(_c_) Before, however, we attempt to gauge in its profundity the new type of art, whose opposition to the old does not come into the course of Art's development, so far, at least, as we here have undertaken to follow it along its fundamental lines, we must in the first instance make clear for ourselves that other transition in its earliest form, which attaches to antique art itself. The principle of this transition consists in this, that the Spirit whose individuality hitherto has been contemplated as in harmony with the true subsistency of Nature and human life, and which, in respect to its own life, volition, and acts, was consciously at home in that accord, begins now to withdraw itself into the infinite subjectivity of its essence, but instead of the true infinity is only able to secure a purely formal and indeed still finite return upon itself. If we look more closely at the concrete conditions which correspond to the principle indicated, we shall see, we have already done so, that the Greek gods possess as their content the substantive _materiae_ of real human life and action. Over and above the vision of the gods we have now the highest mode of determination, the universal interest and the end in determinate life, that is to say, presented at the same time as an existing fact. Just as it was essential to the spiritual configuration of Greek art to appear both as external and real, so, too, the spiritual growth of mankind in its absolute significance has elaborated itself in a reality that both externally appears and is real, with whose substance and universality the individual has put forward a claim to be in accordant fusion. This highest end was in Greece the life of the State, the collective body of citizens and their morality and living patriotism. Outside this supreme interest there was no other more lofty or true. The life of the State, however, as an external phenomenon of the world, fades into the Past, as do the conditions of the entire reality of the outside world. It is not difficult to demonstrate that a State under the type of such a freedom, so immediately identical with all its citizens, which as such already possess in their grasp the highest activity in all public transactions, is inevitably small and weak, and in part must prove suicidal to itself, in part fall into ruins in the natural course of the history of nations. In other words, by reason of this immediate coalescence of individual life with the universality of State-life, on the one hand we find that the peculiar idiosyncrasies of spiritual experience and its particular aspects as private life do not receive their full dues, nor do they receive sufficient opportunity for a development innocuous to society at large. Rather, as distinct from the concrete substance, into which it has not been accepted, such a nature remains simply the limited and natural egoism, which goes on its own way independently,