Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/301

 we find, besides unity, the infinitely limited real end, and in the former again, besides necessity, we have moral substantiality, the Right, the present and real in empirical self-consciousness. In the bosom of necessity repose the many particular powers and partake of its essentiality. Represented as individuals, they are spiritual concrete subjects, and each represents a particular national spirit. They are living spirits, as, for instance, Athene is for Athens, Bacchus for Thebes, and they are also family gods, though they are at the same time transferable, because they are in their nature universal powers. Consequently the objects also with which such gods take to do are particular towns, states, and, speaking generally, a mass of particular ends.

Thus this particularity when brought under a “One” or Unity represents determinateness in its more definite form. The next demand of thought is for the union of that universality and of this particularity of these ends, in such wise that abstract necessity has its emptiness filled within itself with the particularity, with the end.

In the Religion of Sublimity, the end, when it took on a realised form, was an isolated end shutting off one particular family from others. A higher stage is accordingly reached when this end is widened so as to correspond to the compass of the Power, and when at the same time this Power itself is further developed. The particularity which is developed in detail as a divine aristocracy, and together with this the real national spirit in its various forms, which as an end comes to form part of the essential character of the Divine and is preserved within it, must get a place also within the unity. This cannot, however, be the truly spiritual unity such as we have in the Religion of Sublimity. The characteristics of the earlier stages are rather merely put back into a relative totality in which, it is true, both the religions which preceded lose their one-sidedness, but in which at the same time each of the two principles is also perverted