Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/182

 true subjectivity, and corresponding to this we have power as individual empirical self-consciousness. Thus, too, in the Chinese religion there appears an individual existence which represents itself as the Universal pure and simple, as determining everything as God. The first mode of natural existence is self-consciousness, individual, natural. The natural, in its character as something single or individual, is what actually exists as, and is determined as, self-consciousness. Here, accordingly, the arrangement is the reverse of what we have in the Religion of Nature. In the present instance, what is primary is Thought, which is concrete in itself, simple subjectivity, which then advances so as to get determination within itself. In the other case, in the Religion of Nature, it was the natural immediate self-consciousness which was the primary element, and which finally embodied itself in the pictorial conception of light.

I.

THE RELIGION OF SUBLIMITY.

What this religion has in common with that of Beauty is the ideality it ascribes to the natural, which it brings into subjection to the spiritual, and further that in it God is consciously known as conscious Spirit, as Spirit whose determinations are rational and moral. God, however, in the Religion of Beauty has still a particular nature or content, or, to put it otherwise, He is merely moral Power in the manifested form of Beauty, and therefore in a manifestation which still takes place in a sensuous material, in the region of sensuous matter, the matter of the idea or ordinary conception: the region in which the manifestation takes places is not yet that of Thought. The necessity for rising higher to the Religion of Sublimity is to be found in the fact that the particular spiritual and moral forces are taken out of their state of