Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/288

 with free-will, and this last is first found in reflection; but this very reflection and division was not present, we are told, originally, and freedom was as identical with law and rational will as the individual plant is identical with its nature.

In like manner people imagine that in the state of innocence man is perfect in regard to his theoretical consciousness. He seems to determine himself here as identical with nature and the true conception of things; his own true being and that of the things have not as yet separated from each other; he sees into their very heart; nature is not as yet a negative element to him, not something obscured. Not until separation appears does the sensuous rind which separates him from them grow around these things; nature in this way sets up a wall of partition against me. Thus it is said that in such a relation Spirit knows the universal true nature of things, having an immediate knowledge, understanding of them in perception or picture-thought, just because perception is a knowing, a seeing clearly, which may be compared with the state of somnambulism, in which the soul or life returns to this unity of inwardness with its world. Thus the nature of things had, it is supposed, lain open to that original perceiving understanding, because for it that nature is emancipated from the external conditions of space and time, from the character ascribed to things by the understanding. It follows from this that in this unity Spirit, in the exercise of free imagination, which is no kind of caprice, sees things according to their notion, according to their true nature, and the things seen are determined through the notion, appear in everlasting beauty, and stand above that stuntedness which conditions phenomena. In short, Spirit has had before it and has beheld the Universal in the Particular in its pure outward shape, and the Particular, the Individual in its universality as a divine, god-like vitality. And man, in having thus grasped nature in its inmost