Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/299

 by committing the crime, imposes a forfeiture on himself, for arrogance is an injury done to a spiritual higher Power, to which accordingly humility has to sacrifice something in order to propitiate it and restore the equilibrium. In the case of the Greeks this idea seems rather to belong to primitive times. When the Greeks wished to depart from Aulis, and unfavourable winds held them back, Calchas interpreted the storm to be the wrath of Poseidon, who demands the daughter of Agamemnon as a sacrifice. Agamemnon is ready to give her up to the god. Diana saves the girl. In the Œdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles a certain disease is sent by means of which the deed of the parricide is disclosed. In later times such ideas no longer make their appearance. During the pestilence in the Peloponnesian war we hear nothing of the worship of the gods; no sacrifice was made during this war; we meet only with predictions of its conclusion. The appeal to the oracle implies that such a sacrifice has become antiquated. That is to say, if counsel is asked of the oracle, the result is viewed as determined by the god himself. Thus the result came to be regarded as something which has to happen, as a matter of necessity, a matter of fixed destiny, in connection with which no reconciliation could have a place, which could not be averted and could not be remedied.

3. The final form of reconciliation implies that the negative is really a crime, and is so regarded and declared to be such; not a crime which is only perceived to be such by the help of the explanation given through some misfortune. An individual, a state, a people commits a crime; from the human point of view the punishment is the propitiation for the crime either in the form of punishment or in the cruder form of revenge. The free spirit has the self-consciousness of its majesty, whereby it has to make what has happened as if it had not happened, and to do this within itself. An outward act of pardon is something different, but that what has