Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/295

 something accidental, something arbitrary, which must have come into the divine life from the outside. That this Paradise is lost proves that it is not absolutely essential as a state. The truly Divine, that which is in conformity with its essential nature, is not capable of being lost, is everlasting, and by its very nature abiding. This loss of Paradise must rather be considered as a divine necessity, and as included in the necessity that this state should cease; that imagined Paradise sinks to the level of a moment or element in that divine totality—a moment which is not the absolutely True.

The unity of man with nature is a favourite and pleasant-sounding expression. Rightly understood, it means the unity of man with his own nature. But his true nature is freedom, free spirituality, the thinking knowledge of the absolutely existing Universal; and as thus fixed this unity is no longer a natural, immediate unity.

Plants are in this condition of unbroken unity. The spiritual, on the contrary, is not in immediate unity with its nature; the truth rather is, that in order to attain to the return to itself, it has to work its way through its infinite dualism or division, and to win the state of accomplished reconciliation by wrestling for it. This is by no means a state of reconciliation which is there from the outset, and this true unity is attained to by spirit only by separation from its immediate character. People speak of innocent children, and lament that this innocence, this love, this trust get lost; or they speak of the innocence of simple peoples, who are, however, rarer than is generally thought. But this innocence is not the true position of man; the morality which is free is not that of the child; it stands higher than the innocence just spoken of, it is self-conscious willing; and in this the true attitude is for the first time reached.

In his original dependence upon nature man may either be gentler or more barbarous. Within a temperate zone—