The earliest content, then, which the significance secures at this stage consists in this, that in contrast to the totality of the phenomenal it is the essentially substantive _One_, which itself being pure Thought is only present to thought in its purity. Consequently it is no longer possible to inform this substance under the mode of externality, and to that extent all real symbolical character disappears. If, however, an attempt is made to envisage this essential unity for sense-perception, such is only possible under a mode of relation according to which, while retaining its substantive character, it is further apprehended as the creative force of everything external, in which it therefore discovers a means of revelation and appearance, and with which it is accordingly joined in a positive relation. At the same time it is an essential feature in the expressed content of this relation that this substance is asserted above all particular phenomena as such, no less than above their united manifold; from which it then follows as a still more consequential result that the positive relation is deposed for one that is _negative_; and the negative consists in this that a purification of the substance is thus effected from the phenomenal taken as any particular thing, that is, in other words, that which is also not appropriate to it and which vanishes within it. This mode of giving form, which is annihilated by the very thing which it would set forth, so that it comes about that the exposition of content affirms itself as that which renders the exposition null and void is in fact the _Sublime._ We have therefore not, as we found to be the view of Kant, to refer the Sublime exclusively to the subjective content of the soul, and the ideas of reason which belong to it, but rather form our conception of it as having its fundamental source in the significance represented, in other words the one absolute substance. We must, then, further deduce our classification of the art-type of the Sublime from this twofold relation of the substantive unity regarded as significance to the phenomenal world.