Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/324

 hand as their charm, cast it aside when it does not produce the desired effect, and take another.

Such is the essential character of animal-worship; it exists in so far as man and the spiritual in him have not yet conceived of themselves in their true essentiality. The life of man is thus mere free independence.

In this sphere of the appetite of individual self-consciousness, which neither in itself nor outside of itself recognises universal objective spirituality, that significance is not as yet given to the living creature, thus reverenced or worshiped, which it acquires later in the idea of the transmigration of souls. This general conception is based upon the idea that the spirit of man is of a durable character, but that for his existence in that duration he requires corporeal form, and inasmuch as this is not now a human one, he requires another, and the one most nearly related is accordingly that of the animal. In zoolatry, which is bound up with the transmigration of souls, it is an important and essential moment that the idea of an indwelling spiritual element combines itself with this transmuted life, so that it is properly this which is reverenced. Here in this sphere, where immediate self-consciousness is the fundamental element, it is, however, life in the general sense only that is reverenced. This worship, therefore, is of a contingent character, and connects itself now with this animal, and now with that other. Almost every unaccomplished desire is the occasion of a fresh change. Moreover, any kind of thing is to the purpose here,—a manufactured idol, a hill, a tree, &c. Just as children feel the impulse to play, and mankind the impulse to adorn themselves, there is an impulse here too to have something before one as an independent and powerful object, and to have the consciousness of an arbitrary combination which may be just as easily broken up again, as the more precise character of the object appears at first to be of no consequence.