(_a_) We are therefore at once confronted with the question: "From what source is the _material_ secured for this mode of the appearance of singularity, and in what manner is this forward process of particularization maintained?" For the ordinary individual man, for his character out of which he brings his actions to a conclusion, for the events in which he is involved, for the destiny which awaits him, this closest and more positive material is supplied by his external conditions, such as the date of his birth, the situation he inherits, parents, education, environment, temporal relations, the entire province, that is, of the conditions of his life as they affect his spiritual nature or bodily existence. The present world contains this material, and the records of life furnished by different individuals are from this point of view characterized by every conceivable difference. It is another matter altogether, however, with the free shapes of godlike individuality, which possess no determinate existence in the concrete world of Nature, but have their birth in the cradle of the imagination. For this very reason it is an obvious assumption that poets and artists, who, speaking in general terms, have created the Ideal out of their free spiritual bounty, have merely borrowed the material for these accidental particular traits from the caprice of their own innate powers of imagination. This assumption is, however, false. For we assigned in general terms to classical art, the position that its construction in the first instance is, by means of the reaction active in its opposition to the assumptions necessarily requisite to its own peculiar province, carried forward to that which as genuine Ideal it is. It is from these presuppositions as their source that the specific traits of particularity are to be looked for, which supply to the gods their closer individual vitality. The fundamental features of these assumptions have already been submitted, and we have only here to remind our readers shortly of what has been already advanced.