Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/210

 will of the individual. The law is real only in so far as it is made particular, for it is through its being made particular that the universal first becomes something living.

The other peoples are shut out from this single real end. The People has its own peculiar nationality, and consists of certain families and the members of these. This privilege of belonging to the People, and consequently of standing to God in this relation, rests on birth. This naturally demands a special constitution, special laws, ceremonies, and worship.

The peculiarity connected with the end is further developed so as to include the possession of a special district. This district or soil must be divided amongst the different families, and is inalienable, so that the excluding of other peoples results in gaining this wholly empirical and external Present. This exclusion is, in the first instance, not polemical, but, on the other hand, it is the special possession which is the reality, the individual enjoyment of this individual people, and the relation of the individual people to the almighty, all-wise God. It is not polemical, i.e., the other peoples can also be brought into this relation to adore God in this way. They ought to glorify the Lord, but that they should come to do this is not a real end. The obligation is only ideal and not practical. This real end appears first in Mohammedanism, where the particular end is raised to the rank of a general one, and thus becomes fanatical.

Fanaticism, it is true, is found amongst the Jews as well, but it comes into play only in so far as their possession, their religion, is attacked, and it comes into play then because it is only this one end which is by its very nature exclusive and will tolerate no accommodation to anything different, no fellowship, no intercourse with it.

Third Determination.—Man is exalted above all else in the whole creation. He is something which knows, perceives, thinks. He is thus the image of God in a