Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/33

 and for Himself—something which is known of God, a category of Him, and thus would be already too much. Being, consequently, reduces itself by its own act to the mere “something outside of me,” and it is intended expressly, too, to signify the negative of myself, in which negation nothing in fact remains to me but I myself. It is thrashing empty straw to attempt to pass off that negative of myself, that something outside of me or above me, for an alleged, or at least a supposed, recognised objectivity, for to do so is merely to pronounce a negative, and to do this, in fact, expressly through myself. But neither this abstract negation, nor the quality that it is posited through me, and that I know this negation, and know it as negation only, is an objectivity; nor is it an objectivity, so far, at least, as the form is concerned, even although it is not an objectivity so far as the content is concerned; for the truth rather is, that is just the empty form of objectivity without content, an empty form and merely subjective supposition. Formerly that which could be described as merely the negative, was called in the Christian world the Devil. Consequently nothing affirmative remains save this subjectively-supposing “I.” With a one-sided dialectic it has, by a process of evaporation, sceptically rid itself of all the content of the sensuous and super-sensuous world, and given to it the character of something that is negative for it. All objectivity having become for it vain and empty, what is present is this positive vanity itself—it is that objective “I” which alone is Power and Essence, in which everything has vanished away, into which all content whatever has sunk as finite, so that the “I” is the Universal, the master of all determinations, and the exclusive, affirmative point. The Indian “I am Brahma,” and that so-called religion, the “I” of the modern faith of reflection, differ from one another in their external relations only; the former expresses the primitive apprehension of the mind in its naive form, in which the pure substantiality of its thought