Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/335

 instance, when the Stoics made the world originate in fire. The truth is that the reconciliation could appear only amongst a people who possessed the purely abstract idea of the One for itself, and had completely cast away finitude in order to be able to conceive of it again in a purified form. The Oriental principle of pure abstraction had to unite with the finitude and particularity of the West. It was the Jewish nation which preserved the idea of God as representing the ancient sorrow of the world. For here we have the religion of abstract sorrow, of the one Lord, and because of this the reality of life appears relatively to this abstraction and in this abstraction, as the infinite wilfulness of self-consciousness, and is at the same time bound up with the abstraction. The old curse is removed and becomes the source of salvation, and this just because finitude has on its part raised itself to the condition of something positive, has become infinite finitude, and has gained for itself a valid existence.