Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/298

 peoples such knowledge and such presentiments are to be found in far greater degree than among civilised nations. Such knowledge, however, is confined to special or single occurrences and the fate of individuals. The connection of this definite individual with definite things which form a part of his consciousness is awakened, but these are in this case merely single or individual things and occurrences.

But all this is not yet the true heart of things. That is only to be found in the Notion, the law, the universal Idea; it is not the slumber of Spirit which can reveal the true heart of the world to us. The heart of a planet is the relation of its distance from the sun, of its orbit, &c. This is the truly rational element, and is only attainable for the man of scientific culture, who is free from bondage to the immediate sensuous experience of sight, hearing, &c., who has withdrawn his senses into himself, and approaches the objects before him in the exercise of free thought. This rationality and this knowledge are a result only of the mediation of thought, and only occur in the final and spiritual stage of the existence of man. That instinctive knowledge of nature is explained as sense-perception, and this is nothing else but immediate consciousness. If we ask, “What has been perceived?” it is not sensuous nature superficially considered (a kind of perception which may also be attributed to animals), but it is the essential being of Nature. But the Essence of nature as a system of laws is nothing else than the Universal. It is nature looked at in its universality, the system of self-developing life, and it is this development in its true form, not nature in its individual form, in which it exists for sense-perception or pictorial thought. The form of the Natural is nature as permeated by thought. But thinking is not something immediate: it begins indeed from data, but raises itself above the sensuous manifoldness of what is given, negates the form of particularity, forgets what takes place under sensuous conditions, and produces the