Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/263

 actually exhibits in itself this act of withdrawal or taking of itself back. Determinate existence, which is only this process, is in the state of freedom, or, to put it otherwise, determinateness exists as negativity, as reflected into itself, and as sinking itself into simple necessity. This determinateness which relates itself to itself is subjectivity.

For this process of concretely existing necessity the reality is accordingly the spiritual, the human form. This is a sensuous and natural object and thus exists for immediate perception, and it is at the same time simple necessity, simple reference to self, in virtue of being which it plainly announces the presence of thought. In every instance of its contact with reality, of its externalisation, it is directly decomposed, dissolved, and merged in simple identity; it is an externalisation, a manifestation, which is really the externalisation of Spirit.

This relationship is not easily grasped, namely, that the fundamental determination and the one side of the Notion is absolute necessity, while the side of reality in virtue of which the Notion is Idea, is the human form. The Notion must, above all, have actual reality. This determination accordingly is more directly involved in necessity itself, for it is not abstract Being, but what is actual and determinate, determinate in and for itself. Thus the determinateness, just because it is at the same time natural, external, reality, is further directly taken back into simple necessity, so that it is this necessity which exhibits itself in this variegated sensuous element. It is only when it is no longer necessity but Spirit, which constitutes the Divine, that the latter comes to be regarded as existing wholly in the element of thought. Here, however, the moment of external perceptibility still remains, in which, spite of its material character, simple necessity nevertheless exhibits itself. This is only the case when we have the human form, because it is the form of the spiritual, and only in it can reality be taken back for consciousness into the simplicity of necessity.