Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/20

 which has vanished, and by means of which their independence, instead of being a reality, becomes rather a complete contingency. The phenomenal world, the world of appearance, is therefore drawn into the service of imagination. The divine world is a realm of imagination, which becomes all the more infinite and manifold as it has its home in a region where Nature is exuberant; and this principle of passionless imagination, of a fancy built on a theoretical foundation, has enriched the character of the mind and its emotions,—emotions which in this gently hatching warmth are permeated in a pre-eminent degree by a strain of voluptuous and sweet loveliness, but at the same time of feeble softness.

The objective content, too, is not apprehended here in the form of Beauty; those powers, whether general natural objects or the forces of individual feeling, as, for example, love, are not as yet embodied in forms of beauty. To beauty of form belongs free subjectivity, which in the sensuous world and in concrete existence is both free and knows itself to be so.

For the Beautiful is essentially the Spiritual making itself known sensuously, presenting itself in sensuous concrete existence, but in such a manner that that existence is wholly and entirely permeated by the Spiritual, so that the sensuous is not independent, but has its meaning solely and exclusively in the Spiritual and through the Spiritual, and exhibits not itself, but the Spiritual.

Such is true beauty. In living human beings there are many external influences which check pure idealisation, this subsumption of the bodily sensuous element under the Spiritual.

Here this condition does not as yet exist, and for this reason, that the Spiritual is as yet only present in this abstract shape of Substantiality. It is, indeed, unfolded into these particular forms, into special Powers, but the substantiality still exists for itself; it has not