Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/126

 and the Idea rises into its proper element, into its own ethereality. This sacrifice of Nature is its process, and it appears in a more definite form as an advance through a series of graduated stages, in which the differences are present in the form of mutual exclusion. The connection is something purely internal. The moments, through which the Idea runs its course in the web or garment of Nature, are a series of independent forms. Nature is the Idea potentially, and only potentially, and the peculiar mode of its existence is to be outside of itself, in perfect externality. The nature of its progress is, more chiefly speaking, this, that the Notion which is enclosed in it breaks through its covering, absorbs the outer crust of its externality, idealises it, and while rendering the coating of the crystal transparent, is itself revealed to view. The indwelling Notion becomes external, or conversely, Nature immerses itself in itself, and what is external constitutes itself a mode of the Notion. Thus an externality comes into view which is itself ideal, and is held in the unity of the Notion. This is the truth of Nature, namely, Consciousness. In consciousness I am the Notion; and that which is for me, of which I have a consciousness, is, in short, my existence. In nature, what exists is not consciously known; it is merely something that is external, and it is Spirit which first knows the externality and posits it as identical with itself. In sensation, which is the culminating point and the end of Nature, an independent existence, a being for self, is already inherent, so that the definite character, which a thing has, is at the same time ideal, and is taken back into the Subject. The qualities of a stone are mutually exclusive, and the notion or conception we form of it is not in the stone. In sensation, on the other hand, external qualities do not exist as such, but are reflected into themselves, and here Soul, subjectivity, begins. And now the identity, which as gravitation is only impulse and a striving after