Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/198

 the negative, it must free itself from itself. This first natural, simple self-emancipation of the finite from its finiteness is death. This is the renunciation of the finite, and here what natural life is itself implicitly is made explicit really and actually. The sensuous life of what is individual or particular has its end in death. Particular experiences or sensations as particular are transient; one supplants the other, one impulse or passion drives away another. In its annihilation, this sensuous element makes its true nature actually explicit. In death the finite is shown to be annulled and absorbed. But death is only the abstract negation of what is implicitly negative; it is itself a nullity, it is revealed nullity. But explicit nullity is at the same time nullity which has been done away with, and is the return to the Positive. Here cessation, liberation from finiteness comes in. Death does not present itself to consciousness as this emancipation from finiteness, but this higher view of death is found in thought, and indeed even in popular conceptions, in so far as thought is active in them.

($$\beta$$.) Finiteness from the point of view of Reflection.

We now rise out of immediate consciousness to the level of Reflection—and here we have again to do with a finitude which appears in definite contrast to infinitude.

This antithesis has different forms, and the question is what these are. There is an emancipation from finiteness here, but in this sphere the true infinity is as yet only abrogated or annulled finiteness. And, therefore, the question arises, Does reflection get the length of positing the finite as something which is in itself null, or does reflection accomplish as much as nature? Can reflection make that die which is mortal, or is that which is null immortal to it? Since it is null we ought to cause it to vanish, for what is possible to nature must be yet more possible to infinite spirit. Thus reflection, like nature, exhibits the finite as null. But nature always falls back again into the finite, and in like manner what constitutes