamental groundwork of that they represented. In the same way the artists of Christianity, Dante and Raphael, have only reclothed what was already to hand in the doctrines of their faith and their religious conceptions. This is also, it is true, from a certain point of view in like manner the case in the art of the Sublime, but with this difference, that here the relation to the content, as the _one_ substance, does not permit subjectivity to come by its just claims, and allows to it no self-substantive finality. The comparative form of art, on the other hand, no doubt starts with the selection of significances as images which it makes use of, but this initiative of selection remains at the disposition of _subjective_ caprice, and on its part dispenses with all substantive individuality, which constitutes the notion of classical art, and for this reason must rest with the personality which creates it. (_b_) The more, however, an explicitly unfolded content is present for the artist in popular beliefs, myth, and other actual facts, the more his energy is concentrated upon the object of endowing such a content with the _external embodiment_ of art fitting to it. While in this respect symbolic art dissipates its resources in a thousand forms, and with unbridled imaginative power lays about it for material that it fails either to measure or define in order to adapt forms that are never really conformable to the significance it is seeking after, the classical artist in this respect is possessed of an aim that is at once resolute and definite. That is to say, the free form is with the content itself defined through that content, and is essentially pertinent to such content, so that the artist only appears to execute what is already accordant with the fundamental conception of what is presented him. While, therefore, the symbolic artist strives in his imagination, to suit the form to significance or _vice versa_, the classic artist _adapts_ significance to plastic shape by means of the process of freeing the external phenomena which are already presented from that part of them which is merely an incidental product. In this activity, however, although all that is purely his caprice is excluded, his productive power not merely follows or is not merely limited to a bare type, but is at the same time _creative_ throughout the whole. Art which, to start with, is forced to seek out and discover its true form neglects for that reason the very aspect of form; but where, on the contrary, the building up of form is made the essential interest and the main task there we find the content also receives its plastic shape by imperceptible degrees through the process of the reproduction,