Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/254

 various degrees, from the mere bodily movement of the dance up to the erection of enormous colossal structures. The latter are principally of the nature of monuments, and are endless in number, for a fresh beginning must continually be made as each generation completes its own work.

The determining agent in connection with such works is not yet the free imagination; on the contrary, what is produced has the character of something enormous and colossal. The production of such things is still essentially chained to what is Natural and Given, and the discretion left to active effort is limited merely to this, that the dimensions be on an exaggerated scale, and the actual forms be characterised by proportions of the “enormous” order.

All these works too fall within the sphere of sacrifice, for in these, as in sacrifice, the end is the Universal, as against which what is peculiar to self and the interests of the subject must be relinquished. All activity, in fact, is a relinquishment, no longer, however, of a merely external thing, but of inward subjectivity. This renunciation or sacrifice which is involved in activity, in virtue of its character as activity, produces at the same time an object, brings something into existence, yet not in such a way that the Being which is created merely issues from myself, but rather so that the act of production takes place in accordance with an end which is full of content. The labour of man by which the unity of the finite and infinite is brought about only in so far as it is penetrated throughout by Spirit and wrung out of the action of Spirit, is, however, already a deeper sacrifice, and an advance on that form under which sacrifice originally makes its appearance merely as the renunciation of an immediate finitude; for in this act of production the sacrifice is a spiritual deed, and is the effort which, as negation of particular self-consciousness, holds fast the end which has its life within the inner region of thoughts