(_αα_) This is a point all the more important for the reason that in our own day people are ready to take up the view that we may end an Epic as we like, or continue it just as capriciously. Although this is the opinion of men of talent and learning--it is in fact the contention of F. N. Wolff--it remains none the less a crude and illiterate view. It in fact amounts to nothing less than excluding from the finest ethic compositions any genuine character of artistic composition. For it is only in virtue of the fact that an Epos depicts an essentially exclusive, and thereby, for the firs time independent world, that it is at all a work of fine art in contrast to what is, in part, the diffuse, and, in part, the finite, series of independent sections, causes, effects, and other modes of self-causative reality. One can, of course, so far admit that for the genuine and primitive Epos the wholly aesthetic review of the design and organization of the parts, of the position and completion of the episodes, of the kind of similes employed, and so forth, this is not the point of most importance, inasmuch as here, more than in lyrical poetry of a later date, and its artificial elaboration of the drama, the general world-outlook, the faith in divine beings, and, in a word, what is most essential in such national Bibles, must be expressed as the aspect of most weight. Nevertheless, these great national books, such as are the Ramajana, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and even the "Song of the Nibelings," ought not to lose that quality which alone, in respect to both their beauty and their art, can endow them with the worth and freedom of artistic works, the quality, that is, whereby they bring before our vision a complete sphere of action. What we have simply to do, therefore, is to discover the appropriate form of this exclusive unity.