Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/302

 into its opposite. The Religion of Beauty loses the concrete individuality of its gods, as well as their independent moral content or character. The gods are degraded to the rank of means. The Religion of Sublimity again loses its tendency to occupy itself with the One, the eternal, the supernatural. Their union, however, is a step in advance in this, that the single end and the particular ends are broadened out so as to form a universal end. This end has to be realised, and God is the Power which is to realise it.

Action in accordance with an end is a peculiarity not only of Spirit but of life in general. It is the action of the Idea, for it is an act of production which is no longer a passing over into something other or different, whether it is now characterised as other, or, as in the case of necessity, as potentially the same, though in its outward form, and as existing for others, it is an “other.” In the end, any content, as being what is primary, is independent of the form which the transition takes, and of the alteration which takes place, so that it maintains itself within it. The impulse of this flower-like nature, which may take on an external form under the influence of the most manifold conditions, shows itself in the production only of its own development, and only in the simple form of the transition from subjectivity into objectivity. The form which reveals itself in the result is that which was formed before or pre-formed in the germ.

Action in accordance with an end is closely allied to the form of spiritual manifestation which we last considered; but spiritual manifestation in that form is, to begin with, only the superficial mode in which anything having a definite nature and any spiritual determinateness appears, apart from the existence of this determinateness as such under the form or mode of the end or Idea. The abstract characterisation and the basis of the religion which went before were expressed by the idea of necessity, and outside of it was the fulness of Nature, spiritual and physical, which accordingly is broken up so as to