Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/349

 is our own. The laws of freedom, when they actually appear, have always a positive side, a side marked by reality, externality, and contingency. Laws must get a specific character, and into the specification, into the quality of the punishment, there already enters the element of externality, and still more into the quantity of the punishment.

In the case of punishment the positive element cannot at all be absent—it is absolutely necessary. This final determination or specification of the immediate is something positive which is in no sense rational. In the case of punishment, round numbers, for instance, decide the amount; you cannot find out by reason what is the absolutely just penalty. It is the irrational which is naturally positive. It must get a definite character, and it is characterised in a way which has nothing rational about it, or which contains nothing rational in it.

It is necessary to regard revealed religion in the following aspect also. Since in it there is present something historical, something which appears in an outward form, there is also present in it something positive, something contingent, which may take either one form or another. Thus it occurs in the case of religion as well, that owing to the externality, the appearance in an outward form which accompanies it, there is always something positive present.

But we must distinguish between the Positive as such, the abstract Positive, and the Positive in the form of and as the law of freedom. The law of freedom should not possess validity or authority because it is actually there, but rather because it is the essential characteristic of our rational nature itself. It is not, therefore, anything positive, not anything which simply has validity, if it is known to be a characteristic of this kind. Religion, too, appears in a positive form in all that constitutes its doctrines; but it is not meant to remain in this condition, or to be a matter of mere popular ideas or of pure memory.

The positive element connected with the verification