It is an ideal significance of this kind that the art of painting accepts as its object. And for this reason it is not natural objects merely as such in their external form and association which ought to constitute its true content, so that painting is nothing more than a mere imitation, but rather the animation of Nature's life, which interfuses it throughout and which is able to bring into prominence and assert with more vividness in the scenes of Nature reproduced the characteristic affinity of specific conditions of this life with particular spiritual states--it is a vital participation in Nature of this kind which gives us the meeting-point, steeped as it is in the soul-life and temperament of the artist, by means of which Nature may become the content of painting not merely as environment, but as possessing a distinct individuality[274]. (_γ_) There is yet further a _third_ type of idealization which we find partly in the case where objects wholly insignificant are detached from the position they occupy in the landscape, and, partly, in scenes of human life, which may appear to us not merely as wholly accidental as thus selected, but even of a kind that is both mean and commonplace. I have already found an opportunity for an attempt to justify the artistic selection of such subjects[275]. I will in connection with painting merely add the following remarks to our former discussion. The art of painting is not merely concerned with the inward life of the soul, but with that ideal element that is essentially _particularized_[276]. This latter type of ideality for the reason that particularity is its principle is not content to rest satisfied with the absolute object of religion, and as little will merely accept from the external world Nature's vitality and its defined character as landscape; rather it insists on partaking of everything, in which man as an isolated individual soul can take a rational interest and find pleasure. Even in the case of its representations of religious material art, in proportion as it develops, it attaches such more closely to terrestrial conditions and the objects of actual vision, giving to its content the complete presence of natural existence, so that we ultimately find that the aspect of sensuous existence is most important and the interest of devotional life only so in a subordinate degree. For here, too, art receives the task to work out the Ideal in its fullest realization, in other words, to present to our senses that which is originally detached from them, to carry over objects taken from the remoteness of past life into present life and unite them with that present human life. At our present stage of human evolution it is the ideality which we find in actual life as it faces us, in the circumstances of daily experience, the most common and the most trivial, which is the actual content.