Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/283

 This presence of Spirit in its essentialities is on the one hand its truly valuable, thinking, theoretic relationship, and on the other hand is that happiness, joyousness, and freedom which is securely conscious of itself in this state, and is here in presence of its self, or together with its own self.

2. Service as a certain relationship to the gods on their spiritual side does not mean either that man appropriates these powers for the first time, or that man for the first time becomes conscious of his identity with them. For this identity is already present, and man finds these powers already realised in his consciousness. The spiritual in a definite form, as right, morality, law, or in the form of universal essential beings, such as Love, Aphrodite, attains actual existence in individuals, moral individuals, who know and love. They are the will, the inclination, the passion of these individuals themselves, their own willing, active, life. Consequently what is left for worship to do is merely to acknowledge these powers, to revere them, and together with this, to raise the identity into the form of consciousness, and to make it into theoretic objectivity.

If we compare this objectivity with our idea, we at the same time lift the universal out of our immediate consciousness and think it. We can also go on to raise these universal powers into the sphere of the ideal and give them spiritual form. But when it comes to offering prayer or bringing sacrifices to such creations, we reach the point at which we abandon the material view referred to. We cannot go so far as to give those images, which yet are no mere fancies but real powers, individual separate independence and ascribe personality to them as over against ourselves. Our consciousness of infinite subjectivity as something universal absorbs those particular powers and reduces them to the level of beautiful pictures of fancy, whose substance and significance we are indeed able to appreciate, but which cannot be held by us to have true independence.