And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.
And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter (Revelations 10:9-10)
#3.
Now the higher state is the knowledge of that implicit unity which is the content of the classical art-form and is capable of perfect presentation in bodily shape. But this elevation of the implicit into self-conscious knowledge introduces a tremendous difference. It is the infinite difference which, for example, separates man from animals. Man is an animal, but even in his animal functions, he is not confined to the implicit, as the animal is; he becomes conscious of them, recognizes them, and lifts them, as, for instance, the process of digestion, into self-conscious science. In this way man breaks the barrier of his implicit and immediate character, so that precisely because he knows that he is an animal, he ceases to be an animal and attains knowledge of himself as spirit. (Aesthetics 80)
Here, near the end of the introduction, Hegel is discussing how the romantic form of art comes to supersede the classical "because it has won a content which goes beyond and above the classical form of art." "This content," he states, "coincides with what Christianity asserts of God as a spirit," as opposed to "the Greek God [who] is the object of naïve intuition and sensuous imagination, and therefore his shape is the bodily shape of man" (79). This might set up the quotation above, but it certainly doesn't prepare us for the example which Hegel will use. We may also recognize the dialectical pattern which always moves from the implicit to the explicit, from naive consciousness to self-consciousness. But why, we may ask, does Hegel use the example of bodily digestion to exemplify a spiritual function? Bahti's provisional answer to this question is apposite:
This animal, that is to say, bodily, function can become an object of science (say, dietetics) as man thinks about his digestion. . . . This is the aspect of the example as bodily or of the body. But the very example of digestion is also of the spirit, that is, of the appropriation, interiorization, and assimilation of the outer into the inner -- or, in Hegel's context here, of the body by the spirit. So the example of the body is overcome in its exemplification of the spirit: digestion is digested, or "the process of digestion" processes or digests the "merely bodily object" of its knowledge, namely, the animal-like function of digestion (Bahti 110-11).