(_γγ_) Bright and dark, shadow and light, no less than their interplay are, however, merely an abstraction, which do not exist in Nature as such abstraction, and consequently cannot be utilized as sensuous material. In other words Light, as we have already seen, is related to its opposite Dark. In this relation both principles have no self-subsistency apart from each other, but can only be asserted in their unity, that is, as the interplay of light and dark. The light, which is in this way essentially impaired and obscured, which, however, to a like extent transpierces and illumines darkness[244], supplies us with the principle of _colour_ as the genuine material of painting. Light in its purity is devoid of colour, it is the pure indeterminacy of essential identity. Distinction from bare light, a lowering of its value, is the characteristic of colour, which in contrast to light is already in some degree obscurity, and together with which the principle of light is asserted in union. It is consequently an incorrect and false idea to hold that light is the aggregate result of different colours, or in other words different degrees of obscuration[245]. Form, distance, limitation, rounded shape, in short, all spatial relations and distinctions visible in the phenomena of Space are unfolded in the art of painting entirely by means of colour, the more ideal principle of which is capable of presenting a more ideal content and by virtue of its profounder oppositions, the infinite variety of its transitional gradations and the delicacy of its softest modulations relatively to the fulness and detail of the objects it accepts as subject-matter, is possessed of a field for its activity of the widest range. It is beyond belief what mere colour is able to accomplish in this art. Two human beings are, for example, something totally distinct. Either is in his self-conscious identity no less than his bodily organism an independent and exclusive spiritual and bodily totality, yet the entire result of this difference is in a picture reduced to a distinction of colours. In one place some particular shade of colour ceases, in another a particular one starts up, and by such means we get everything set before us, shape, distance, play of posture, expression, what is nearest to sense and what is most akin to intelligence. And we are not to regard this reduction as a make-shift and defect. Quite the reverse is the fact; the art of painting dispensing with the third dimension in no such way, but deliberately rejecting it in order to set in the place of purely spatial reality the higher and richer principle of colour.