Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/304

 and effect we have potentially the same content, but it appears in the form of actual independent things which mutually affect each other. The end, however, is this content which is posited as identity with itself in contrast to the apparent difference between reality and the form in which reality appears. Accordingly, in the case of action carried out in accordance with an end, nothing can come out of it which was not already there.

So far as the end is concerned, it is just in this that the difference between the end and the reality is found. The end maintains itself, mediates itself only with itself, coincides only with itself, brings about the unity of itself in the form of the unity of what is subjective with reality; but it does this through means. It is the power which is above reality, the power which has at the same time a primary content determined in and for itself, and this content is what is first and continues to be what is last. The end is thus the necessity which has taken into itself the external, particular content, and holds it fast as against reality, which has a negative character and is degraded to a means.

This unity of the content which ever dominates reality, freeing itself from its power, and maintaining itself in opposition to it, is accordingly present in life. The content, however, is not free in its own nature, free for itself in the element of Thought; it has not been given a higher form in the mode of its identity, it is not spiritual. The same unity exists in the spiritually formed ideal; but inasmuch as it is represented as being present in a free form and as beauty, it belongs to a higher stage than what has life. The quality of this unity is, so far, to be regarded as an end, and what it produces is action in accordance with an end. Its qualities, however, are not represented under the mode of the end—e.g., Apollo and Pallas do not set it before them as an end to produce and extend science and poetry; Ceres and the mystic Bacchus do not make the production and the teaching of