Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/256

 (#.) The contingency of form or outward embodiment.—The twelve principal gods of Olympus are not arranged in accordance with the Notion, and they do not constitute any system. One moment of the Idea, it is true, plays a leading part, to begin with, but it is not carried out in detail.

The divine powers of necessity being separate from it, are external and thus unmediated, merely immediate objects, natural existing things, such as sun, sky, earth, sea, mountains, men, kings, and so on. But they are also still held fast by necessity, and thus the natural element in them is abrogated. If no advance were made beyond the thought that these powers were, in their natural immediate form of existence, divine essentially existing beings, this would be a reversion to the Religion of Nature, in which light, or the sun, or some particular king is as immediate, God, while the inner element, the universal, has not yet reached that moment of the relation which, nevertheless, necessity essentially and absolutely contains in itself, since in the latter the immediate is merely something posited and abrogated.

But even if it is abrogated and preserved, the element of Nature is still a determinate characteristic of the particular powers, and because it is incorporated in self-conscious individuals it has become a fruitful source of contingent determinations. The determination of time, the year, the division of the months, still hang so much about the concrete gods that some, as Dupuis, for example, have even tried to make them into calendar gods. The idea, too, of the productive power of Nature, of beginning to be and ceasing to be, is seen to be operative within the sphere of the spiritual gods in the many points of agreement still existing between these gods and Nature. But when thus lifted up into the self-conscious form of these gods, those natural characteristics appear as contingent, and are changed into characteristics of self-conscious subjectivity, whereby they lose their original meaning. The