(_γ_) If we ask ourselves in a general way, what from this point must for classical art fall into the background, failing, that is, to have any right to figure as its final form and adequate content, we shall find at the earliest point of departure the elements of Nature. With them disappear from the world of the new gods all that is gloomy[170], fantastical, void of clarity, every wild confusion between Nature and Spirit, between significances essentially substantive and the accidental incidents of externality. In a world such as this the creations of an unrestricted imagination, which has not yet for its principle the measure of spiritual proportion, have no place, and are compelled and justly so to vanish before the clear light of day. We may furbish up the monstrous Cabeiri[171], the Corybantes, these representatives of procreative force as much as we choose, yet for all that such presentations in every trait of them--to say nothing of the ancient Baubo, whom Goethe sets careering over the Blocksberg on an old sow--belong to a greater or less degree to the twilight of consciousness. Only that which is spiritual imperatively demands the light; and that which does not reveal itself and in itself expound its own interpretation is the unspiritual, which fades again once more into Night and obscurity. That which is of Spirit on the contrary reveals itself, and purifies itself, by itself defining its external form, from the caprice of the imagination, the flood of obstructing shapes, and the otherwise perturbed accessories of symbolical sense. For the same reasons we now find that human activity, in so far as it is limited merely to Nature's wants and their satisfaction, falls into the background. That old right, Themis, Dike and the rest, as one not determinate through laws which originate in self-conscious Spirit, loses its unimpaired validity, and in the same way, if conversely, that which is purely local, albeit there is still room left for its play, passes by incorporation into the universal figures of the gods; in which we may still trace the lingering vestiges that remain of it. For as in the Trojan war the Greeks fought and conquered as _one_ people, so, too, the Homeric gods, who already have their conflict with the Titans behind them in the past, are one essentially secure and defined god-world, a world which is yet further with ever-increasing fulness made definite and unassailable by later poetry and the plastic arts. This invincible consistency[172] is in its relation to the content of the Greek world of gods Spirit and only Spirit; but not Spirit in its abstract ideality, but as identified with its external and adequate existence, just as with Plato soul and body, as in union brought into one nature and in this consolidation from one piece, is at once the Divine and Eternal. 3. THE POSITIVE CONSERVATION OF THE CONDITIONS SET UP THROUGH NEGATION