If we take a glance back on the territory we have passed through, we see in the first instance that the object of our investigation was the life of the soul[256] in its most absolute capacity, in other words, consciousness in its mediation with God, the universal process of the self-reconciling spirit. The abstraction of this point of view consisted in this that the soul by an effort of abnegation withdrew itself from all that was secular, purely natural and human--even when the same had ethical features, and for this reason possessed a claim upon us--into its own distinctive domain in order to satisfy its yearning for the pure heaven of spirit. _Secondly_, we found ourselves able, it is true, to bring into view the human consciousness without this factor of abstract negation which was included in that mediation, in other words, positively in its independence and as related to others[257], but the content of this secular infinitude as such was none the less only the personal self-subsistency of honour, the intensiveness[258] of love and the vassalage of fidelity, a content which, no doubt, may appear before us in many relations, in a many-folded variety and many gradations of feeling and passion, subject to the most extensive changes of external condition, yet for all that only propounds just this personal independence and inwardness within such examples. The _third_ aspect, then, which we have now left us to examine is the mode and manner in which that further material of human existence, both on the side of its inward and its external life, that is to say, Nature and its apprehension and significance for soul-life, is able to enter into the romantic type of art. We have here to deal with the world of particular objects, determinate existence generally, regarded in its unfettered independence, and which, in so far as it does not appear transparent to religion and spiritual synthesis, bringing it into unity with the Absolute, asserts itself on its own foothold and declares its self-subsistence in its own kingdom.