Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/333

 which has been set free, is taken up into the infinite universality of Thought, and is in this way purified from its immediacy, and raised to the condition of what has substantial validity. So, too, this infinite universality of thought which has no external existence or value of its own must in turn receive a present reality, and self-consciousness must at the same time come to be a consciousness of the reality of universality, so that it may see the Divine to be something with an actual definite existence, something belonging to the world and present in the world, and know that God and the world are reconciled.

We have seen how Olympus, that heaven of the gods, that region within which are found the fairest divine forms that were ever created by fancy, represented at the same time a free moral life, a free, though as yet a limited, national spirit. Greek life was split up into many small states, into those stars which themselves are only limited centres of light. In order that the free condition of Spirit may be reached, this state of limitation must be done away with, and the fate which floats in the distance above the world of the gods and above the national life must make its true authority felt in them in such a way that the national spirit of these free peoples is destroyed. The free spirit must get to know itself as free spirit in the entirety of its nature, free spirit in-and-for self. Its value no longer consists in its being simply the free spirit of the Greeks, of the citizens of this or the other state, but rather man must be known to be free as man, and God is thus the God of all men, the all-embracing, universal Spirit. This fate, accordingly, which exercises a kind of corrective discipline on the particular forms in which freedom shows itself and crushes the limited national spirit of the various peoples—so that the nations apostatise from their gods, and get to be conscious of their weakness and powerlessness, since their political life is destroyed by the one universal