Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/232

 flow into its universality, or more accurately, into its essence as its object—as something which merges its natural singularity, which determines itself as finite in the essential object, that is here, in the absolute content, which determines itself as object. If in connection with the immediateness thus relinquished, what is thought of be the merely bodily immediateness, then this yielding up presents itself partly as natural death, by means of which man may be united with God—partly, however, as Thought, which abstracts from sensuous life and sensuous ideas, and is a withdrawal into the free region of the supersensuous. But if thought here adheres to its form as abstract thought, it retains the reflected vanity of simple, immediate Being-for-itself, of the cold and reserved isolation of the existent “I,” which takes up an exclusive attitude towards its Essence, and negates its own essence in itself. With justice is it said of this that God would not be in it, nor would it be in God, and that it would have to do with God in an outward fashion only, and further, that it would be the pantheistic point of view, and unworthy of God, if this  should be taken as an actual existence of God, since God must at least abstractly be defined as the absolutely universal Essence. But the relation of self-consciousness to God as Spirit is wholly different from this pantheistic mode of conceiving the relation, since in such a relation it is itself Spirit, and since by the renunciation of the exclusive character which it possesses as immediate oneness or isolation, it places itself in an affirmative relation, in a spiritually-vital attitude toward God. If theologians see Pantheism in this attitude, and consequently even count the spirit among the All, the all things among which indeed they reckon the soul and that which is reflected into its Beingfor-self, and which they then are justified in excluding from God in respect of their individual actuality in which they are finite, and if they know Spirit only as negation of God, they not only forget the doctrine that man was