Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/353

 with this conception, however, we have the other idea that it is the Emperor who is sovereign upon earth, and not the Heavens. It is not Heaven which has given laws or gives them, laws which the people respect, divine laws, laws of religion, of morality. It is not T‘ien who governs nature; it is the Emperor who governs everything, and he only is in connection with this T‘ien.

It is the Emperor alone who brings offerings to T‘ien at the four principal festivals of the year. He also confers with T‘ien, offers his prayers to him; he alone stands in connection with him, and governs everything on earth. The Emperor has in his hands, too, authority over natural things and their changes, and rules their forces.

We distinguish between the world, the phenomena of the world, and God, in a way which implies that God also rules outside of this world. Here, however, the Emperor alone is the one who rules. The Heaven of the Chinese—T‘ien—is something entirely empty; the souls of the departed exist, it is true, in it, they survive the separation from the body, but they also belong to the world, since they are thought of as lords over the course of nature. And they too are under the rule of the Emperor; he instals them in their offices and deposes them. If the dead are conceived of as directors of the realm of nature, it might be said that they are thus given an exalted position; but the fact of the matter is that they are degraded into genii of the natural world, and therefore it is right that the self-conscious Will should direct those genii.

The Heaven of the Chinese, therefore, is not a world which forms an independent realm above the earth, and which is in its own right the realm of the Ideal, like the heaven we conceive of, with angels and the souls of the departed; nor is it like the Greek Olympus, which is distinct from life upon earth. Here, on the contrary, everything is upon earth, and all that has power is subject to the Emperor; it is this individual