Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/186

 but Man, self-consciousness, is the sphere in which it shows itself. The end must, as being a divine end, be universal, inherently and potentially universal; it must contain universality in itself. The end is thus merely human, and as yet naturally the family, which widens out into a nation. A definite nation becomes here the end set before itself by wisdom.

That God should be thus characterised as One seems to us a thought which is familiar, and not striking and important, because we are accustomed to this figurative idea of Him. The idea is formal, too, but of infinite importance, and it is not to be wondered at that the Jewish people put such a high value upon it, for the thought that God is one is the root of subjectivity, of the intellectual world, the way to truth. The essential character of absolute truth is contained in it; still it is not yet truth as truth, for development is a necessary quality of this latter, but it is the beginning of truth and the formal principle of the absolute harmony of the Absolute with itself. The One is pure power, and all that is particular is posited in Him as negative, and not as belonging to Him as such, but as inadequate to express Him, as unworthy of Him. In the religion of Nature we saw the determinateness under the aspect of natural existence, as, for example, light, and the self-consciousness of the Absolute appeared in this manifold manner. In the infinite Power, on the other hand, all this externality is annihilated. There is, therefore, an essence without form or representation which does not exist for the Other in any natural mode, but only for thought, for Spirit. This definition of the One is that formal definition of unity which forms the basis of the conception of God as Spirit, and, so far as self-consciousness is concerned, it is the root of its concrete, true content.

But it is, to begin with, nothing more than the root merely. For the point to be determined is not how many spiritual predicates—as, for example, wisdom,