Among the Indians and Egyptians, among Asiatics generally we find animalism, or at any rate specific kinds of animals regarded as sacred and worshipped, because in them the Divine itself is taken to be visible to sense. The animal form is consequently also a main feature of their artistic representations, albeit they are in addition merely used as symbolic and in association with human forms, in the stage previous to that where we find the human, and only the human, apprehended by consciousness as that which is alone true. It is only in virtue of the self-consciousness of the spiritual that the respect for the obscure and gloomy ideality of animal life disappears. This has already taken place among the ancient Hebrews who regard, as we have already observed, the whole of Nature neither as symbol nor as the presence of God, and attach to external objects merely the powers and vitality which in fact dwell within them. At the same time there still remains even among them, if in accidental fashion, at least a vestige of reverence for the living thing as such. We may illustrate this with the fact that Moses forbids the use of animal blood as food for the reason that life is centred in the blood. Man, however, is really under a necessity to eat that which is his natural food. The next step which we must draw attention to in this passage to classical art consists in lowering the high worth and position of what is animal, and making this degradation itself the content of religious conceptions and artistic productions. And illustrative of this we find abundant examples from which I shall merely offer the following selections.