Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/226

 This expresses the essential character of the family, together with the land which belongs to it and from which it derives its subsistence. The possession of a country is what self-consciousness of this kind receives from its God. It is consequently that very confidence before referred to which is the absolutely limited constitutive element of the individual family existence. Just because man in the absolutely negative condition of self-surrender exists in what is purely positive, and consequently is once more in a condition of immediacy, confidence, as expressing the surrender of finite interests, turns into the surrender of the surrender, and thus comes to represent in turn the realised finite individual, his happiness and possessions. These possessions and this people are identical, inseparable. God’s people possess Canaan. God has made a covenant with Abraham, the one side of which is constituted by this possession, and it is the affirmative in this sphere of empirical particular interests. Both are inseparable, the special possession and the confidence, the piety. The possession consequently gets an infinitely absolute authorisation, a divine authorisation; and yet at the same time the title to the possession does not take the form of a juridical right, of a property; this latter, as being different from possession, is not applicable here. Property has its source in personality, in this very freedom of the single individual. Man is essentially a holder of property in so far as he is a person, but the possession, as expressing the empirical aspect of property, is entirely free to take any form, this being left to chance. What I possess is a matter of accident, a matter of indifference; when I am recognised as a holder of property, I am a free subjectivity and the possession is a matter of indifference. Here, on the contrary, this definite possession as such is identical with the feeling of confidence, and it is consequently this possession to which an absolute title attaches. The idea of property does not come in here,