Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/241

 the finite spirit. In this determinateness the form of the natural outward embodiment of subjectivity comes into view, the natural outward form is imagined by self-consciousness as something divine, and this divinity accordingly stands over against self-consciousness.

B.

THE OUTWARD FORM OF THE DIVINE.

(a.) The Conflict of the Spiritual and the Natural.

Since the fundamental determination is spiritual subjectivity, the power of Nature cannot be considered as being the essential power in its own right. Yet it is one of the particular powers, and as the most immediate is the first of those through whose abrogation the other spiritual powers first originate. We have seen the nature of the power of the One, and how His real and actual sublimity first resulted from creation. This one fundamental principle, as the self of the Absolute, is wanting here. Thus the starting-point here is within the sphere of what is immediately natural, which cannot at this stage appear as if created by the One. The unity in which these particular forms of the powers of Nature repose is not spiritual, but is, on the contrary, an essentially natural unity, chaos, in fact.

“But first of all,” sings Hesiod, “was Chaos” (Theog. v. 116). Chaos is thus itself something posited, but what the positing agent is we are not told. It is only said that it came into being. For the fundamental principle here is not the self, but rather the selfless, the necessity, of which it can only be said that it is. Chaos is the moving unity of the immediate, but it itself is not yet subject, particularity; hence it is not said of it that it begets, but as it only comes into being itself, so this necessity comes into being in turn out of it, namely, the