Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/179

 the other the opposite, an infinite limitedness or restrictedness. This is the first form in reference to the end. The One has what is infinite alongside of it, while, however, setting up for being the One.

So far as the relation between Nature and Spirit is concerned, the Religion of Sublimity means that the sensuous, the finite, the natural, what is spiritually and physically natural, has not yet been taken up into free subjectivity or transfigured within it. The characteristic of this stage is that free subjectivity is elevated to the condition of pure Thought, a form which is more adequate to express the content than the sensuous is. Here the natural element is dominated by this free subjectivity, in which the Other is merely ideal, and has no true lasting existence as against free subjectivity. Spirit is what raises itself, what is raised above the natural, above finitude. This is the Religion of Sublimity.

The Sublime is not, however, the Measureless, which, in order to determine itself and to take on a definite form, can make use only of what is immediately present and of silly distortions of it, and has to do this in order to produce a conformity with its inner nature. Sublimity, on the other hand, can do without immediate existence and its modes, and does not, like the other, get into a condition of poverty which forces it to lay hold of these modes in order to represent itself, but pronounces these to be a mere show or illusion.

(6.) The other characteristic or determination is that the natural or finite is transfigured in Spirit, in the freedom of Spirit. Its transfiguration consists in this, that it is a symbol of the spiritual in such a way that in this transfiguration of the physical-natural or spiritual-natural, the natural itself stands over against the spiritual as finite, as the other side of that essentiality, of that substantiality which we call God. This last is free subjectivity, in connection with which the finite is posited merely as a symbol, in which God, Spirit, appears. This is the mode