Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/284

 self-determined, concrete content, has its beginning, and is the end or purpose which the universal powers of nature or the gods of the religion of beauty serve, is the Religion of External Utility or Conformity to an End. We have here a concrete content which comprises determinate characteristics within itself, implying that the hitherto separate individual powers are made subservient to one single end or purpose. The particular subject has hitherto been something other than these divine powers; these constitute the divine content generally, and the particular subject is human consciousness, the finite end. The divine content is now of use to that culminating point of subjectivity which was wanting to the content in the religion of beauty, as a means whereby it can fully develop itself. Thus the form under which religion here presents itself is that of outward finite purpose, or adaptation to an end. The idea of Spirit determines itself on its own account and by its own act; it is clearly itself the end, and this end is just the notion or conception of Spirit, the notion which realises itself. Here the Spiritual too is an end, has the intrinsically concrete determinations within itself, but here too these are still finite and represent a limited end, which consequently is not as yet the relation of Spirit to itself. In its gods the particular spirit seeks its own subjective end only; it seeks itself, not the absolute content.

The religion of utility or adaptation to an end, in which an end is posited in God, though not yet as the absolute end, may also be called the Religion of Fate, because that end itself is not as yet a pure spiritual end, but is in its form as a particular end forthwith posited in God. This particular end, when treated thus, is void of rational character as against other ends which would have just as much right to exist as it.

This division of the subject must not be taken in a merely subjective sense; it is, on the contrary, the necessary one in the objective sense of the nature of Spirit. Spirit,