Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/101

 of God, so that higher religions have no superiority over them in this respect: these are so-called pure conceptions of God (such, for example, as those in Friedrich von Schlegel’s “Weisheit der Indier”), and are regarded as survivals of the perfect original religion. In the Religion of Light, too, we have already found that evil in an individual form is everywhere done away with. Subjectivity we have observed everywhere at the same time in the concrete determination of self-consciousness. Even at the stage of magic, the power of self-consciousness was above Nature. What really constitutes the special difficulty in the study of religion is that we have not to do here, as in logic, with pure thought-determinations, nor with existing ones, as in Nature, but with such as are not wanting in the moment of self-consciousness, of finite spirit in fact, since they have already run their course through subjective and objective Spirit. For religion is itself the self-consciousness of Spirit regarding its self, and Spirit makes the different stages of self-consciousness themselves, by which Spirit is developed into the object of consciousness for itself. The content of the object is God, the absolute Totality, and therefore the entire manifoldness of matter is never wanting. It is necessary, however, to seek more precisely for definite categories, which form the differences of the religions. This difference is especially sought for in the mode of working of the Essence; this last is everywhere, and yet is not; it is further made to turn on the question as to whether there is or is not one God. This distinction is just as little to be relied upon, for even in the Indian religion there is to be found One God, and the difference then merely consists in the mode in which the many divine forms bind themselves together into unity. There are several Englishmen who hold that the ancient Indian religion contains the idea of the unity of God as a sun or universal soul. But predicates of the understanding such as these don’t help us here.