Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/189

 own self is merely a moment of Power, and not its totality. Power is in its very nature a negative relation to self, a mediation within self; and since it is negatively related to self, the abolition or annulling of abstract identity is the positing of difference, determinateness, i.e., it is the creation of the world. The element of nothing, out of which the world is created, is the absence of all difference, and it is in connection with this quality that Power, Essence, is first thought of. If, accordingly, it is asked where God got the material, the answer is, just in that simple relation to self. Matter is what is formless, what is identical with itself. This is merely a moment of the Essence, and is thus something different from absolute Power, and is accordingly what we call matter. The creation of the world, therefore, means the negative relation of the Power to itself, in so far as it is to begin with something which is defined as merely identical with self.

The creation by God is something very different from the act of proceeding from God, or from the idea of the world proceeding out of God. All peoples have had theogonies, or, what comes to the same thing, cosmogonies. In these the fundamental category is always procession, not the fact of something being created. It is out of Brahma that the gods proceed, while in the cosmogonies of the Greeks, the highest, the most spiritual gods are those which have finally proceeded from some source, which have been the last so to proceed. This poor category of procession now disappears, for the Good, Absolute Power, is a Subject.

This procession does not express the true character of what is created. What thus proceeds is what exists, what actually is, and in such a way that the Ground or Essence from which it proceeds is thought of as the unessential element which has disappeared in something higher. What proceeds out of God is not thought of as something created, but as something independent, self-subsistent, not as something which has no inherent