The content and form of the third chapter may be generally indicated as the formal consistency of character. In other words, if the subjective life has been so far concentrated, that spiritual independence is its essential characteristic, it follows also that the particular content, with which such independence is associated as with what is strictly its own, will also partake of such a character; this self-subsistence, however, inasmuch as it does not, as was the case in the sphere appertinent to essential and explicit religious truth, repose in the substantive core of its life, is only able to reach a formal type. Conversely the configuration of external conditions, situations, and events is now also independently free, and is involved consequently in every sort of capricious adventure. For this reason we find, to put it in general terms, as the termination of the romantic, the contingency of the exterior condition and internal life, and a falling asunder of the two aspects, by reason of which Art commits an act of suicide, and betrays the fact that conscious life must now secure forms of loftier significance, than Art alone is able to offer, in which to grasp and retain truth.
[206] Throughout, of course, the German word translated in these paragraphs as mind or spirit is Geist.
[207] Absolute ideality may perhaps interpret the text more intelligibly.
[208] It is so because as self-identity it distinguishes itself from everything to which it is related.
[209] Das wirkliche Subjekt, Hegel means, of course, individual man.
[210] "Most intimate" would perhaps express the meaning more clearly.
[211] Hegel here gives expression to what is perhaps not wholly defensible logic, though it may be truly poetic mysticism.
[212] I would refer any reader who is inclined to gasp at this interpretation of Christian revelation to some useful remarks of Professor Bosanquet in his Preface to his translation, p. XXVIII.
[213] Die Ausbreitung dieses Selbstanschauens, In-sich-und-Bei-sich-seyns des Geistes ist der Frieden. One of Hegel's terrors for the translator, though the sense is obvious enough.