Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/194

 Power which maintains itself in the differences, inasmuch as it remains Being-for-self, and thus represents the Being of the world. The world is thus divided within itself; regarded from one side it is dependent, selfless difference, and regarded from the other side it is its own Being.

The manifestation of the nothingness, of the ideality of this finite existence, of the fact that Being is here not true independence—this manifestation in the form of Power, is Righteousness, and in this justice is done to finite things. Goodness and righteousness are not moments of Substance. These characteristics exist in Substance in a state of being, and they also are immediately present in it as not being, as becoming.

Here the One is not thought of as Substance, but as the personal One, as Subject, and here the determination of the end is the determinateness of the Notion itself. The world has to be, and so, too, it has to change, to pass away. Here righteousness is thought of as determination of the Subject in its self-differentiation from these determinations which belong to it, from this world which is its own world.

Creation, preservation, passing away are, in the ordinary conception of them, separated in time, but in the Notion they are essentially moments only of one process, namely, of the process of Power. The identity of Power with itself is thus the Nothing out of which the world has been created, being both the subsistence of the world and the cancelling and absorbing of this subsistence or independent existence. This identity of Power which presents itself in the Being of things, too, is both the Being of things and their Not-Being. In so far as goodness is concerned, the world exists only as having no justification for its existence in itself, as upheld and maintained in a contingent way, and in this fact is, at the same time, contained its negativity, which owes its existence to righteousness.