Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/114

 realm of ideas or ordinary thought where what is preserved is precisely that which has not natural existence.

Typhon, Evil, is overcome, and likewise pain, and Osiris is the judge in accordance with law and justice. Evil is overcome, is condemned; and with this the act of judgment makes its first appearance, and does so as what decides; that is to say, Good has the power to assert itself, and to annihilate the non-existent, the evil.

If we say Osiris is a ruler of the dead, the dead are in this case just such as are not held to be in the sensuous natural sphere, but have independent continuous existence in a region beyond what is sensuous and natural. Connected with this is the fact that the individual subject is known as continuous, as something withdrawn from the region of the transitory, as something having a fixed, independent existence, something distinguished from what is sensuous.

That is a thoroughly weighty saying of Herodotus regarding immortality, namely, that the Egyptians were the first to declare that the soul of man is immortal. We find this continued life, this metamorphosis in India and China, but this, like the continued life of the individual, the immortality of the Hindus, is itself merely something subordinate and unessential. What is with them highest is not an affirmative permanent duration, but is Nirvana, continuous existence in the state of annihilation of the Affirmative, or only a semblance of affirmation, the being identical with Brahma.

This identity, this union with Brahma, is at the same time a melting away into this unity, which is, it is true, seemingly affirmative, and yet is in itself utterly devoid of determination and without differentiation. But what we have here as a logical deduction is this: the highest form of consciousness is subjectivity as such; this is totality, and is able to exist independently in itself; it is the idea of true independence or self-existence.

We call that independent or self-sustained which is