Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/57

 solitary unity, however, does not become such concrete unity, reason, rationality.

For this reason there is no right, no duty present here, for the freedom of the will, of the Spirit, just consists in being present with itself in determinateness. But here this being present or at home with itself, this unity, is abstract, is devoid of determinate character. And here is one source of the fantastic polytheism of the Hindus.

It has been remarked that the category of Being is not found here; the Hindus have no category for what we call independent existence in things, or what we express when we say “they are,” “these are.” Man, to begin with, knows himself only as existing independently, he therefore conceives of an independent object of nature as existing with his independence, in the mode of independence which he has in himself, in his Being, in his human form, as consciousness.

Here fancy makes everything into God. This is what we see in its own fashion among the Greeks, too, where all trees and springs are made into dryads or nymphs. We are accustomed to say that the beautiful imagination of man gives soul and life to everything, conceives everything as endowed with life, that man wanders among his like, anthropomorphises everything, by his beautiful sympathy shares with everything that mode of beauty which is his own, and thus, as it were, presses everything to his heart as having animated life.

But the liberality of the Hindus in the wild extravagance of their desire to share their mode of existence, has its foundation in a poor idea of themselves, in the fact that the individual has not as yet within himself the content of the freedom of the Eternal, the truly and essentially existent, and does not as yet know his content, his true nature, to be higher than the content of a spring or of a tree. Everything is squandered on imagination, and nothing reserved for life.

With the Greeks this is more a play of fancy, while