(_c_) Despite this substantive foundation we have seen the general elaboration of the gods of classical art manifest itself out of the repose of the Ideal within the variety of the individual and external embodiment, in all the detail of events, occurrences, and actions, which become ever and ever more human. By this means classical art finally, if we consider its content, carries yet further the process of _articulating_ the accidental individualization, when we consider it as a mode of making the same _pleasurable_ and attractive. In other words that which pleases is the elaboration of the particular aspect of the external phenomenon at every point of the same; by this means the work of art no longer arrests the spectator merely in its connection with his own concrete soul-life, but also contains many affiliating links with the finite aspect of his subjectivity. For it is precisely in the finiteness of the art-creation that the closer association subsists with that aspect of the individual which is itself finite, and which rediscovers itself once more with satisfaction in every respect as mobile and stable existence in the art-product. The seriousness of the gods becomes a grace, which does not agitate with violence or lift a man over his ordinary existence, but suffers him to persist there tranquil, and simply claims to bring him content. Just as we generally find that the imagination when it masters religious conceptions, and endows them with a form appropriate to its notions of beauty, has a tendency to make the earnest character of devotion disappear, and in this respect destroys religion strictly as religion; so, too, this very process moves forward at the stage we are discussing for the most part by the addition of that which is agreeable and pleases. For it is not by any means the substantial aspect, the significance of the gods, or their universal character, which is evolved by virtue of what delights. Rather it is the finite side, their sensuous existence and subjective inward life, which purports to awake interest and provide satisfaction. The more, therefore, the charm of the existence reproduced is the dominant factor in its beauty to that extent the gracefulness is disentwined from the embrace of the universal and removed from the content, through which alone the profounder penetration could rest satisfied. The transition to another province of the forms of art is closely united with this externality and articulate definition. For under the mode of externality reposes the manifold of the finite condition; a manifold which, so soon as it secures a free field, asserts itself finally in opposition to the spiritual Idea, its universality and truth, and begins to rouse up the dissatisfaction of thought in a reality which is no longer adequate to express it. [Footnote 180: Chapter XLIX.] [Footnote 181: I presume this is the sense of that difficult word _des Inneren_ here.]