expressing the Absolute, its artistic consciousness either seeing in animals and so forth the presence of gods, or striving vainly under false modes toward the true unity of the spiritual and the natural. It is through the removal and reformation of this defective association that the Ideal for the first time presents itself as the Ideal, and is forced to develop consequently this process of transcendence within its own sphere as a phase of its own necessary evolution. Such a consideration at once enables us to dispose of the question whether the Greeks received this religion from extraneous sources or no. We have already seen that subordinate conceptions are necessarily presupposed in the very notion of classical art. These, in so far as they in truth appear and are presented as factors of human history, are, as opposed to the higher form, which strives to pass beyond them, the actual starting-point of the new self-evolving art. And this is so, though in the particular case of Greek mythology there is not throughout historical evidence for these preliminary data. The relation, however, of the Greek spirit to these presupposed data is essentially a relation of construction and in the first instance of transformation. If this were not so the conceptions and forms of the same had remained as they were. It is true that Herodotus says, in a passage already cited, of Homer and Hesiod, that they had created their gods for the Greeks, but he also speaks expressly of particular gods, how this or that one was Egyptian or some other form: the poetic activity does not therefore exclude the reception of material from other sources, but merely suggests an essential transformation. For the Greeks possessed mythological conceptions before the time in which Herodotus places those original poets.