We may adjoin a further quite sufficient reason for the imperative character of this radical definition of romantic art from another point of view. The classic Ideal, where we find it at the culminating point of its very truth, is self-exclusive, self-subsistent, retiring and not susceptible[224] in its nature, an orbed individual totality, which repels all else from itself. Its conformation is uniquely its own; its life is bound up in that and that exclusively, and it will harbour no affinity with what is purely empirical and contingent. Whoever, therefore, approaches an ideal such as this as spectator, is unable to appropriate its existence as an embodiment strictly akin to that of his own presence. The figures of the eternal gods, albeit human, do not belong to our mortality, for these gods have not themselves experienced the infirmities of finite existence, but are directly exalted above them. Their affinity with what is empirical and relative is interrupted. The infinite subjectivity, what we call the Absolute of romantic art, is on the contrary not absorbed in its presentment; it is rather carried into its _own_ domain, and for this very reason retains such external aspect as it possesses not so much _for itself_ as for the contemplation of others, as, in short, an exterior presence which is freely offered for this purpose. This externality must further appear in the form of common fact, the human as our senses perceive it, since it is through that that God Himself descends to the level of finite and temporal existence, in order to mediate and reconcile the absolute antithesis, which is inherent in the notion of the Absolute. For this reason our empirical humanity also contains in its bodily presence an aspect, which unfolds to man a bond of affinity and kinship, by virtue whereof he is able to contemplate even his direct natural presence with assurance; and he can do so because the Divine incarnation does not, with the severity of the classical type, thrust on one side the particular and contingent, but presents to his vision that which he himself possesses, or that which he recognizes and loves in others around him. It is just this homeliness incidental to what we ordinarily meet with which attracts and enables romantic art to entrust itself to the external aspect of reality. Inasmuch, then, as the externality which is turned adrift is called upon, through this very abandonment, to suggest the beauty of soul, the lofty pretension of its spirituality and the sacred colour of the emotional life, so, too, at the same time, it is a condition of its doing so that it be absorbed itself within the ideal realm of mind and its absolute content, and that it appropriate the same.