What we encounter at first are the productions of an imagination which is in a state of complete ferment and agitation. In the first attempt of the human spirit to separate the elements and to reunite them, its thought is still confused and vague. The principle of things is not conceived in its spiritual nature; the ideas concerning God are empty abstractions; at the same time the forms which represent Him bear a character exclusively sensuous and material. Still plunged in the contemplation of the sensuous world, having neither measure nor fixed rule to determine reality, man exhausts himself in useless efforts to penetrate the general meaning of the universe, and can employ, to express the profoundest thoughts, only rude images and representations, in which there flashes out the opposition between the idea and the form. The imagination passes thus from one extreme to the other, lifting itself very high to plunge yet lower, wandering without support, without guide, and without aim, in a world of representations at once imposing, fantastic and grotesque.
Hegel characterizes the Indian mythology, and the art which corresponds to it, thus: “In the midst of these abrupt and inconsiderate leaps, of this passage from one excess to another, if we find anything of grandeur and an imposing character in these conceptions, we see afterwards the universal being, precipitated into the most ignoble forms of the sensuous world. The imagination can escape from this contradiction only by extending indefinitely the dimensions of the form. It wanders amid gigantic creations, characterized by the absence of all measure, and loses itself in the vague or the arbitrary.”
Hegel develops and confirms these propositions, by following the Indian imagination in the principal points which distinguish its art, its poetry, and its mythology. He makes it apparent that, in spite of the fertility, the splendor, and the grandeur of these conceptions, the Indians have never had a clear idea of persons and events—a faculty for history; that in this continual mingling of the finite and the infinite, there appears the complete absence of practical intelligence and reason. Thought is suffered to run after the most extravagant and monstrous chimeras that the imagination can bring forth. Thus the conception of Brahma is the abstract idea of being with neither life nor reality, deprived of real form and personality. From this idealism pushed to the extreme, the intelligence precipitates itself into the most unbridled naturalism. It deifies objects of nature, the animals. The divinity appears under the form of an idiot man, deified because he belongs to a caste. Each individual, because he is born in that caste, represents Brahma in person. The union of man with God is lowered to the level of a simply material fact. Thence also the rôle which the law of the generation of beings plays in this religion, which gives rise to the most obscene representations. Hegel, at the same time, sets forth the contradictions which swarm in this religion, and the confusion which reigns in all this mythology. He establishes a parallel between the Indian trinity and the Christian Trinity, and shows their difference. The three persons of this trinity are not persons; each of them is an abstraction in relation to the others; whence it follows that if this trinity has any analogy with the Christian Trinity, it is inferior to it, and we ought to be guarded against recognizing the Christian tenet in it.
Examining next the part which corresponds to Greek polytheism, he demonstrates likewise its inferiority; he makes apparent the confusion of those innumerable theogonies and cosmogonies which contradict and destroy themselves; and where, in fine, the idea of natural and not of spiritual generation is uppermost, where obscenity is frequently pushed to the last degree. In the Greek fables, in the theogony of Hesiod in particular, one frequently obtains at least a glimpse of a moral meaning. All is more clear and more explicit, more strongly coherent, and we do not remain shut up in the circle of the divinities of nature.
Nevertheless, in refusing to Indian art the idea of the truly beautiful, and indeed of the truly sublime, Hegel recognizes that it offers to us, principally in its poetry, “scenes of human life, full of attractiveness and sweetness, many agreeable images and tender sentiments, most brilliant descriptions of nature, charming features of childlike simplicity and artless innocence in love; at the same time, occasionally, much grandeur and nobleness.”
But as to that which concerns fundamental conceptions in their totality, the spiritual cannot disengage itself from the sensuous. We encounter the most insipid triviality in connection with the most elevated situations—a complete absence of precision and proportion. The sublime is only the measureless; and as to whatever lies at the foundation of the myth, the imagination, dizzy, and incapable of mastering the flight of the thought, loses itself in the fantastic, or brings forth only enigmas which have no significance for reason.
3. Egyptian Art.—Thus the creations of the Indian imagination appear to realize only imperfectly the idea of the symbolic form itself. It is in Egypt, among the monuments of Egyptian art, that we find the type of the true symbol. It is thus characterized:
In the first stage of art, we started from the confusion and identity of content and form, of spirit and nature. Next form and content are separated and opposed. Imagination has sought vainly to combine them, and is successful only in making clear their disproportion. In order that thought may be free, it is necessary that it get rid of its material form—that it destroy it. The moment of destruction, of negation, or annihilation, is then necessary in order that spirit arrive at consciousness of itself and its spirituality. This idea of death as a moment of the divine nature is already contained in the Indian religion; but it is only a changing, a transformation, and an abstraction. The gods are annihilated and pass the one into the other, and all in their turn into a single being—Brahma, the universal being. In the Persian religion the two principles, negative and positive—Ormuzd and Ahriman—exist separately and remain separated. Now this principle of negation, of death and resurrection, as moments and attributes of the divine nature, constitutes the foundation of a new religion; this thought is expressed in it by the forms of its worship, and appears in all its conceptions and monuments. It is the fundamental characteristic of the art and religion of Egypt. Thus we see the glorification of death and of suffering, as the annihilation of sensuous nature, appear in the consciousness of peoples in the worships of Asia Minor, of Phrygia and Phoenicia.
But if death is a necessary “moment” in the life of the absolute, it does not rest in that annihilation; this is, in order to pass to a superior existence, to arrive, after the destruction of visible existence, by resurrection, at divine immortality. Death is only the birth of a more elevated principle and the triumph of spirit.
Henceforth, physical form, in art, loses its independent value and its separate existence; still further, the conflict of form and idea ought to cease. Form is subordinated to idea. That fermentation of the imagination which produces the fantastic, quiets itself and is calm. The previous conceptions are replaced by a mode of representation, enigmatic, it is true, but superior, and which offers to us the true character of the symbol.