Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/217

 D.

WORSHIP.

God has essentially a relation to self-consciousness, since it is the finite spirit which constitutes the sphere in which His end appears. We have now to consider the religious sentiment or feeling of religion as seen in this self-consciousness. The mediation which it needs, in so far as it is feeling, is the positing of the identity, which is potentially posited, and is thus the mediating movement. This feeling represents the most inward movement of self-consciousness.

1. Self-consciousness brings itself into relation with the One, and is thus, to begin with, intuition, pure thought of the pure Essence as pure power and absolute Being, alongside of which nothing else of equal value can be put. This pure thought, therefore, as reflection into self, as self-consciousness, is self-consciousness with the character of infinite Being for self, or freedom, but freedom devoid of all concrete content. This self-consciousness is thus as yet distinct from real consciousness, and nothing of all the concrete characteristics of spiritual and natural life, of the fulness of consciousness, of the impulses, inclinations, and of all that belongs to the realm of spiritual relations, nothing of all this has as yet been taken up into the consciousness of freedom. The reality of life has still a place outside of the consciousness of freedom, and this last is not yet rational, it is still abstract, and no full, concrete, divine consciousness is as yet in existence. Since, therefore, self-consciousness exists only as consciousness, while, however, in the way of an object for the simplicity of thought there exists as yet no corresponding object, and since the determinateness of consciousness has not yet been taken up into it, the Ego is an object for itself only in its abstract state of unity with itself only as immediate particularity.