Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/315

 longer any connection with the free and living play of fancy.

Besides those particular gods which the Romans have in common with the Greeks, there are many gods and ways of worshipping God which are peculiar to the Romans. Sovereignty is the end sought after by the citizen; but the aims of the individual are not yet exhausted by this—he has also his own particular ends. The particular ends lie outside of this abstract end.

The particular ends, however, become perfectly prosaic particular ends, and it is the common particularity of man regarded in the manifold aspects of his necessities, or of his connection with Nature, which comes to the front here. God is not that concrete individuality above referred to. Jupiter is simply sovereignty; while the particular individual gods are dead, lifeless, without mind or spirit, or, what is more, they are got at second-hand.

Particularity thus bereft of universality, and existing on its own account, is something quite common; it is the prosaic particularity of man, but it is an end for man, and he uses this or that other thing to accomplish his end. Anything, however, which is an end for man is in this region of thought a characteristic of the Divine.

The end aimed at by man and the divine end are one, but it is an end which lies outside of the Idea; thus human ends rank as divine ends, and consequently as divine powers, and so we get these many particular and supremely prosaic deities.

We thus see on one side this universal Power which is sovereignty; in it the individuals are sacrificed and have no standing as individuals. Regarding the matter from the other side, we see that the definite element, just because that unity, God, is something abstract, lies outside of this unity, and thus it is what is human that is essentially the end; it is the human element which gives fulness to God by creating a content for Him.

In the Religion of Beauty, which represents the stage