Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/293

 of locality has at the same time the significance of universality, and since this is firmly clung to as against the splitting up and particularisation into characters and individualities developed in the Religion of Beauty, it is in what is rude and primitive, in what is unbeautiful and uncultured, that the service of a deeper, inner universal, maintains itself, a universal which is at the same time not abstract thought, but which, on the contrary, retains in itself that external and contingent form.

This older religion may, on account of its simplicity and substantial intensity, be called deeper, purer, stronger, more substantial, and its meaning may be termed a truer one, but its meaning is essentially enveloped in a kind of haze, and is not developed into thought, that is, is not developed into that clearness which marks the particular gods in whom the day of Spirit has dawned, and which have in consequence attained to character and spiritual form. The service of this deeper and universal element involves, however, in it, the opposition of this deeper and universal element itself to the particular, limited, and revealed powers. It is, regarded from one side, a return from these to what is deeper, more inward, and so far higher, the bringing back of the many scattered gods into the unity of Nature, but it also involves the antithesis which is expressed by saying that this deeper element is as opposed to clear self-consciousness, to the serenity of day and rationality, something dull and torpid, unconscious, crude, and barbarous. The perception, or pictorial contemplation, in this kind of worship, is accordingly in one aspect the perception of the universal life of Nature and of natural force, a return to inward substantiality; but in another aspect it is equally the perception of the process, of the transition from savagery to a state of law, from barbarousness to morality, from mental torpor to the clear growing certainty of self-consciousness, from the Titanic to the Spiritual. It is consequently not a god in his finished form who is beheld here, no abstract