precisely as we have hitherto found in a general way that form and content proceed hand in hand during the process, wherein they are completed. In this respect the classic artist elaborates the result also where it is a religious world that is presented him; he throughout develops in the free and buoyant medium of his art the material and mythological ideas which he receives. (_c_) The same applies to the technique of art. In the case of the classic artist the ingredients must be already to hand; the sensuous material through which the artist labours must already be disengaged from all brittleness and extreme stubbornness, and yield directly to the aims of the artist, in order that the content, conformably to the notion of the classic type, may make its free and unfettered way through this external medium. To classical art, consequently, belongs from the first a high level of technical ability, which has subjected the sensuous material to an apt subservience. Such a technical perfection, if it is really to carry out all that is required of Spirit and its conceptions, is presupposed by the complete elaboration of all that pertains to craftsmanship in art, that is, in especial degree of that which makes itself visible within the plastic forms of the religion to which we now refer. The religious view of things, such as the Egyptian, for example, discovers, that is, definite external forms, idols, colossal constructions whose type remains fixed, and, further, in the usual similarity of forms and shapes, supplies a considerable field for elaboration in the treatment of it by the steadily progressive executive powers. This adaptability to the talents of the craftsman must already have been presented in that which is of an inferior and distorted type before the genius of classical beauty can associate these powers of mechanical facility with the forms of technical perfection. Then, at last, when that which is purely mechanical work is confronted with no further insuperable difficulty, is art enabled to proceed in the elaboration of a form, the practice in working out which is at the same time an elaboration which is in the closest relationship to the progressive advance of both content and form.