Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/288

 cannot so far have anything fixed about it, nor be in any way grounded in the nature of things, but in deciding I know at the same time that I am dependent on what is other than myself, on what is unknown. Now, since neither in the divine nor in the individual is the moment of infinite subjectivity present, it does not fall to the individual to take the final decision of himself, to perform of himself the final act of will, for instance, to give battle to-day, to marry, to travel; for the man is conscious that objectivity does not reside in this willing of his, and that it is formal merely. To satisfy the longing for this completion and to add on this objectivity, a direction from without is required coming from one higher than the individual, that is, the direction of an external, decisive, and definite sign. It is the inner free will which, that it may not be mere free will, makes itself objective, i.e., makes itself inalienably into what is other than itself and accepts the external free will as higher than itself. It is, speaking generally, some power of Nature, a natural phenomenon, which now decides. The man, amazed at what he sees, finds in such a natural phenomenon something relative to himself, because he does not yet see in it any objective essential significance, or, to put it otherwise, he does not see in Nature an inherently perfect system of laws. The formal rational element, the feeling and the belief in the identity of the inward and outward, lies at the basis of his conception, but the inward element of Nature, or the universal to which it stands related, is not the connection of its laws; on the contrary, it is a human end, a human interest.

When, accordingly, any one wills anything, he demands, in order actually to take his resolution, an external objective confirmation or assurance; he asks that he should know his resolution to be one which is a unity of the subjective and objective, one which is assured and ratified. And here this ratification is the unexpected, something which happens suddenly, a materially significant,