Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/201

 is said, “From Thy breath the worlds proceed; before Thy threatenings they flee away; if Thou openest Thine hand, they are filled with good; if Thou hidest Thy face, they are troubled; if Thou boldest in Thy breath, they pass away into dust; if Thou sendest it forth, they spring up again.” Sublimity consists in this, that Nature is represented as thus entirely negated, in subjection, transitory.

C.

THE END GOD WORKS OUT IN THE WORLD.

First Determination.—The determination of the end appears here as the essential one that God is wise, to begin with—wise in Nature generally. Nature is His creature, and He lets His power be known in it, though not His power only, but His wisdom as well. This wisdom reveals itself in what it produces by the presence of arrangement in accordance with an end.

This end has rather the character of something indeterminate, superficial; the conformity to an end is rather of an external kind, “Thou givest to the beast its food.” The true end and the true realisation of the end are not present within Nature as such, but rather they are essentially to be found in consciousness. He manifests Himself in Nature, but His essential appearing is that He appears in consciousness, in His reflection or reappearance, in such a way that in self-consciousness it reappears that His end is just to be known by consciousness, and that He is an end for consciousness.

Sublimity, to begin with, gives only the general idea of power, and not as yet that of an end. The end is not only the One, the truth rather being that only God Himself can be His end, and this means that His Notion becomes objective for Him, and that He possesses Himself in the realisation. This is the universal end in general. If, accordingly, turning our attention to the world, to