Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/108

 in it. The moments are not, however, the totality of the form, but present themselves in the first place as a sequence, as a course of life, as different states of the subject. Not until later does the subject as absolute Spirit arrive at the stage at which its moments are potential or implicit totality. Here the subject is still formal, still limited as regards determinate character, although Form in its entirety belongs to it, and thus there is still this limitation, that the moments are developed into form as states only, and not each one for itself as a totality; and it is not eternal history which is beheld in the subject as constituting the subject’s nature, but merely the history of states or conditions. The first is the moment of affirmation, the second is negation, the third is the return of negation into itself.

2. The second moment is the one which is of most importance here. Negation shows itself as a certain state of the subject; it is its alienation, death, in fact. The third is restoration, return to sovereignty. Death is the most immediate way in which negation shows itself in the subject, in so far as the latter has merely natural form generally, and also definitely existing human form. Further, this negation has besides the further characteristic that since what is here is not eternal history, is not the subject in its totality, this death comes to individual existence as it were by means of an Other, and from without, by means of the evil principle.

Here we have God as subjectivity generally, and the most important moment in it is that negation is not found outside, but is already within the subject itself, and the subject is essentially a return into itself, is self-contained existence, Being which is at home with itself. This self-contained condition includes the difference which consists in positing and having an Other of itself—negation—but likewise, in returning into itself, being with self, identical with itself in this return.

There is One subject; the moment of the negative, in