(_ββ_) In their beauty these gods appear, therefore, as exalted over their individual bodily shape; we have consequently a kind contradiction or contention between their lofty blessedness, which is, in fact, their spiritual self-exclusiveness and their beauty, which pertains to their external bodily presence. Spirit appears wholly lost in its external form, and yet for all that appears quite as much absorbed in itself from out that form. It is precisely as though we had the moving to and fro of an immortal god among mortal men. In this relation the Greek gods make on us an impression which, despite all difference, resembles that which the bust of Goethe by Rauch made upon me when I first saw it. Many will have doubtless seen it, the high brow, the powerful, commanding nose, the free eye, the round chin, the affable, finely-cut lips, the pose of the head, so suggestive of genius, with its glance a bit on one side and uplifted: add to this the entire fulness and breadth of an emotional and genial humanity, and further, those carefully articulated muscles of the forehead, of the entire countenance, of all that gives evidence of passion and emotion; and in all this house of Life, the repose, stillness, and loftiness of advanced age; and we may add withal the fading ebb of the lips, which retreat back into the teethless mouth, the slackness of the neck and cheeks, whereby the bridge of the nose appears yet more dominant, and the reach of the forehead yet more towering. The force of this firmly set figure, which to an extraordinary degree brings before us the notion of immutability, appears all the more so in the loose environment which surrounds it[190], just as the sublime head and form of the Oriental in his wide turban, but flapping over-garment and trailing slippers. It is the secure, powerful, timeless spirit, which, in the mask of encircling mortality, is just ready to let this husk fall away, and yet suffers it to linger around it freely and without restraint. In much the same way the gods appear to us in their aspect of lofty freedom and spiritual repose to be exalted over their bodily presence, so that they seem to feel their form, their limbs, despite all the beauty that is there, as at the same time a superfluous appanage. And yet withal the entire presentment is suffused with vitality, identical with their spiritual being, inseparable, without the disunion of what is essentially subsistent, and those parts which are more loosely put together, the spirit in short neither escaping nor coming forth from the body, but both firmly moulded together into a whole, out of which, and in no other way, the self-absorption of Spirit looks forth in silence in its amazing and secure self-possession.