Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/294

 doctrine is propounded; on the contrary, the content of perception is the conflict of what is original and primitive, which is brought forth from its undeveloped state into clearness, into form, into the daylight of consciousness. This idea is already present in many exoteric and pictorial forms in mythology. The war of the gods and the conquests of the Titans is just this divine issuing forth of the spiritual from the overcoming of the rude powers of Nature.

It is here accordingly that the action of the subjective side and its movement receive their deeper determination. Worship cannot here be merely serene enjoyment, the enjoyment of present immediate unity with the particular powers; for since the divine passes out of its particularity over to universality, and since self-consciousness is reversed or inverted within itself, opposition is consequently present, and the union starts from a separation greater than that presupposed by outward worship. Worship here is rather the movement of an inward impression made on the soul, an introduction to and initiation into an essentiality which is for it foreign and abstract, an entrance into disclosures which its ordinary life and the worship grounded on that do not contain. Just because the soul enters into this sphere the demand is made that it should give up its natural Being and essence. This worship is thus at the same time the purification of the soul, a path to this purification, and a gradual progress towards it, the admission into the high mystical Essence, and the attainment of a contemplation in pictorial form of its secrets, which, however, have for the initiated ceased to be secrets, and can only still remain such in the sense that the pictures thus contemplated, and this content, are not introduced into the sphere of ordinary existence and consciousness, that is, into the sphere of ordinary action and reflection. All Athenian citizens were initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. A secret is thus essentially something known,