Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/314

 Universal relatively to self-consciousness, for the individual, for the particular empirical consciousness. This objectivity is an essential characteristic, on which all depends. Not until it is present does religion begin, does a God exist, and even in the lowest condition there is at least a beginning of it. The mountain, the river, is not in its character as this particular mass of earth, as this particular water, the Divine, but as a mode of the existence of the Divine, of an essential, universal Being. But we do not yet find this in magic as such. It is the individual consciousness as this particular consciousness, and consequently the very negation of the Universal, which is what has the power here; not a god in the magician, but the magician himself is the conjurer and conqueror of nature. This is the religion of passion, which is still infinite for itself, and therefore of sensuous particularity which is certain of itself. But in the religion of magic there is already also a distinguishing of the individual empirical consciousness of the person dealing in magic from that person in his character as representing the Universal. It is owing to this that out of magic the religion of magic is developed.

(b.) The Objective Characteristics of the Religion of Magic.

With the distinction of the singular and universal in general, there enters a relation of self-consciousness to the object, and here mere formal objectifying must be distinguished from the true. The former is that the spiritual Power—God—is known as objective for consciousness; absolute objectifying means that God is, that He is known as existing in and for Himself, in accordance with those characteristics which essentially belong to Spirit in its true nature.

What we have to consider in the first place here is formal objectifying only. The relation here is of a threefold kind.

1. Subjective self-consciousness, subjective spirituality,