For this reason, _secondly_, the form of Nature can no longer be accepted in the immediacy of sensuous existence as adequate to the significance referred to it, because the significance of the External consists just in this, that it must die in the form of its real existence and rise again.
On the same ground, _thirdly_, the mere conflict between significance and form and that ferment of the imagination, which was the fantastic product of Hindoo conceptions, drop away. The significance is, it is true, even now not yet fully and with absolute clarity cognized in its pure unity _free_ from all sense-presented reality, so that it could be set forth in real _contrast_ with the form of its actual embodiment; conversely, however, the form itself, this particular, object, that is, whether in its glorified shape of grandiosity or in any other more conspicuous form of caricature, as an image of animal life, a human personification, event or action, is not taken to envisage for immediate sense an adequate existence of the Absolute. This corrupt form of identity is already surpassed as fully to the extent that it still falls behind that other complete deliverance. And in the place of both of these extremes we have asserted that kind of representation, which we have above already described as the _real symbolical._ On the one hand it is now _able_ to appear for the reason that the Inward, or that which is conceived as significance, is no longer something which merely, as in Hindoo conceptions, comes and passes away, at one moment is absorbed immediately in externality, at another is withdrawn from the same into the solitude of abstraction, but it begins to make itself independently secure against the mere reality of Nature. And on the other hand the symbol is now forced to seek some form of plastic shape. That is to say, although the significance, identical in every way with that which has hitherto obtained, possesses as a phasal condition of its content the negation of the Natural, yet the true Inward now for the first time shows a definite tendency to wrest its way from that Natural, and is consequently itself still swallowed up within the external mode of appearance, so that it is unable independently to be brought home to consciousness in its clear universality without having previously had to comply with the form of external reality.