Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/240

 Spirit in such a way that Spirit is made to stand out distinctly as representing their essentially universal nature.

2. Because the unity of necessity is not yet carried back to the ultimate point of infinite subjectivity, the spiritual and essentially moral determinations appear as disconnected or lying outside of one another; the content is the fullest possible, but its constituent parts are disconnected.

Ethics in general must be distinguished from morality and ethics as the Greeks understood them; and by ethics in general is meant the subjectivity of ethics, that subjectivity which can give account of its principles and has an ethical intention, an ethical design and aim.

Morality is here as yet the substantial Being, the true Being of what is moral, but not as yet the knowledge of it. So far as the objective import is concerned, this means that just because one subjectivity, the particular reflection into self, is not yet present—and just in virtue of this fact—the moral content has no connecting element in it, its basis being constituted by the Πάθη, the essentially spiritual powers, the universal powers of the moral life, and chiefly of the practical life, life in the State, and, in addition to this, justice, bravery, the family, oaths, agriculture, science, and so on.

Closely connected with the fact that what is moral has no inner connection as it appears in these particular forms, is that other want of connection, namely, that the natural appears as something opposed to these spiritual powers. The determination of immediacy, which has this disconnected condition as its consequence, involves the further idea that the natural forces, the sky, the earth, rivers, the division of time, appear as opposed to the spiritual forces.

3. The last form of determinateness is that of the antithesis between essential self-consciousness and the finite self-consciousness, between the essential spirit and