Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/243

 this personification is, so far as they are concerned, superficial only; for the content of Helios, for example, or of Oceanos, is something natural, and not superficial Power. Thus, if Helios is represented in human fashion as active, what we have is the empty form of personification. Helios is not god of the sun, not the sun-god (the Greeks never express themselves thus), and Oceanos is not the god of the sea in such a way that the god and that over which he rules are distinguished from each other; on the contrary, these powers are natural powers.

The first moment in this natural sphere is thus Chaos posited together with its moments by abstract necessity; the second is the period of begetting under the rule of Uranos, in which these abstract moments which have proceeded out of chaos are the productive element; the third is the period of the sovereignty of Cronos, when the particular natural powers, themselves just born, give birth in turn to something else. In this way what is posited is itself the positing factor, and the transition to Spirit is made. This transition shows itself more definitely in Cronos, in that he himself brings about the downfall. He is sovereign pre-eminently through the abrogation of the immediate divine forms. But he himself is immediate, and thereby presents the contradiction of being, while in himself immediate, the abrogation of immediacy. He begets the spiritual gods out of himself; yet in so far as they are at first merely natural, he does away with them, and swallows them up. But his abrogation of the spiritual gods must itself be abrogated, and this is accomplished in its turn through cunning working against the natural force of Cronos. Zeus, the god of spiritual subjectivity, lives. Thus over against Cronos there appears his Other, and there arises, in fact, the conflict between the natural powers and the spiritual gods.

However much, then, this breaking up may take place, representing a state of things in which the natural powers