Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/289

 character, and recognised its true relation to the corresponding side of his own nature, has taken up a relation to nature as to something which is an adequate garment for Spirit, and one which is not destructive of organisation. With this general conception the idea is bound up that Spirit has consequently been in possession of all art and science, and it is further imagined that if man is found within the universal harmony, he beholds harmonious substance—God Himself—in an immediate manner; not as an abstraction of thought, but as a definite Being.

Such is the general idea given of that primitive religion which is supposed to be the immediate religion, and historically the first. Perhaps, too, an attempt is made to confirm this idea by appealing to one aspect of the Christian religion. We are told in the Bible of a Paradise; many peoples have the idea of such a Paradise as lying behind them, and lament over it as a lost one, thinking of it as the goal for which man yearns, and to which he will attain. Such a Paradise, whether it belong to the past or be looked for in the future, is then filled up with moral or unmoral content, according to the stage of culture which has been reached by the peoples in question.

In reference to the criticism of such a general conception as this, it must be stated, in the first place, that such a conception is, as regards its essential substance, a necessary one. The Universal, the inner element, is the divine unity in a human reflex, or, in other words, the thought of the man who stands within this unity as such a reflex. Thus men have the idea that Being-in-and-for-itself, true Being, is a harmony which has not as yet passed over into division or dualism, which has not yet broken up into the dualism of good and evil, nor into the subordinate dualism represented by the multiplicity, intensity, and passion of human needs. This unity, this condition in which the contradictions are resolved,