Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/331

 The more the power of spirituality is conceived of in accordance with its content in an eternal form, the worthier is the idea of God, as well as the idea of the spirit of the human individual and of the immortality of the spirit.

However weak, however powerless men appear here, they appear just the same among the Greeks and in Homer. In the scene of Odysseus at the Styx we see how he calls forth the dead and slays a black goat; by the help of blood only are the shades able to acquire memory and speech; they are eager for blood, so that vitality may enter into them: Odysseus permits some to drink, and holds the rest back with his sword.

When the idea of the spirit of man is of this material character, the idea of what the ruling power is in its essential nature is equally material.

The example already quoted at once shows us the little value man, as an individual, has for those at this standpoint. This contempt for man, this making light of man by others, is confessedly present also among the negroes too, in the form of the condition of slavery, which is quite universal among them. Prisoners either become slaves or are slaughtered. With the idea of immortality the value of life increases; one might suppose the reverse would take place, and that life would then have less value. On the one hand, such is actually the case too, but, on the other, the right of the individual to life at once becomes so much the greater, and the right becomes for the first time great when man is recognised as free implicitly or in himself, in his own right. Both determinations, that of subjective finite independent being and that of absolute power, which is afterwards to appear definitely as absolute Spirit, are connected in the very closest manner.

On this account, too, one might suppose that man, since he is of so much value as being this power, would be held in great reverence here, and would have the