Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/226

 relative attitude of opposition. In the first, that is, the attitude of relation, the finite consciousness is the one side, and the mode in which its finiteness is determined is the mode in which it itself reveals to us how its object is determined for it. Here we have the manner of the divine manifestation, that is to say, the world of general ideas, or the theoretical side. In the other relation, the practical, being that of the active process in which the division annuls itself, it is, on the contrary, in consciousness that the activity makes its appearance. To this side accordingly belongs the form of freedom, subjectivity as such, and it is here that self-consciousness is to be considered in its movement. This is manifestation as worship.

C.

WORSHIP OR CULTUS.

The separation of subject from object makes its first actual appearance in the Will. In willing I am an actual being and a free agent, and I place myself over against the object as an Other, in order to assimilate it to myself by bringing it out of that state of separation. In the theoretical relation, this immediate unity, immediate knowledge, is still present. But in worship I stand on the one side and God on the other, my purpose being to unite myself closely with God, and God with myself, and so to bring about a concrete unity. Or, if we designate that first or theoretical unity as the mode under which ordinary thought conceives the Existent, the Objective, then, in contrast with that stable relation (which, as being the consciousness of God as existent in and for Himself, in the form of idea, is theoretical), worship will now constitute the practical relation. This it does, inasmuch as it possesses in itself the antithesis of subject and object, and so far does away with the division between subject and object; so that this division might seem to exist in the first condition of