Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/196

 life particularly, a feeling of delight arises from the friendly and joyous character of the relation in which Man stands to Nature, since Man, in so far as he is related to Nature, is related to the Divine. By taking up this generous attitude he spiritualises what is natural, makes it into something Divine, gives it a soul.

This unity of the Divine and the natural, this identity of the ideal and the real, is an abstract characterisation, and is easily reached. The true identity is that which is found in infinite subjectivity, which is not conceived of as neutralisation, as a kind of mutual blunting of the characteristics of the two elements, but as infinite subjectivity, which determines itself, and sets its determinations free in the form of a world. At this stage these determinations thus set free are, in their character as things, at the same time unsubstantial or dependent, and this is indeed their true nature. They are not gods, but natural objects.

These particular moral Powers, which the higher Greek gods essentially are, possess independence only in form, because their content, owing to its particular character, is unsubstantial. This is a false form; the Being of these unsubstantial things, which are immediate regarded from the present standpoint, is really conceived of as something formal, as something unsubstantial, which comes to have Being not in the shape of absolute divine Being, but Being which is abstract, one-sided, and since it gets the character of abstract Being, it has attached to it the categories of Being, and being finite, the categories of the Understanding.

We are in the presence of prosaic things when the world thus exists for us, in the presence of external things, existing in accordance with the manifold connection of the Understanding as expressed by ground and consequence, quality, quantity, and all such-like categories of the Understanding.

Nature is here undeified, natural things have no