Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/204

 whole of finitude, and yet expresses this finite as infinitude, as the universal affirmative. What is wanting here is objectivity. In true renunciation all depends on whether this culmination of subjectivity still has an object.

The standpoint which has been considered is reflection in its completeness, the abstract subjectivity, the Ego, the absolute idealiser, that for which all distinction, determination, content is annulled, or exists only as posited by it. I am that which determines, and I alone, and I am this as the individual unit, as the immediate self, as I, who am immediate.

In all content I am immediate relation or reference to myself, that is to say, I am Being, and this I am as particularity, as the relation of negativity to itself. That which is posited by me is posited as distinct from me—as the negative, and thus as negated, as only posited. I am, consequently, immediate negativity. Thus I, this exclusive Ego, in my state of immediacy, that is to say, in my feelings, opinions, in the caprice and contingency of my feeling and willing, am the affirmative in general, am good. All objective content, law, truth, duty vanish for me. I recognise nothing, nothing that is objective, no truth. God, the Infinite, is for me something beyond this world, something held aloof from me. I alone am the Positive, and no content has value on its own account, it has no longer affirmation in itself, but only in so far as I lay it down. The True and the Good exist in my conviction only, and all that is needful in order that a thing be good is this conviction, this recognition of mine. In this ideality of all determinations or categories I alone am the Real. This attitude at first gives itself out to be that of humility, and what such humility consists in is this, that the Ego shuts out from itself the Infinite, the knowledge and rational apprehension of God, renounces it, and characterises itself in reference to it as finite. But in so doing this humility contradicts itself; it is pride rather, for I shut out the