(_b_) However much, we must fain add, this identification asserts itself as grounded in the essence of the Absolute itself, as spiritual freedom and infinity it is no reconciliation which immediately is visible from the first in either the real worlds of Nature or Spirit; on the contrary, it is only accomplished as the elevation of Spirit from the finitude of its immediate existence to its truth. As a corollary of this it follows that Spirit, in order to secure its totality and freedom, must effect an act of self-severation, and set up on the one side itself as the finitude of Nature and Spirit to its opposed self on the other as that which is essentially infinite. Conversely with this act of disruption the necessity is conjoined that from out of this retirement from its unity--within the bounds of which the finite and purely natural, the immediacy of existence, the "natural" heart in the sense of the negative, evil and bad, one and all are defined--a way is at last found by virtue of the subjugation of all that has no substantive worth within the kingdom of truth and consolation. In this wise the reconcilement of Spirit can only be conceived as an activity, a movement of the same, can only be presented as a process, in whose course arise both strain and conflict, and the appearance and reappearance, as an essential feature of it, of pain, death, the mournful sense of non-reality, the agony of the soul and its bodily tenement. For just as God in the first instance disparts finite reality from Himself, so, too, finite man, who starts on his journey outside the divine kingdom, receives the task to exalt himself to God, to let loose from him the finite, to do away with the nothing-worth, and by means of this decease of his immediate reality to become that which God in His manifestation as man accomplished as very truth in the actual world. The infinite pain of this sacrifice of the most personal subjectivity, sufferings, and death, which for the most part were excluded from the representation of classical art, or rather only are presented there as natural suffering, receive their adequate treatment necessarily for the first time in romantic art. It is, for example, impossible to affirm that among the Greeks death was ever conceived in its full and essential significance. Neither that which was purely natural, nor the immediacy of Spirit in its union with the bodily presence, was held by the Greeks as something in itself essentially negative. Death was consequently to them purely an abstract passing over, unaccompanied by horror or fearsomeness, a cessation without further immeasurable consequences for the deceased. If, however, conscious life in its spiritual self-possession is of infinite worth then the negation, which death enfolds, is a negation of this exaltation and worth, and it is consequently fearful, a death of the soul, which is in the position of finding itself thereby as itself now this negative in explicit appearance, excluded for