Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/272

 affected by what is contingent, so that it is essentially at this stage that slavery is found to exist. It is still a matter of accident whether a man is a citizen of this particular State or not, whether he is free or is not free. And because, further, the infinite opposition is not yet present, and because the absolute reflection of self-consciousness into itself, that climax of subjectivity, is still wanting, morality as individual conviction and rational insight is not yet developed.

Nevertheless, in morality, individuality is in a general sense taken up into universal substantiality, and thus there here enters in—if at first only as a faint semblance, and not yet as the absolute demand of Spirit—the idea of the eternal nature of the subjective, individual spirit, the idea of immortality. The demand for the immortality of the soul could not make its appearance at any of the earlier stages already considered, either in the religion of Nature or in the religion of the One. In the former, the immediate unity of the spiritual and the natural is the fundamental idea, and Spirit is not yet self-conscious, or for itself. In the latter, Spirit is, it is true, self-conscious and exists for itself, but it is still unrealised; its freedom is still abstract, and its Being is still a natural form of existence, the possession of a particular land and its welfare. But that is not Being as the determinate existence of Spirit within itself; it does not yet imply full satisfaction in the spiritual. The duration is only the duration of the race, of the family, of natural universality, in short. But here self-consciousness is complete and realised in itself; it is spiritual. Subjectivity is taken up into universal essentiality and is thus known as essentially Idea; and here we meet with the conception of immortality. But this consciousness becomes more definite when morality appears on the scene; self-consciousness goes down into itself, and hence it will recognise that only as good, true, and right which it finds to be in harmony with itself and its thought. With Socrates and Plato accordingly