Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/292

 to self, is to be set forth for perception or pictorial contemplation as absolute and essential, it must be beheld in the divine objects themselves. The need for this has, as a matter of fact, been obviated by means of a process which, in the pictorial representation of the world of the gods, has been carried out in the following way.

It is a fact intimately connected with the adoration of the many divinities,—which, however, just because they are many are limited divine beings,—that there is also a transition to the universality of the divine power. The limited character of the gods itself leads directly to the idea of a transcendence, a rising above them, and to the attempt to unite them in one concrete picture, and not merely in abstract necessity, for the latter is not anything objective. As yet this transcendence cannot here be the absolute inherently concrete subjectivity as Spirit, but neither can it be the return to the pictorial representation or perception of the power of the One and to the negative service of the Lord. On the contrary, the One which is the object for self-consciousness at this standpoint is a unity which is in a concrete fashion all-embracing; it is universal Nature as a whole, or, a totality of gods, the content of the sensuous-spiritual world united in a material fashion. Inasmuch as self-consciousness cannot advance to infinite subjectivity, which as Spirit would be inherently concrete, the perception or picturing of substantial unity is something already present so far as this stage is concerned and preserved from the older religions. For the older original religions are the definite nature-religions, in which this Spinozism, namely, the immediate unity of the spiritual and the natural, constitutes the foundation. But further, the older form of religion, however much it may be locally defined and limited in its outward representation and in the mode in which it is conceived of, is, before it reaches its developed form, still inherently indefinite and general. Each local god in its