In the _second_ chapter, on the other hand, we have reached by means of this process the true Ideal of the classical type of art. We find here as the central fact the fair and novel world of the gods of Greece, which it will be incumbent on us to develop exhaustively from within, both in its aspects of spiritual individualization, and those which are related to the bodily form with which such individuality is immediately associated.
In the _third_ place, however, the notion of classical art implies conversely, along with this becoming of the beauty which springs from itself, also the dissolution of that creation, which will carry us into a further sphere, namely, that of the romantic type of art. The gods and human individuals of classic beauty just as they rise so, too, pass away once more from the art-consciousness, which in part turns round in opposition to the aspect of Nature that still persists, in which Greek art, in fact, had elaborated itself in the full perfection of beauty, in part transcends an undeific[138], defective, and vulgar mode of reality in order to reveal that which is false and purely negative therein. In this dissolution, whose artistic activity we shall take as the material of our third chapter, the specific phases in the process, which created the truly classical type in that harmony presented by the perfect fusion of immediate beauty, fall apart. The ideal essence is made explicit on the one side in its independence of the external mode of its existence on the other. Subjectivity withdraws into itself, for the reason that it fails now to find an adequate realization in the forms hitherto employed, and is constrained to enlarge itself with the fuller content of a new spiritual world of absolute freedom and infinity, looking about for novel means of expressing this profounder grasp of its substance.
[Footnote 121: The central point, that is, in the entire evolution of the types of art, classical art being intermediate between symbolic and romantic art and in a certain sense marking a point of culmination.]
[Footnote 122: _Zu ihrem Inneren_, _i. e._, that which unites it as a whole rather than is the purely external form. The Inward of man is the notion of man, not the mere fact that he has a head and arms, etc.]