Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/327

 proportions that hundreds of men, from four to five hundred lions, tigers, elephants, crocodiles were butchered by men who had to fight with them, and who in turn butchered each other. It is, above all, the history of cold, unspiritual death which is here brought before men’s eyes—a death willed in an irrational, arbitrary way, and which serves to feast the eyes of others. It is necessity, which is purely arbitrary, murder without any substantial element or content, and which has only itself for content. It is this and this way of representing destiny which occupy the supreme place, the cold fact of dying, not a natural death, but a death brought about by an exercise of empty arbitrary will. It is not produced by some external necessity arising out of certain circumstances; it is not a consequence of the violation of some moral principle. Dying was thus the only virtue which the noble Roman could practise, and he shared this virtue with slaves and with criminals who were condemned to death.

What is here pictured to the mind is that cold kind of murder which serves merely to feast the eyes upon, the nothingness of human individuality, and the worthlessness of the individual who has no moral life in himself. It is a picture of hollow, empty destiny, which in its relation to men is something contingent, a blind arbitrariness.

Contrasted with this extreme of empty destiny in which the individual disappears, a destiny which finally found a personal representation in the power of the Emperor, a power which is arbitrary and takes its own way, unhindered by moral considerations, we have the other extreme, the assertion of the worth of the pure particularity or separate life of subjectivity.

The power has, that is to say, at the same time an end also, but this power viewed in one aspect is blind; Spirit is not yet reconciled to itself, brought into harmony with itself in it, and both accordingly continue to occupy a