Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/160

 is inflexible as contrasted with the fluctuations of individual desires and likings.

This has reference to the essence of idea in a general sense. With regard to its more specific form, we have to make the following remarks:—

a. We have seen that in idea the essential content is posited in the form of thought, but this does not mean that it is already posited as thought. When, therefore, we said that idea takes up a polemical attitude to the sensuous and pictorial, and assumes a negative attitude with regard to it, this does not imply that idea has freed itself absolutely from the sensuous, and posited the latter ideally in a complete and perfect way. It is only in actual thought that this is accomplished, which lifts up the sensuous qualities of the content to the region of universal thought-determinations, to the inward moments, or to the determinateness as peculiar to the Idea itself. Since idea is not this concrete elevation of the sensuous to the Universal, its negative attitude towards the sensuous means nothing more than that it is not truly liberated from the sensuous. General idea or ordinary thought is still essentially entangled with the sensuous; it requires it, and requires to enter on this contest with the sensuous in order to exist. The sensuous element, therefore, belongs essentially to idea, although idea never permits the sensuous to enjoy an independent validity. Further, the Universal, of which idea is conscious, is only the abstract Universality of its object, only its undetermined Essence, or approximate nature. In order to give a determinate character to that essence, it again requires what is determined by Sense, the pictorial; but to this as being sensuous it gives the position of something which is separate from what is signified by it, and treats it as a point at which it is not permissible to remain, as something which only serves to represent the proper or true content which is separate from it.