Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/264

 Life generally is this infinitude of free existence, and as what is living is it this subjectivity, which reacts against the immediate determinateness and posits it as identical with itself in feeling. But the life of the animal, that is, the actual existence and externalisation of its infinitude, has plainly a merely limited content, is sunk in merely particular conditions. The simplicity to which this determinateness is taken back is a limited and merely formal one, and the content is not adequate to this its form. For thinking man, on the other hand, the spiritual is expressed in his particular conditions also; this expression of it lets us see that man even in any one limited condition is at the same time above it, transcends it, is free, and does not go outside of himself, continues to be at home with himself. We can very easily judge whether a man in the act of satisfying his wants behaves like an animal or like a man. The human element is a delicate fragrance which spreads itself over every action. Besides, man has not only this element of mere life, but has likewise an infinite range of higher ways of expressing himself, of higher deeds and ends, the constituent element of which is just the Infinite, the Universal. Thus man is that absolute reflection into self which we have in the conception of necessity. It properly belongs to physiology to get a knowledge of the human organism, of the human form as the only form truly adequate for Spirit, but as yet it has accomplished little in this regard. Aristotle long ago expressed the truth that it is only the human organisation which is the form of the spiritual, when he pointed it out as being the defect in the idea of the transmigration of souls, that according to this theory the bodily organisation of human beings was of a merely accidental kind.

The individual actual man still essentially has, however, in his immediate existence the element of immediate natural life, which makes its appearance as something temporary and fleeting, as that which has fallen away