Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

716 Phenomenology of Mind by having given himself over to which his selfconsciousness loses freedom. But that positive power belonging to the universal is overcome by the pure self of the individual, the negative power. This pure activity, conscious of its inahenable force, wrestles with the unembodied essential being.

Becoming its master, this negative activity has turned the element of pathos into its own material, and given itself its content ; and this unity comes out as a work, universal spirit individualised and consciously presented.

a The Abstract Work of Art The first work of art is, because immediate, abstract and particular. On its own side it has to move away from this immediate and objective phase towards selfconsciousness, while, on the other side, the latter for itself endeavours in the '' cult " to do away with the distinction, which it at first gave itself in contrast to its own spirit, and by so doing to produce a work of art inherently endowed with Ufe.

The first way in which the artistic spirit keeps as far as possible removed from each other its form and its active consciousness, is immediate in character — the form assumed is there as a " thing " in general. It breaks up into the distinction of particularity, which contains the form of the self, and universality, which represents the inorganic elements in reference to the form adopted, and is its environment and habitation.

This shape assumed obtains its pure form, the form belonging to spirit, by the whole being raised into the sphere of the pure notion. It is not the crystal, belonging as we saw to the level of understanding, a form which housed and covered a hfeless element, or is shone upon externally by a soul.

Nor, again, is it that comminghng of the forms of nature and thought, which first arose in connection with plants, thought's activity here being still an imitation. Rather the notion strips off 717

718 Phenomenology of Mind the remnant of root, branches and leaves, still chnging to the forms, purifies the forms and makes them into figures in which the crystal's straight hues and surfaces are raised into incommensurable relations, so that the animation of the organic is taken up into the abstract form of understanding, and, at the same time, its essential nature — incommensurabiUty — is preserved for understanding.

The indwelling god, however, is the black stone extracted from the animal encasement,* and suffused with the light of consciousness. The human form strips off the animal character with which it was mixed up. The animal form is for the god merely an accidental vestment ; the animal appears alongside its true form,t and has no longer a value on its own account, but has sunk into being a significant sign of something else, has become a mere symbol.

By that very fact, the form assumed by the god in itself casts off even the need for the natural conditions of animal existence, and hints at the internal arrangements of organic hfe melted down into the surface of the form, and pertaining only to this surface. The essential being of the god, however, is the unity of the universal existence of nature and of self-conscious spirit which in its actuahty appears confronting the former.

At the same time, being in the first instance a particular form, its existence is one of the elements of nature, just as its self-conscious actuahty is a particular national spirit. 1: But the former is, in this unity, that element reflected back into spirit, nature made transparent by thoughts and united with self- * V. anp., p. 710. t e.g. the eagle as tlie "bird of Zeus. I e.g. Athene.