Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/157

 freely over against itself. Bruce, when in Abyssinia, showed a painted fish to a Turk, but the remark which the latter made was this: “At the last day the fish will lay it to your charge that you gave it no soul.” An oriental does not desire mere form; on the contrary, for him the soul remains absorbed in unity, and does not advance to the condition of separation, nor reach the process in which truth stands on the one side as embodied without a soul, and on the other the perceiving self-consciousness, which again annuls this separation.

If we now look back upon the progress which the religious attitude has made in its development up to this point, and if we compare perception with feeling, we shall see that truth has indeed definitely appeared in its objectivity; but we see too that the defect, or deficiency, in its manifestation is, that it remains in sensuous, immediate independence, that is to say, in that independence which in turn annuls itself, does not exist on its own account, and which likewise proves itself to be the product of the subject, since it only attains to subjectivity and self-consciousness in the perceiving subject. In perception the elements of the totality of the religious relation—namely, the object, and self-consciousness—have got separated. The religious process belongs, indeed, to the perceiving subject only, and yet it is not complete in the subject, but needs the object perceived by sense. On the other hand, the object is the truth, and yet it needs, in order to be true, the self-consciousness which lies outside of it.

The advance now necessary is this, that the totality of the religious relation should be actually posited as such, and as unity. Truth attains to objectivity, in which its content as existing on its own account is not merely something posited, but exists essentially in the form of subjectivity itself, and the entire process takes place in the element of self-consciousness.

In accordance with this, the religious attitude is in the first place that of the general idea or ordinary thought.