Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/290

 undoubtedly contains truth, and is in entire agreement with the Notion. But the more precise shape under which this unity is represented as a condition in time, as a unity which ought not to have been lost, and which was only lost by accident, is something altogether different. This is a confounding of what is first as representing the Notion with the reality of consciousness, as this reality is adequate or proportionate to the Notion.

We must therefore do this general conception justice. It contains in itself the necessary Idea of the divine self-consciousness, of the serene untroubled consciousness of the absolutely divine Essence. In it this fundamental determination must not only be allowed to be correct, but also to be a true idea from which to start. This idea is that man is no merely natural being as such, no mere animal, but Spirit. In so far as he is Spirit, he has, in short, this universality within himself, the universality of rationality, which is concrete thought in its activity. He has the instinct, too, to know the universal, to know that nature is rational; not, indeed, that it is conscious reason, but that it has reason within itself.

Thus the spirit knows, too, that God is rational, is absolute reason, the absolute activity of reason; and thus it has instinctively the belief that it must know God as well as nature, must find its essence in God, if it takes up toward Him an attitude of rational investigation.

This unity of man with God, with nature in the general sense as Potentiality, is undoubtedly the substantial, essential determination. Man is reason, is Spirit; by means of this quality or capacity he is implicitly the True. That, however, is the Notion, Potentiality, and in forming an idea of what the Notion, the Potentiality is, people usually end in representing it to themselves as something belonging either to the past or else to the future, not as being an inner element which exists on its own account, but in external, immediate existence, in some shape or other, as a state or condition. It is thus