Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/137

 a kind that their content belongs only to the form of free self-determination, and with this is necessarily connected the fact that freedom constitutes the content of the laws. When we perceive this, the element of naturalness or immediacy retires into the background, and inherently universal ends show themselves—ends which are inherently universal, although externally they may be quite unimportant, or, so far as their range is concerned, are not yet universal, just as a man who acts from ethical motives may perform his actions within a sphere extremely restricted, so far as its general content is concerned, and yet be essentially moral. The brighter sun of Spirit makes the natural light pale before it. Thus we pass outside of the circle of the Religion of Nature. We come to gods who are essentially founders of states and marriage, founders of peaceful life, producers of art which originates solely with them, gods who preside over oracles and states, and who originate and protect law and morality. The peoples who have reached that stage in the development of self-consciousness in which subjectivity is recognised to be the ideality of the natural, have thereby crossed over into the sphere of ideality, into the kingdom of the soul, and have come to the region belonging to the realm of Spirit. They have torn from their eyes the bandage of sensuous perception, escaped from the trackless maze which is devoid of thought, they have laid hold of thought, of the Intellectual Sphere, and have made and secured for themselves the solid ground in what is inward. They have laid the foundations of the sanctuary which in its very nature is firm and stable.

The progress made up to this point has been as follows:—We started from the natural desires as seen in the religion of magic, from the authority and power of these desires over Nature, gained simply by individual will which is not determined by thought. The second stage was occupied by the theoretical