Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/239

 have here is concrete rationality which contains essentially moral principles.

That freedom is just this, namely, the desiring or willing of nothing except itself, the desiring of nothing else than freedom, and that this is the true moral element from which moral determinations spring, or, in other words, that the formal element of self-determination changes round into the content, is a thought which cannot here be further followed up.

While morality constitutes the essential basis, still what comes first is morality in its immediacy. It is the rationality above referred to as absolutely universal or general, and thus still in its impersonal or substantial form. The rationality is not yet one subject, and has not yet left the virgin unity in which it is morality, and raised itself to the unity of the subject, or, in other words, has not plunged into itself.

Absolute necessity and the spiritual human embodiment are still separate. Determinateness, it is true, is posited in a general way, but this determinateness is, on the one hand, abstract, and on the other is left free to take on determinateness in manifold shapes, and is not yet taken back into that unity. That it should ever be so taken back would be due to the circumstance that the determinateness has developed into an infinite opposition or antithesis—as in the Religion of Sublimity—and has gone on increasing till it became infinite; for it is only when it has reached this extreme that it becomes at the same time capable of attaining to unity in itself. The entire circle of the gods, as these take on a definite form, must itself be taken up into and placed within the sphere of necessity as in a pantheon. But it is only capable of this, and is only worthy of attaining this, when its manifoldness and diversity become generalised into simple difference. Not till this happens is it adequate to that element, and so immediately identical in itself. The different spirits must be conceived of as