(_ββ_) This succession further, in addition to its aspect of being an extension into essentially profounder conceptions of godhead, possessing, that is, a fuller content, also appears as the degradation of the earlier and more abstract type within the range of the older race of gods itself. The primary and most ancient powers are robbed of their masterdom, just as we find Kronos dethroned Uranos, and the later representatives are set up in their place. (_γγ_) In this way the negative relation of the reformation[169], which we settled at once to be the essence of this first stage of the classic type of art, becomes the proper centre of the same. And it is so for the reason that personification is here the universal form, in which the gods are presented to the imagination, and the progressive movement comes into opposition with human and spiritual individuality. And although this appears in the first instance still in a form indeterminate and formless, we necessarily find that the imagination presents this negative attitude of the younger gods against the more ancient under the image of conflict and war. The essential advance is, however, from Nature to Spirit, implying by the latter the true content and the real form appropriate to classical art. This progress and the conflicts by means of which we perceive that it is carried forward, belong no longer exclusively to the sphere of the old gods, but centre in the war through which the new gods lay the foundation of their enduring mastery over the ancient. (_c_) The opposition between Nature and Spirit is in the nature of the case inevitable. For the notion of Spirit, as in very truth totality, is, as we have already seen, _essentially_ simply this, to split itself in twain, that is into its intrinsic constituents as objectivity and as subject, in order that by means of this opposition it may emerge from Nature and confront the same forthwith free and jubilant as vanquisher and superior might. This fundamental phase, rooted in the very essence of Spirit, is consequently a material aspect in the conception which it supplies to itself of that nature. Regarded historically, that is on the plane of ordinary reality, this passage asserts itself as the reconstruction through progressive steps of the natural man into the condition where right, property, laws, constitution and political life are paramount. Regarded under a mode which relates this process to gods and _sub specie eternitatis_ it becomes the conception of the victory over the natural Powers by means of the spiritual and individual Divinities.