Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/282

 The universal powers, however, in this case certainly retire farther into the background again, so far as the individual is concerned. The spring allows itself to be drawn upon unhindered, and the sea allows itself to be freely frequented, but it also rises in storm; it and the stars are not only not serviceable to man, but inspire fear, and are a source of disaster. Nor is the Muse always gracious to the poet either; she goes away and serves him badly, though, properly speaking, the poet really appeals to her only when he is composing his poem, and the appeal to and praise of the Muse is itself Poetry. Even Athene—Spirit, God—is unfaithful to herself. The Tyrians bound their Hercules with chains, so that he should not desert their city, which represented his reality and actual real existence; and yet Tyre fell. But such estrangement on the part of men from their essentiality or embodiment of essential Being does not lead to absolute division, not to that inward laceration of heart which would compel men to draw down their deity, so to speak, by the force of spirit to themselves in worship, and with which the lapse into magic would be connected. The individual cannot go on living in endless opposition to these particular powers, because as particular ends they lose themselves in necessity, and are themselves surrendered in this necessity.

Service hence consists in the fact that the universal powers are given a place of honour on their own account and are duly acknowledged. Thought grasps the essential, substantial element of its concrete life, and hence is neither sunk in a state of torpor in the empirical details of life and dissipated amongst these, nor does it turn from these merely to the abstract One, to the infinite “Beyond.” On the contrary, just because Spirit sets before itself the true element, the Idea of its manifold existence, it is, in the very act of acknowledging and doing reverence to this universal, in the state of enjoyment, and remains in the presence of its own nature.