Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/123

 soul, yet still man does not wish, at least that nature, as such, should be that which exerts its power and physical necessity over the exanimated body, that noble casket of the soul. Man’s desire is, on the contrary, that he himself should exert this power over it. Men accordingly endeavour to protect it against nature as such, or give it themselves, by their own free will, as it were, back to the earth, or else annihilate it by means of fire. In the Egyptian mode of honouring the dead and preserving the body, there is no mistaking the fact that man knew himself to be exalted above the power of nature, and therefore sought to maintain his body against this power, in order to exalt it above it too. The methods followed by peoples in their treatment of the dead stands in the closest connection with the religious principle, and the different customs which are usual at burial are not without bearings of very great importance.

In order then to understand the peculiar position of Art at this stage, we have to recollect that subjectivity does, as a matter of fact, begin to appear here, but as yet only so far as its basis is concerned, and that its conception or idea still passes over into that of substantiality. Consequently the essential differences have not yet mediated and spiritually permeated each other; on the contrary, they are as yet mixed together. Several noteworthy features may be specified which elucidate this intermixture and combination of what is present and of living things with the Idea of the Divine, so that either the Divine is made into something present, or on the other hand into something human; and in fact here even animal forms become divine and spiritual moments Herodotus quotes the Egyptian myth that the Egyptians had been ruled by a succession of kings who were gods. In this there is already the mixing together of the ideas that the god is known as king, and again the king as god. Further, we see in the countless number of the representations of art which portray the consecration of