Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/51

 two forms which we have considered is, as it were, a merely abstract, isolated relation of self-consciousness to Brahma; the first being only a momentary one, the second only the flight out of life—lasting life in Brahma being the lasting death of all individuality. The third demand, therefore, is that this relation should not be mere flight, mere renunciation of life, but that it should also be posited in an affirmative manner. The question is, How must the affirmative mode of this relation be constituted? It can be none other than the form of immediate existence. This is a difficult transition. What is merely inward, merely abstract, is merely outward; and thus this merely Abstract is the immediate Sensuous, is sensuous externality. Since the relation here is the wholly abstract one to wholly abstract substance, the affirmative relation is in like manner a wholly abstract, and consequently an immediate one. With this we get the concrete phenomenon implying that the relation to Brahma, the relation of the self-consciousness to him, is an immediate, a natural one, and thus an inborn one, and a relation established by birth.

Man is a thinking being, and is such by nature; thought is a natural quality of man. But the fact that he is a thinking being generally expresses a quality different from the determination which is here under consideration, from the consciousness of thought in general as the absolutely existent. In this form we have in fact the consciousness of thought, and this is then posited as the Absolute. It is the consciousness of absolute Being which is posited here as existing in a natural mode, or, to put it otherwise, which is affirmed and supposed to be inborn; and its degradation into this form is based upon the entire relation; for although it is rational knowledge, yet this consciousness is supposed to exist in an immediate form.

Since, then, man is a thinking being, and since the consciousness of thought, as the Universal, the