Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/254

 individuals. Here there is an external union of cause and effect by which an inherited evil, an ancient curse that rests on his house, breaks out in the individual. In such cases fate implies that there exists some sort of reason, but a reason that is at the same time away beyond the present, and fate is here nothing but a connection of causes and effects, of causes, which, so far as the person is concerned upon whom the fate falls, should be finite causes, and where there is nevertheless a hidden connection between that which the sufferer is in himself and that which befalls him as something unmerited.

The perception of and reverent regard for necessity is, on the other hand, the direct opposite of the foregoing. In it that mediation and the superficial reasoning about cause and effect are done away with. We cannot speak of a belief in necessity as if necessity were something essentially existing, or were a connection of relations, such as that of cause and effect, and as if it thus stood opposed to consciousness in some objective outward form. On the contrary, the expression “it is necessary” directly presupposes the abandonment of all argumentative reasoning, and the shutting up of the spirit within simple abstraction. Noble and beautiful characters are produced by this attitude on the part of the human spirit, which has thus given up that which, as the saying goes, fate wrests from us. It produces a certain grandeur and repose and that free nobility of soul which is also found amongst the ancients. This freedom is, however, only of the abstract kind, which merely stands above the concrete and particular, but does not actually come to be in harmony with what is definite, i.e., it is pure thought, Being, Being-within-self, the relinquishment of the particular. In the higher forms of religion, on the contrary, there exists the consolation that the absolute end and aim will be reached even in misfortune, so that the negative changes round into the affirmative. “The sufferings of the present are the path to bliss.”