Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/32

 remain so far also merely attributes; or, as the Hebrews frequently express it, they are His names, which do not become special forms or shapes, although too they do not become the content through which the Christian Unity of God is alone the spiritual one. For this reason the Jewish God cannot acquire the determination of a subjective existence in self-consciousness, because He is rather a subject in Himself. To reach subjectivity He does not therefore require an Other in which He should for the first time acquire this determination, but which, because of its being in an Other, would have a merely subjective existence also.

On the other hand, what the Hindu says in and to himself—“I am Brahma”—must be recognised, in its essential character, as identical with the modern subjective and objective “vanity”—with that which the “I” is made into by means of the oft-repeated assertion that we know nothing of God. For the statement that “I” has no affirmative relation to God, that He is a “Beyond” for the “I,” a nullity without any content, at once implies that the mere independent “I” is the affirmative for “I.” It is of no use to say, “I recognise God as above me, as outside of me;” God is an idea without content, whose sole characteristic, all that is to be recognised or known of it, all which it is to be for me, is wholly and entirely limited to this—that this absolutely indeterminate Being is, and that it is the negative of myself. In the Indian, “I am Brahma,” it is not, indeed, posited as the negative of myself, as being in opposition to me. But that apparently affirmative determination of God—that He is—is partly in itself merely the perfectly empty abstraction of Being, and therefore a subjective determination only, a determination which has an existence in my self-consciousness only, and which therefore attaches to Brahma also, and partly in so far as it still is to get an objective meaning, it would already be—and not in concrete determinations only, as, for instance, that God is a subject in