Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/327

 actual sovereigns over them too; if the priest and prince are distinguished from one another, the man is on the one hand reverenced as God, and on the other compelled to do what others require of him. The negroes, who have magicians who are not at the same time sovereigns, bind and beat them until they are obedient, if they refuse to use their magical charms or are not disposed to do so.

We shall see how the idea runs through various religions that the Spiritual has its presence in man, and that human consciousness is essentially the presence of Spirit. This idea necessarily belongs to the oldest class of principles. It is present in the Christian religion too, but in a higher form, and, as it were, transfigured. The Christian religion interprets and transfigures it.

In the case of a human being, the mode in which objectivity is attained is of a twofold kind. The first is that in which he takes up a position of exclusiveness as against what is other than himself; the second is the natural mode, namely, the stripping off of what is temporal from him; this natural mode is death. Death takes away what is temporal, what is transitory in man, but it has no power or control over that which he essentially is. That man actually has such a region within himself, since he exists in his own right, cannot at this standpoint as yet come into consciousness; here self-consciousness is not as yet in possession of the eternal meaning of its spirit. The stripping off referred to has to do only with the individual’s sensuous existence; the whole remaining contingent mode of his particularity, of his sensuous presence is, on the other hand, retained by him. It is removed into the region of ideas, and is retained there. This, however, has not the form of truth, but what is thus retained for the individual has still the form of his wholly sensuous existence. Reverence for the dead is therefore still quite feeble, and its content is of an accidental character. The dead are a power, but a feeble power.

The lasting part of the dead, a part which is at the