Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/38

 It is impossible to speak of miracles here, for all is miracle; everything is dislocated, and nothing determined by means of a rational connection of the categories of thought. Undoubtedly a great deal is symbolical.

The Hindus are, moreover, divided into many sects. Among many other differences, the principal one is this, that some worship Vishnu and others Siva. This is often the occasion of bloody wars; at festivals and fairs especially, disputes arise which cost thousands their lives.

Now these distinctions are in a general sense to be understood as meaning that what is called Vishnu even says again regarding itself that it is All, that Brahma is the womb in which it begets All, and that it is the absolute activity of form, that indeed it is Brahma. Here this differentiation represented by Vishnu is removed and absorbed.

If it is Siva who is introduced as speaking, then it is he who is absolute totality; he is the lustre of precious stones, the energy in man, the reason in the soul—in fact, he too in turn is Brahma. Here all the Powers, even the two other differences, as well as the other Powers, gods of nature and genii, melt into One Person, into one of these differentiations.

The fundamental determination of the theoretical consciousness is therefore the determination of unity, the determination of that which is called Brahma, Brahma, and the like. This unity, however, comes to have an ambiguous meaning, inasmuch as Brahma is at one time the Universal, the All, and at another a particularity as contrasted with particularity in general. Thus Brahma appears as creator, and then again as subordinate to something else, and he even speaks of something higher than himself—of a universal soul. The confusion which characterises this sphere originates in the dialectic necessarily belonging to it Spirit, which puts everything in organic connection, is not present here, and therefore if the determinations never make their appearance at all