Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/270

 is not known to man, or which he does not find and know in himself. The confidence of a man in the gods is at the same time his confidence in himself.

Pallas, who restrained the outbreak of wrath in the case of Achilles, is his own prudence. Athene is the town of Athens, and is also the spirit of this particular Athenian people; not an external spirit or protecting spirit, but the spirit who is living, present, actually alive in the people, a spirit immanent in the individual, and who in her essential nature is represented as Pallas.

The Erinyes are not the Furies represented in an outward way. On the contrary, they are meant to suggest that it is man’s own act and his consciousness which torment and torture him, in so far as he knows this act to be something evil in himself. The Erinys is not only an external Fury who pursues the matricide Orestes, but suggests rather that it is the spirit of matricide which brandishes its torch over him. The Erinyes are the righteous ones, and just because of that they are the well-disposed, the Eumenides. This is not a euphemism, for they really are those who desire justice, and whoever outrages it has the Eumenides within himself. They represent what we call conscience.

In the Œdipus at Colonos, Œdipus says to his son, “The Eumenides of the father will pursue thee.” Eros, love, is in the same way not merely the objective, the god, but is also as power the subjective feeling of man. Anacreon, for instance, describes a combat with Eros. “I also,” he says, “will now love; long ago Eros bade me love, but I would not follow his command. Then Eros attacked me. Armed with breastplate and lance, I withstood him. Eros missed, but after that he forced his way into my heart.” “But,” thus he concludes, “what is the use of bow and arrow? the combat is within me.” In thus recognising the power of the god, and in this reverential attitude, the subject is absolutely within the sphere of his own nature. The gods are his own emotions.