Nature, as environment and _locale_ of Spirit, and divert them to the one single object referred to. By this means the history of soul-life is infinitely rich, and can adapt its form to ever shifting conditions and situations in every possible way. And, further, if the individual at last steps forth from this absolute sphere and actively engages in worldly affairs, the range of interests, objects, and emotions will be difficult to count on the score in proportion as the spiritual self-possession is profound, agreeably to the principle in its fullest application; man is consequently distracted by an infinitely multiplied profusion of interior and exterior collisions, revolutions, and gradations of passion, and the most manifold degrees of satisfaction. The Absolute in its unqualified and essential universality, in so far, that is, as it is unfolded in the conscious life of the human soul, constitutes the spiritual content of romantic art; and for this reason his collective humanity, no less than its entire evolution, becomes its inexhaustible material. (_b_) Romantic art does not, however, _as art_ educe this content in the way we found was the case for the most part in symbolic art, and, above all, in the classical type and its ideal gods. Romantic art, as we have seen already, is not, in its _specific_ capacity, the instructive _revelation_, which, merely in the form of art, makes the content of truth visible to the senses. The content is already present in the conceptive mind, and the emotions independently and outside the sphere of art. _Religion_, as the consciousness of truth in its universality, is here an essential _premiss_ of art to a degree totally different from what it was in the previous cases; and, even if we look at the position in its wholly exterior aspect for the consciousness that is actual in the reality of the material world, it lies before us as the prosaic fact of the very present. That is to say, inasmuch as the content of revelation to mind is the eternal absolute nature of _mind_[221] itself, which breaks itself loose from Nature in its bareness and _subordinates_ the same, its manifestation in the immediacy of present life is such that the external material, in so far as it consists and is existent, only continues as a contingent world, out of which the Absolute recollects itself in the secret wealth of Spirit, and only by such means attains independence and truth. The external show receives thus the imprimatur of an indifferent medium, in which Spirit can repose no ultimate trust, and in which it can find no dwelling-place. The more it conceives the conformation of external reality as unworthy of its fulness the less it becomes able to seek consolation therein, or to discover its task of self-reconcilement consummated by a union therewith.