material which is consonant with its content, and in the first instance it finds such in painting, which consequently remains more or less of a formal character when dealing with all objects and compositions not of this type[227]. Granting, then, the fact that we find outside the Christian paintings an Oriental, Greek, and Roman school of painting, yet the real centre and focus of all is none the less the elaboration which this art secured within the boundaries of romantic art. We can only speak of Oriental and Greek painting in the same kind of way as we did when, despite our main thesis that sculpture attained its highest crown of perfection in the classical Ideal, we referred to a subordinate Christian type of sculpture. In other words we are forced to admit that the art of painting first apprehends its content in the material of the romantic type of art, which completely corresponds to its instruments and its modes, and consequently that it was only after the treatment of such material that it discovered how best to use and elaborate in every direction all the means at its disposal. Following now the course of the above remarks in a wholly general way we have to observe as follows in connection with the _content_, _material_, and _artistic mode_ of treatment of painting. (_a_) The fundamental definition of the _content_ of painting is, as we have seen, subjectivity as an independent process[228]. (_α_) In this process, looking at it from the point of view of a _reflex of soul-life_, individuality must not wholly pass into the universality its substance, but must on the contrary disclose how it retains that content as a distinctive personality[229], and possesses and expresses its inward life, that is the vitality of its own conception and feeling in the same; neither should the external form be wholly dominated by the ideal individuality as is the case in sculpture. For the principle of subjectivity, albeit that it permeates the external material as the mode of objectivity adequate to express it, is notwithstanding likewise an identity which withdraws itself into itself out of that objective domain, and by virtue of this self-seclusion is relatively to that objective aspect neutral, leaving it quite untrammelled. Just as therefore, on the spiritual side of the content, the particularity of the personal life is not set forth in direct union with its substance and universality, but is essentially reflected as the culminating feature of its independent embodiment[230], so, too, in the objective envisagement of form, the particularity and universality of the same are carried from their previous plastic union[231] to a predominance of the individual aspect, and indeed of comparatively accidental and indifferent features, and in a manner much the same as that which, in the reality of sense experience, is the prevailing character of all phenomena.