Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/230

 speaks, forms ideas, and which has to do with this its exaltation. But in devotion the subject does not maintain itself in its particularity, but only in its movement in the Object, and only as this individual self-moving spirit. The further development of the immediacy which has not been abrogated accordingly presents us with the infinitude of the vain subject as vain, and this culmination of vanity remains. If this be taken as also the unity of the certain knowledge of itself with the content, then this unity would be one in which vanity as such would be defined as representing what is true and absolute. That subjectivity, on the contrary, is destined to be the true subjectivity only in so far as it is knowledge which is emancipated and free from immediacy, as likewise from the Being-for-self which reflects itself into itself, and holds itself fast as against Substance—that is, only in so far as it is this negative unity of infinite Form with Substance, as against its individual particularity.

In connection with the conception just indicated, we may perhaps be reminded of another idea, or of the bald accusation of Pantheism which is brought against that conception even by theologians themselves. For there are theologians who, while they suppose that they have gone a long distance from the beaten track of the ordinary forms of the reflection which characterises the culture of our time, are so restricted to it that if they do not find God spoken of and defined as something absolutely supersensible, they in their thinking cannot get any further than the conception of such an affirmative relation as mere ordinary abstract identity. People do not know how to get a knowledge of God as Spirit: Spirit is an empty idea to them, having merely the same meaning as motionless abstract Substance. Pantheism sees and knows God in the sun, in a stone, a tree, an animal, in so far only as the sun as sun, the tree or animal as such, is and continues in this immediate natural existence. The sun, the air, and such like, are, it is true, universal matter,