Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/322

 not start so to speak from God, it is not the content of what really is His nature, but on the contrary it starts from man, from something which is a human end.

For this reason the outward form taken by these gods can scarcely be considered as distinct from the worship paid to them; for this distinction together with free worship presupposes a truth which has a realised existence, a truth in and for self, something which is universal, objective, and truly divine, and which by means of its content rises above particular subjective necessities and exists on its own account, and thus worship is the process in which the individual gets for himself the enjoyment of his identity with what is universal and in which he commemorates this identity. Here, however, the interest originates in the subject or individual; his needs, and the fact that the satisfaction of these depends on another, produce piety, and worship is thus the positing of a Power which will relieve him and which exists because of his needs. These gods have thus essentially a subjective root and origin, and they have, as it were, an existence only in the worship paid to them; they possess substantiality in the festivals though scarcely in the conceptions formed of them. The truth, rather, is that the effort to overcome the need by the help of the power of the gods, and to get from them the satisfaction of the want and the hope of being able to do this, are merely the second part of worship, and the side which is otherwise objective comes to be included within the worship itself.

It is thus a religion of dependence and of the feeling of dependence. The dominant element in such a feeling of dependence is the absence of freedom. Man knows that he is free; but that in which he is in possession of himself is an end which remains outside of the individual, and this is still more the case with those particular ends, and it is just in reference to these that the feeling of dependence finds a place.