Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/154

 against itself. This distinction is now, too, to be posited as such, so that the activity of the Ego comes into operation, and sets its determinate character at a distance, so to speak, as not its own, places it outside of itself, and makes it objective. And further, we saw that the Ego is in feeling potentially estranged from itself, and has potentially in the Universality which it contains, the negation of its particular empirical existence. Now, in putting its determinateness outside of itself, the Ego estranges itself, does away, in fact, with its immediacy, and has entered into the sphere of the Universal.

At first, however, the determinateness of Spirit appears as the external object in general, and gets the entirely objective character of externality in space and time. And the consciousness which places it in this externality, and relates itself to it, is perception, which we here have to consider in its perfect form as Art-perception.

2. Perception.

Art had its origin in the feeling of the absolute spiritual need that the Divine, the spiritual Idea, should exist as object for consciousness, and in the first place for perception in its immediate form. The law and content of art is Truth as it appears in mind or Spirit, and is therefore spiritual truth, but spiritual truth in such a form that it is at the same time sensuous truth, existing for perception in its simple form. Thus the representation of truth is the work of man, but it appears in an external fashion, so that it is produced under the conditions of sense. When the Idea appears immediately in Nature and in spiritual relations too, when the True shows itself in the midst of diversity and confusion, the Idea is not yet gathered into one centre of manifestation; it still shows itself in the form of externality, or mutual exclusion. In immediate existence the manifestation of the Notion does not yet appear in harmony with truth. That sensuous perception to