Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/22

 It is the system of universal fundamental determinations, the system determined in and for itself through the Notion, as that of the absolute sovereign powers to which everything returns, and which permeate everything through and through, which alone brings thorough stability into this region of caprice, confusion, and feebleness, into this measureless splendour and enervation. And it is the study of this system which is of the most essential moment. On the one hand, we have to recognise the presence of these determinations through the perverted sensuous form of the capricious, externally determined embodiment, and to do justice to the essential element which lies at their foundation; and on the other hand, we have to observe the degradation which they undergo. This degradation is partly owing to the mode in which the indifference of those determinations toward one another appears, partly owing to the presence of arbitrary human and externally local sense experience, through which they are transposed into the sphere of the every-day life, where all passions, local features—features of individual recollection—are joined on to them. There is no act of judgment, no feeling of shame, nothing of the higher mutual fitness of form and of content; the every-day existence as such is not made to vanish, and is not developed into beauty. The inequality or disproportion of form and content consist?, more strictly speaking, in this that the fundamental determinations are debased, inasmuch as they acquire the semblance of being similar to the disconnected facts of existence, and that conversely the external sensuous representation becomes depraved by means of its form.

From what has now been stated it will be already clear that these determinations of the divine Essence have their existence in the Indian religion. We have here to look away from its vast and characteristically endless mythology and mythological forms, in order to keep to the principal fundamental determinations alone,