On the way to this emancipation of the Idea from the immediately sensuous medium and to its self-establishment we are confronted by the _Sublime_ and the consecration of the imagination. The absolute significance is, that is to say, in the first instance the thinking, absolute and senseless[125] One, which is self-related as the Absolute, and in this relation affirms that which it creates; Nature and finitude generally, as the negative, thing, that which is essentially in itself devoid of stability. It is the explicit and essential Universal, conceived as the objective power over collective existence, whether it be that this One be brought now to consciousness and represented in its expressly negative attitude to the created, thing, or in its positively pantheistic inherence in the same. The twofold defect of this point of view, so far as it is connected with art, consists first in this that this One and Universal which constitutes the fundamental significance has not yet in itself arrived at the closer determination and distinction, and by this means just as little at the point of real individuality and personality in which it could be apprehended as Spirit, and could be set before the sensuous perception in a form which would be applicable to its spiritual content, according to its own notion, and duly conformable therewith. The concrete idea of Spirit on the contrary requires, that it both defines and distinguishes itself in itself, and by the very act of making itself an object discovers through this reduplication an external phenomenon, which although material and present, nevertheless is throughout permeated by Spirit, and consequently taken by itself expresses nothing at all, simply permitting Spirit to declare itself as its inner core, the expression and reality of which it is. _Secondly_, from the point of view of the objective world the defect is bound up with this abstraction of an Absolute to which the principle of self-determination is lacking that now also the real phenomenon, being that which is essentially without substance, is unable to set forth under any true mode the Absolute in concrete shape. In contrast to those songs of praise and glory, those celebrations of the abstract and universal majesty of God, we have now in the passage we are making to a higher form of art to recall to our minds that phase of negativity, change, pain, and progress through life and death, which we discovered among other matter in the conceptions of the East. We have here set before us the principle of _self-distinction_ in its essential character under a mode which is unable to unite with its conception the unity and self-subsistency of that subjective principle. Both aspects, however, both the essential and self-substantive unity, and the differentiation of that unity by virtue of a self-defined content, are equally necessary to unfold a true and free self-subsistency in its concrete and mediate totality.