Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/275

 he may indeed be sad, but he cannot be vexed or annoyed. Vexation is the sentiment of the modern world; the feeling of vexation or annoyance presupposes an end, a demand on the part of modern freewill, which considers itself warranted and justified in indulging this feeling if any such end should not be realised. Thus the modern man easily gets into the mood in which he loses heart with regard to everything else, and does not even seek to reach other things he might quite well have made his aim if otherwise unsuccessful All else that belongs to his nature and destiny he abandons, and in order to revenge himself destroys his own courage, his power of action, all those ends of destiny to which he might otherwise have quite well attained. This is vexation; it could not possibly have formed part of the character of the Greeks or of the ancients, the truth being that their grief regarding what is necessary is of a purely simple kind. The Greeks did not set before themselves any end as absolute, as essential, any end the attainment of which ought to be warranted; their grief is therefore a grief of resignation. It is simple sorrow, simple grief, which has for this reason the element of serenity in it. No absolute end is lost for the individual; here, too, he continues to be at home with himself, he can renounce that which is not realised. It is so; and this means that he has withdrawn himself into abstraction, and has not set his own Being in opposition to what is. The liberation here is the identity of the subjective will with that which is; the subject is free, but only in an abstract fashion.

The heroes, as was remarked, bring about an alteration in the course of simple necessity, in this way, namely, that an element of division comes in, and the higher, really interesting element of division, so far as Spirit is concerned, is that it is the moral powers themselves which appear as divided and as coming into collision.

The removal of this state of collision consists in this, that the moral powers which are in collision, in virtue