Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/305

 laws an end. They take under their protection what constitutes the laws, it is their special care; but here the separation between end and reality does not exist. These beings which have divine nature are those very powers and activities themselves; the Muse is herself the composition of poetry; Athene herself is Athenian life—the happiness and well-being of the city is not her end; but, on the contrary, these powers rule in as immanent a way in the reality with which they are connected as the laws act within the planets.

And further, as the gods in the stage of thought represented by beauty are in no sense means, they are just as little mutually opposed as independent; rather, they themselves disappear in necessity. If they do at a time act on their own account, they soon submit again and allow themselves to be put in their right place. While, accordingly, in necessity one determination depends on another, and the determinate character passes away, the end is posited as identity with difference and reality in it, the unity which is determined in and for itself, and which maintains itself in its determinate character as against the determinate character of something else.

The Notion, accordingly, in so far as it is posited as free in its own nature, or for self, is at first confronted by reality, and this is characterised in reference to it as negative. In the absolute Notion, the pure Idea, this reality, this hostile element, melts away into unity, and gets to be on a friendly footing with the Notion itself; it throws off its peculiar individual character, and is itself freed from the position of being merely a means. It is this which is the true conformity to an end in which is posited the unity of the Notion, of God, of the Divine Subject or person, with that in which the Notion realises itself, namely, objectivity and realisation, and it is the very nature of God Himself which realises itself in objectivity, and is thus identical with itself viewed under the aspect of reality.