Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/135

 A.

TRANSITION TO THE SPHERE OF SPIRITUAL INDIVIDUALITY.

What is higher is also deeper; in it the separate moments are grasped together in the ideality of subjective unity; the want of connection which characterises immediacy is annulled, and the separate elements are brought back into subjective unity. For this reason it is necessary that what has the quality of naturalness should manifest such a multiplicity of outward shapes, which exhibit themselves as indifferent and mutually exclusive, as independent and individual forms of existence.

The general characteristic is free subjectivity which has satisfied its impulse, its inner desire. It is free subjectivity which has attained to dominion over the finite generally, over the natural and finite elements of consciousness, whether physical or spiritual, so that now the subject, that is, Spirit as spiritual subject, becomes known in its relation to the natural and the finite, while the latter are in part merely subservient to Spirit, and in part the garment of Spirit, and are present concretely in Spirit. Further, as outwardly representing Spirit, the natural and finite merely serve as a manifestation and glorification of Spirit. Spirit in this freedom, power, reconciliation with itself, exists on its own account, free and untrammelled in the natural; the external, the finite, is distinguished from these finite-natural and spiritual elements, from what belongs to the region of empirical, changeable consciousness, as well as to that of external existence.

Such is the general fundamental characteristic of this stage. Spirit being free, and the finite only an ideal moment in it, it is posited as inherently concrete, and inasmuch as we look upon Spirit and the freedom of Spirit as concrete, what we have is rational Spirit; the content constitutes the rationality of Spirit.